On Distinguishing Sensorial and Eliciting Epistemic Actions and on the Relationship between Perceptive Structure of Body and Cognitive Processes

The present article is the fruit of part of an ethnographic research that I have carried out at an Italian hospital in order to analyze how cognition goes on in a surgical team. The paper has two main points: the distinction between two kinds of epistemic action specifically devoted to construct representations in interaction with the environment and a reflection about the possible influences on cognitive processes of a change in the perceptive structure of human body. These two points are treated by means of two case studies: medical semeiology and laparoscopic video-surgery, respectively. The aim of the article is to try to demonstrate the hypothesis that representations used in human cognitive processes arise from more or less structured physical interactions between human and environment and that a change in the perceptive relationship between body and environment may mean a change in the representational codes used in reasoning.