I'm not sure about the current status of this field, but Francisco Varela ('46-2001) appropriated the term neurophenomenology for the work he did with neural networks in the '90s to explain conscious time perception in a biologically plausible way that is also compatible with Husserl's philosophy. This may reconcile phenomenology with neuroscience, but isn't necessarily compatible with embodied cognition. It might be a nice start though.

Could you clarify what you mean by "objective terms" (i.e., how the methods used in behavioral and neuroimaging studies purporting to support embodied cognition are subjective while research in classical cognitive science is objective)?

I suspect the problem here is a fundamental one. The concept of embodiment in the study of the mind does not, I think, have any scientific meaning, because it is not based in a causal relation. Science can only be about relations between dynamic causes and experiences (observations) because any non-causal relation cannot cause us to have any evidence to support its existence. Embodiment is an ontological stance that cannot, as far as I can see, generate any predictions of its own to test in a special way. (I would have thought that if one takes an embodiment stance then all experiments by definition use an embodied methodology because all the observations will be based in an embodied system?)

The problem for me with embodiment is that much of the history of philosophy and of science has been underpinned by an appreciation that 'body' in the popular sense is an intuitive concept that turns out to be empty (Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Montaigne, Descartes, Leibniz, Russell, Eddington, Pauli, ... ). The business of science is to establish what patterns of dynamic causal relation explain the differences between our experiences over time. Any questions about the 'intrinsic nature' either of the dynamic relations or the experiences are outside science and probably empty. So the idea that to get the right experiences you have to have a body does not add up to much. Why not stick to the standard position that to get certain sequences of different appearances you need the right causal dynamic relations to operate? And you study that by seeing what experiences you get under controlled and adequately calibrated conditions of causal relation.

Thanks for your answers. Marius, I agree. Francisco Varela managed effectively to bring biology and cognition together through some very interesting science postulates, however, he does not propose any specific methodology for embodied research. It is also true that during the last years, some interesting relationships between neuroscience and psychology as an autonomous science have emerged. I remember reading a large number of papers discussing whether assigning mental states to brain was plausible or not.

Andrew, I do not think neuroscientific studies are subjective, rather the opposite. The controversy was referring to studies that are presented as purely embodied. For example, research on metaphorical thought could not escape until now from language research. We hypothesize that metaphorical projections emerge from schemas that arise from the interaction of our bodies with the world, but we cannot prove that relation empirically at all beyond the language level. A harsh criticism to the embodied approach is, then, that it does not allow a full understanding of the experience (intersubjective) of metaphorical projection (beyond granting some sense to the process, in terms of cold cognition).

Jonathan, thanks for the reply. Your perspective is very interesting. However, I would like to ask your opinion on whether there would be a principle of connection between the body and the mental experience at the image-squemas level. If they are recurring structures, there should be a genetic point of view that can explain in detail how that structure is constructed and unfolded psychologically; and then, how it is activated for metaphorical reasoning (in terms of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory). Do you think there is another stance that accounts in a better way for analogical and metaphorical reasoning?

Thanks again for your opinions. I really appreciate your collaboration.

Yes, there must be a principle of connection or a set of laws of correspondence between certain dynamic events/relations in nerve cells and the image or schemas of experience. At the moment few people are brave enough (except maybe myself!) to say where they think these events are precisely located so there is no consensus on what set of laws we are looking for. However, I think we have enough information from neurophysiology to be able to know what sort of form they could take if we can agree at which level of process we are talking. The genetics of neural structure are not well understood but the structure is well enough understood. I am familiar with Conceptual Metaphor Theory but I would assume that images draw on rules for representing invariant dispositional patterns that have been inferred (subpersonally) from sensory inputs and that metaphorical understanding would be based on being able to apply these invariant patterns across domains unrelated in other specific features.

That may not answer your question but my original intent was just to make a broad statement about the doubtful role of the 'embodiment' concept in any scientific explanation. I am not sure that 'body' is particularly important here. As the 'extended mind' enthusiasts have pointed out, there is no very fixed or interesting boundary at the body surface with the world. Our experiences draw on dynamic relations that go well beyond the body surface, or sometimes never reach it.

One idea is to take the "body" in embodiment into account a lot more than it has been so far. There are excellent methods for measuring human movement in the field of Human Movement Science (or Sport and Exercise Science) to quantify the effects of different conditions.

Hi all,

Thanks for your interesting question and comments.

I second Rita’s suggestion to look into the literature on body movements. Technology has vastly expanded our ability to at least use dependent variables that are more “embodied” by measuring body/eye movements and postural sway.

Of course we’d hope that embodied cognition would offer more than just a methodological framework. It seems you are particularly interested in language so I will give the following examples. Spivey details some interesting findings with the use of eye tracking and mouse movement trajectories in language comprehension in his book “The continuity of mind.” Also, there is some interesting evidence that coordination in the body movement of individuals while communicating is important for the success of social interactions (Schmidt et al., 2012; Shockley et al., 2007).

Of course, as alluded to by Jonathan, there is some interesting research involving cognitive technology and distributed intelligence that pertains to this question (Clark, 1997). Pecher and Zwaan (2005) also provide some excellent examples of empirical approaches to the study of embodied cognition.

Best wishes!

Brandon

Article Measuring the Dynamics of Interactional Synchrony

Article Articulatory constraints on interpersonal postural coordination

Book Being There: Putting Mind, Body, and World Together Again

Book The Continuity of Mind

Article Grounding cognition: the role of perception and action in me...

Nicholas,

First there is no Embodies Cognition Theory but a sub-movement in cognitive science that took momentum since the 1990 and which is characterized by :

1. interaction of the whole body with its physical and social environment.  The experience is not in the brain but in the interaction of the body.

2. the world is not understood through the construction of  representions  in the brain; the nervous system is about the interaction of the body with the world.

Second there is nothing new in this.  It was only momentarily forgotten for half a century.  Kant, Heidegger, Piaget etc were doing embodied cognition approaches.  The trememdous influence of the invention and used of computers from the 1960's had just created the illusion that the brain was a symbolic processing computer connected to the world through body input (senses) and body outputs (movement of the body).  That movement was also a reaction to a behaviorism movement which was also extreme in trying to avoid anything else than input output relations.  The first generation of cognitive science, influenced by computer model of the brain when to the other extreme of trying to represent the world in the head, processing these representation for coming up with proper actions to be performed.  The embodied cognition return to beginning of 1900 balance, previous to behaviorism and the all mathematical symbolic representation.  

Embodied cognitivists are more carefull about language report of experience.  The experience of interest is the normal experience in normal circumstances and not artifical laboratory experience.  We have a lot of new technologies which allows us to monitor our behaviors in normal circumstances.  

Dear Louis Brassard:

1) I think there is a great deal of truth to the view that embodied cognition isn’t a theory, namely because of the disparate origins for the disparate ways in which different scientists believe cognition to be embodied. That said, I wouldn’t really call it a sub-movement, because I don’t think there is any movement that it is subordinate to. Within cognitive linguistics, research on and development of the ways in which cognition is embodied date back to the 80s and in particular with the groundbreaking book by Lakoff Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (which, despite being published 7 years after his co-authored Metaphors We Live by, was far more influential, specific, and clearly situated within an embodied view of cognition). Around that time another linguist, Ronald Langacker, was also developing a theory of language that incorporated embodiment, as were other “founders” of the umbrella framework of cognitive linguistics.  Meanwhile, psychologists like Eleanor Rosch were looking at cognition more generally and in terms of dissatisfaction with the reigning paradigm within cognitive science. Perhaps THE groundbreaking publication from psychology on embodiment is Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s The Embodied Mind (1991).  A few years later two other important works from other fields emerged: Thelen & Smith’s 1994 The Development of Cognition in Action (which, in addition to being an early work on embodied cognition from developmental psychology was also one of the earliest uses of a dynamical systems approach within psychology) & Hutchins’ 1995 Cognition in the Wild (a cognitive anthropology perspective). Finally, just before the 21st century, yet another line of inquiry, this time from robotics and AI, contributed to the development of the now disparate but large body of evidence supporting embodied cognition: Brooks’ Cambrian Intelligence. This is not by any means intended to be an exhaustive list of the fields or researchers who independently contributed to EC, but rather to emphasize that there was no movement that this research can be seen as a sub-movement of.

2) Although there is no single, cohesive EC theory that would satisfy all those who consider EC to be true, there are a number of widely shared core components. While I think your first description (if I am interpreting it aright) is fair, I am not sure about the second. EC proponents can and do believe that the world is understood through representations in the brain, and the nervous system is largely irrelevant to EC theories excepting in the ways already covered in your first characterization.

3) “There is nothing new under the sun.” It’s true that EC was not some wholly new paradigm (or set of paradigms) nor that the general idea was new. However, there was a great deal of novelty to the work and findings of the early developers of EC. In fact, Lackoff’s book mentioned above spends a fair amount of time on how traditional philosophy led to an understanding of categorization mostly rooted in Platonic philosophy. He cites Rosch’s work on prototype theory among other evidence that categorization is both fundamental to cognition, is not at all some modern cognitive science version of Plato’s Forms, and is embodied. Additionally, much of early EC research could not have existed except as a response to more mainstream theories/approaches. Had early cognitive scientists not posited that the brain is just another symbol processing machine and the symbols arbitrary, meaningless, and amodal, and had Chomskyan linguistics not provided the best ways in which to show this to be true only to fail repeatedly, we would likely not have seen linguists seeking better theories that led to cognitive linguistics, the re-introduction of neural networks in the connectionist program  that allowed cognitive psychologists to abandon the algorithms along with the “mind as computer” metaphor and look for other ways in which the brain might work. Of extreme importance was the idea that cognition wasn’t amodal but grounded in sensory modalities. Whatever parallels between EC and older philosophy exist, the idea that cognition is modal-specific or multimodal isn’t one of them.

4) Kant utterly rejected key components of EC. The fact that he distinguished between knowledge that required sensory experience or justification vs. that which didn’t is nothing like EC. It was Husserl, not Kant, who first tied conceptualization, categorization, and cognition all to perception. As for Piaget, one of the most important developments in developmental cognition was when Baillargeon thought to question Piaget’s mostly anecdotal evidence for object permanence. She demonstrated that infants did understand object permanence by developing a way to test whether or not Piaget’s conclusion was based upon his failure to take into account the limited motor skills infants had. Just because earlier philosophers and scientists connected bodily experience to cognition doesn’t mean they were fore-runners to modern EC. Piaget’s theories were largely wrong because he had used motor and perceptual capabilities as metrics to test what were very abstract, non-embodied stages of cognitive development. EC proponents do the reverse: they start with the abstract and test whether and how it may be rooted in sensorimotor experience/perception.

Andrew,

I began to do graduate studies in robotic and AI and vision in particular in the mid 80's and by the beginning of the 90's some people in robotic (Brook, Agree, etc) and vision (active vision) began to move away from the classical AI paradigm which is computer representation centered and began to embodied the agent, to consider that the movement of the agent was important, that internal representation could be minimized towards a focus of the body interaction.  But that was new as a AI research paradigm but the ideas were not new. Gibson had similar ideas in the 50's and before him Von Uexkull studies living organisms with the concept of umwelt.  Von Uexkull was in line with Bergson, the biological german tradition that has rooted in the ideas of Kant and the romantic german philosopher.  Heidegger was pursuing a kind of embodied psychology and his work began to be read by contemporary AI embodied people. Dreyfus was a philosopher who was instrumental in making this philosophical work known to this research community.  The education system in north america after the second world war became more and more a system of formation of specialists and so the old philosophical knowledge, reading of Kant and Lock was reserved for specialist in philosophy.  Engineers like me were not taught those this and so went I began reading AI , I was reading a litterature written by people that were trying to reinvent the wheel, people like Minksy who had not much general knowledge and knew a lot about stupid computers and were following in the footsteps of Turing which is a totally desimbodied conception of intelligence: general intelligence and with the computer as the incarnation of this general computational machine.  It was a regression of the thinking about intelligence more primitive than the thinking of the empiricist of the 1660's.  Finally in the 90's , all the prediction of the AI pionners having failed then some people began to read the classics instead of reinventing the wheels.  Neural networks were the basis of the classic associatif philosophy and were reintroduced as important.  New technologies for visualizing the working of the brain encouraged this.  Piaget put the focus on infant development.  But he erroneously put at the tip of the mind hierarchy: the rational intellectual faculty, the capacities that allow us to do mathematic and abstract thought.  He neglected the emotional side and the intuitive side. His focus on the sensory-motor system was right. 

You mentioned Lackoff as a forerunner of cognitive linguistics.  I want to learn more about this field.  I am particularly interested to the linkage between the sensory-motor system and metaphore and narrative.  Who should I read?

Dear Louis Brassard:

You began your graduate studies in AI after Lakoff and Johnson published their groundbreaking EC linguistics research. That was after several founders of EC, such as Rosch, had already founded the genral framework for EC.

My undergraduate research consisted of two majors (one a combined psychology & sociology major, the other classical languages) and a minor in cognitive science. My cognitive science thesis was a history of cognitive science from Plato past Chomsky, examining sources in half a dozen languages over 2,500 years. Ironically, this lead to my graduate work in cognitive neuroscience and my focus on mathematical biology, complex systems, and quantum physics. You will have to excuse my skepticism when an engineer inaccurately describes the basic research I had to be familiar with just to attend graduate research seminars, let along the faintest hint of balanced representation of the actual research literature. In particular, as unlike you I began reading Aristotle, Kant, Frege, Sartre, etc., in their original languages before or during my undergradutate studies which included Turing, Shannon, Tolman, Minsky, Miller, Hebb, etc,;one of my uindergraduate majors as well as a minor directly concerned theories within cognitive science; and my graduate work began with a graduate seminar on EC research, I do not have your experience but I do have the benefit of hindsight and in-depth analysis of the basis for EC from multiple disciplines merely from my undergrad work, let alone several years of graduate research from merely reading the literature to running neuroimaging studies and using NEURON to create neuronal models. I was reading 17th century philosophy in a variety of languages at the same time I was studying the origins of EC.

So, on the one hand your account of philosophy and the history of embodiment is that of an engineer's woefully inadequate familiarity merely with the relevant languages in question, and on the other you have failed to describe an adequate summary of what EC is. You'll forgive me if I request something more than what you have provided to indicate you know of what you speak.

Andrew,

You have a very interesting background and I would probably have a lot to learn for you.  BUT I detect in your last post an adversarial attitude.  My background is engineering and I did not get a formal training in philosophy.  An so what.  I do not try to pretend anything.  I have my interpretation and they may be wrong.  In such a case I any expect someone that know better to point out the faults in these interpretation.  No the lack of formal background in the person expressing these opinions.  I have a great deal of difficulty exchanging view with someone who attact me personally.  

My apologies for any hint of an adversarial. tone. I have dedicated my research to far too many different topics, and in nearly every instance there exists some researcher who's basic understanding of a field is (rightly or wrongly) different from my own.Also, the number of different fields that have contributed to EC are so disparate that I have spent a great many hours per week in my early graduate research years on only this subject and in defense of those like Chomsky, Pinker, and others whose views do not reflect my own.Perhaps I am oversensitive, for which I apologize. 

Does this help?

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291166890_Martins_I_C_Oliveira_A_M_Steenbergen_B_2013_Motion_extrapolation_in_people_with_motor_constraints_suggestive_evidence_for_embodiment_Proceedings_of_the_29th_Annual_Meeting_of_the_International_Society

Article Martins, I. C., Oliveira, A. M. & Steenbergen, B. (2013). Mo...

What do you mean by embodiment, Isabel? Your study is interesting but I cannot work out in causal physical terms what embodiment is supposed to mean. I see no problem in giving a causal physical account of things like intentionality (aboutness) but I cannot get a handhold on embodiment.

All,

I'm counting my good fortune at having just stumbled on this Q & A and read such penetrating distillations of the Embodied Cognition - Cognitivist relationship. In the light of them all, I feel encouraged to add my own take, which may in fact add nothing other than a distillation of your own distillations. Anyhow:

To my mind, cognitivism and embodied cognition do not at all constitute competing theories, but merely research-programs whose perspectives potentially offer each other indispensable insights contributing to the overall theoretical enterprise of life-science and its progress. The perspective of cognitivism is directed primarily towards understanding concrete causal mechanisms underlying behaviour and the functional relationships made possible by their operations; that of embodied cognition primarily towards global considerations reflecting the behavioural consequences of those mechanisms operating collaboratively. The former takes a components-orientated perspective, the latter a system-orientated one, in which the system comprises both the organism and its environment and the dynamics of their interacting. Without a corpus of knowledge of implicated components to refer to, embodied cognition can only speculate about that system's interactions in purely abstracted, metaphysical terms. Informed by such knowledge, however, its perspective may provide otherwise inaccessible clues enabling cognitivist scientists to further understand the large scale organization of the brain-body's components and the adjusting of its organization in response to the changing dynamic activity of the system.

Scientists inclined to argue for the explanatory superiority of one perspective over the other, it seems to me, betray an anti-interdisciplinary mentality reminiscent of that permeating quarrels between proponents of Behaviorist and Gestalt psychological perspectives (which, as it happens, correspond respectively to the components-orientated and system-orientated perspectives of Cognitivism and EC). That mentality overlooks the colossal impact of interdisciplinarily pursued science on the advancement of theoretical understanding witnessed in our own, more recent times.

Interdisciplinary science owes its success to having permitted scientific theorizing to become fuelled by previously excluded forms of expertise, resulting in novel, creative ways of interrelating extant scientific problems, concepts, research findings, methodologies, technologies and so forth. Regressing to a pre-interdisciplinary manner of tackling the stuff of science, entailing the withdrawal of such fuels, spells obvious consequences for the pace of its advancement thereafter.

EC researchers who appear to take a condescending or dismissive stance towards their cognitivist peers betray also a mentality forgetful of the multidisciplinary ancestry of their own perspective. EC's emergence - squarely within an interdisciplinary climate - represents a synthesis of ideas fundamental to, if not axiomatic within, particular perspectives predating it - including those of cognitivism, cybernetics, Gestalt and behaviorist psychology, of James, Wundt, Helmholtz, Herbart, Comte, Locke, Descartes and beyond. To say nothing of its neuropsychological heritage. Echoing Andrew, there is nothing new under the Sun, and EC is no exception. EC sides-takers need to keep the Sun that nurtures it in view unless, of course, they prefer to grope around in the dark.

From my own perspective, heavily influenced by cybernetics thinking (including Ashby's Design for a Brain and Powers' Hierarchical Perceptual Control Theory), I have no difficulty visualizing a mutually fuelling relationship between Cognitivism and EC or their functional status relative to each other within an overall knowledge-architecture. I've already spelled that out, in fact - so, in a nutshell: Cognitivist research provides the bottom-up, concrete data informing EC's higher order model of how the data fits together, which potentially can provide top-down steering of Cognitivist research in advantageous directions. Simple. And, as I see the overall issue, no problem.

My own understanding of EC is from a cognitivist - or more accurately, cognitive neuroscience - perspective, itself as seen from the perspective of a working classical musician. Both CN and EC serve a long-sustained academic mission to better understand the underpinnings of musical performance expertise. The three perspectives permit making sense of each other symbiotically. Within each there's, not surprisingly, a mountain of stuff I have yet to make any sense of at all. EC thinking offers much I can naturally identify with from the musician perspective alone, along with a lot that strikes me as utter gobbledegook from either that or in terms of CN concepts. Recognizing EC to be still in its infancy, I'm prepared to allow for the possibility that the gobbledegook reflects its authors' struggling to find apt metaphors that, to me, are totally opaque in their abstractedness. No matter. I look forward eagerly to enjoying whatever fruits of the interplay between formally pursued CN and EC theorizing should emerge over years to come.

My thanks for all your excellent words and best regards!