The Embodied Cognition Research Programme

Embodied Cognition is an approach to cognition that departs from traditional cognitive science in its reluctance to conceive of cognition as computational and in its emphasis on the significance of an organism’s body in how and what the organism thinks. Three lines of embodied cognition research are described and some thoughts on the future of embodied cognition offered. The embodied cognition research programme, hereafter EC, departs from more traditional cognitive science in the emphasis it places on the role the body plays in an organism’s cognitive processes. Saying more beyond this vague claim is difficult, but this is perhaps not surprising given the diversity of fields – phenomenology, robotics, ecological psychology, artificial life, ethology – from which EC has emerged. Indeed, the point of labelling EC a research programme, rather than a theory, is to indicate that the commitments and subject matters of EC remain fairly nebulous. Yet, much of the flavour of EC becomes evident when considering three prominent directions that researchers in this programme have taken. Before turning to these lines of research, it pays to have in sight the traditional view of cognitive science against which EC positions itself. I.Traditional Cognitive Science Unifying traditional cognitive science is the idea that thinking is a process of symbol manipulation, where symbols lead both a syntactic and a semantic life (Haugeland, ‘Semantic Engines’). The syntax of a symbol comprises those properties in virtue of which the symbol undergoes rule-dictated transformations. The semantics of a symbol constitute the symbols’ meaning or representational content. Thought consists in the syntactically determined manipulation of symbols, but in a way that respects their semantics. Thus, for instance, a calculating computer sensitive only to the shape of symbols might produce the symbol ‘5’ in response to the inputs ‘2’, ‘+’, and ‘3’. As far as the computer is concerned, these symbols have no meaning, but because of its programme it will produce outputs that, to the user, ‘make sense’ given the meanings the user attributes to the symbols.