Embodied Action, Embodied Theory: Understanding the Body in Society

Embodied understanding

Western culture has inherited a view of understanding as an intellectual cognitive operation of grasping of concepts and their relations. However, cognitive science research has shown that this received intellectualist conception is substantially out of touch with how humans actually make and experience meaning. The view emerging from the mind sciences recognizes that understanding is profoundl...

kant on the embodied cognition

Phenomenology and embodied action

> context • The enactivist tradition, out of which neurophenomenology arose, rejects various internalisms – including the representationalist and information-processing metaphors – but remains wedded to one further internalism: the claim that the structure of perceptual experience is directly, constitutively linked only to internal, brain-based dynamics. > Problem • I aim to reject this interna...

Flexibility in Embodied Language Understanding

Do people use sensori-motor cortices to understand language? Here we review neurocognitive studies of language comprehension in healthy adults and evaluate their possible contributions to theories of language in the brain. We start by sketching the minimal predictions that an embodied theory of language understanding makes for empirical research, and then survey studies that have been offered a...

Hierarchies for Embodied Action Perception

During social interactions, humans are capable of initiating and responding to rich and complex social actions despite having incomplete world knowledge as well as physical, perceptual and computational constraints. This capability relies on action perception mechanisms, which exploit regularities in observed goal-oriented behaviours to generate robust predictions, and reduce the workload of se...