Cognitive linguistics is one of the fastest growing and influential perspectives on the nature of language, the mind, and their relationship with sociophysical (embodied) experience. It is a broad theoretical and methodological enterprise, rather than a single, closely articulated theory. Its primary commitments are outlined. These are the Cognitive Commitment-a commitment to providing a charac...

The social brain hypothesis is a well-accepted and well-supported evolutionary theory of enlarged brain size in the non-human primates. Nevertheless, it tends to emphasize an anthropocentric view of social life and cognition. This often leads to confusion between ultimate and proximate mechanisms, and an over-reliance on a Cartesian, narratively structured view of the mind and social life, whic...

1. Introduction Consciousness is trendy. It seems that more pages are published on consciousness these days than on any other subject in the philosophy of mind. Embodiment and situated cognition are also trendy. They mark a significant departure from orthodox theories, and are thus appealing to radicals and renegades. It's hardy surprising, then, that consciousness, embodiment and situated cogn...

Foreign language education in the twenty-first century still teaches vocabulary mainly through reading and listening activities. This is due to the link between teaching practice and traditional philosophy of language, where language is considered to be an abstract phenomenon of the mind. However, a number of studies have shown that accompanying words or phrases of a foreign language with gestu...

The mind integrates cognitive and perceptual processes that are currently best modeled using many different computational mechanisms. These are difficult to integrate into a single cognitive model and are thus a challenge to developing a unified model of human cognition. This paper presents two computational principles that identify common elements among these mechanisms and uses these principl...

In the decade and a half since the appearance of Varela, Thompson and Rosch’s work The Embodied Mind, enactivism has helped to put experience and consciousness, conceived of in a distinctive way, at the forefront of cognitive science. There are at least two major strands within the enactive perspective: a broad view of what it is to be an agent with a mind; and a more focused account of the nat...

A popular conception in the mind/brain sciences today is the metaphor of the brain as a computer. According to the computational theory of mind, all relevant cognition consists of executing some welldefined rules over representations which model (and have a direct correspondence to) the external world (Chalmers, 1996). I would like to challenge this notion and advocate a pluralistic/biological ...

John Searle has long argued that the philosophy of language is a branch of the philosophy of mind. In his view the capacity of speech acts to represent and relate to reality derives from more biologically basic forms of intentionality, such as perception and action, which initially evolved to relate organisms directly to their environments. Searle’s naturalistic model of language, in order to b...

Radical enactive and embodied approaches to cognitive science oppose the received view in the sciences of the mind in denying that cognition fundamentally involves contentful mental representation. This paper argues that the fate of representationalism in cognitive science matters significantly to how best to understand the extent of cognition. It seeks to establish that any move away from repr...

Abstract A popular trend in the sciences of mind is to understand cognition as embodied, embedded, enactive, ecological, and so on. While some work under label “embodied cognition” takes for granted key commitments traditional cognitive science, other projects coincide treating embodiment starting point an entirely different way investigating all cognition. Focusing on latter, this paper discus...