Book review of Lawrence Shapiro's Embodied Cognition

AVANT Journal

Embodied Cognition by Lawrence Shapiro is a fine text that focuses on the issues of body, embodiment, and the environment in cognitive science, philosophy, and psychology. As the title suggests, Shapiro's book offers us a glimpse into the broadly defined, and still growing, research paradigm known as "embodied" cognition. Within this particular paradigm the body and environment are placed in the foreground when it comes to both theoretical and empirical work on cognition and the mind. In terms of the audience for this particular text, we suggest that with its combination of systematic rigor, lucid prose, and multiple well structured examples, it is a worthwhile read for scholars, casual readers, or as a useful addition to any course that contains elements of philosophy of mind or a focus on cognitive science.

"In his latest book, Lawrence Shapiro analyzes three main themes of embodied cognition that are claimed to make it distinct from traditional, disembodied research on cognition. The author provides a lucid comparison of the “old” and the “new” cognitive science, thereby often referring to enactivism, which most certainly makes his book interesting for constructivists."

Frontiers in Psychology, 2011

whether representations of other people's perspective are embodied depends on difficulty. They argue that the degree of symmetry determines whether perspective taking is needed. The Challenges The Challenge To aCCounT for absTraCT ConCepTs Most studies of E and G cognition have focused on concrete objects and actions. People can also represent and reason about abstract concepts that do not have many sensory-motor features, however, and there is not much evidence yet on grounding of abstract concepts in sensory-motor systems (for a review, see Pecher et al., 2011). Thus, critics have argued that current evidence does not fully account for abstract representation. Some authors propose a theoretical solution. van Elk et al. (2010) challenged the reliance on representations and proposed an enactivist approach. They argued that the view of representations as simulations or re-enactment of previous experiences opens two problems. First, the necessity of sensory-motor systems for cognition has been disputed (e.g., Mahon and Caramazza, 2008). Second, it fails to explain concepts beyond our motor repertoire, such as animal actions, or abstract words. The authors proposed that sensory-motor brain areas underlie prediction of actions, arguing in favor of a more procedural view of cognition. In contrast, Dove believed that "the notion of representation is too useful to give up." Dove proposed to use the term dis-embodiment. Language is disembodied because its sensory-motor features are unrelated to its meaning. According to Dove (2011), this dual functionality of language is at the basis of generalization and abstraction. Several papers addressed conceptual metaphor theory. Flusberg et al. (2010) presented a computational connectionist model

Frontiers in Cognition, 2011

This essay proposes and defends a pluralistic theory of conceptual embodiment. Our concepts are represented in at least two ways: (i) through sensorimotor simulations of our interactions with objects and events and (ii) through sensorimotor simulations of natural language processing. Linguistic representations are “dis-embodied” in the sense that they are dynamic and multimodal but, in contrast to other forms of embodied cognition, do not inherit semantic content from this embodiment. The capacity to store information in the associations and inferential relationships among linguistic representations extends our cognitive reach and provides an explanation of our ability to abstract and generalize. This theory is supported by a number of empirical considerations, including the large body of evidence from cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology supporting a multiple semantic code explanation of imageability effects.

Journal of Physiology-paris, 2008

Many studies have demonstrated that the sensory and motor systems are activated during conceptual processing. Such results have been interpreted as indicating that concepts, and important aspects of cognition more broadly, are embodied. That conclusion does not follow from the empirical evidence. The reason why is that the empirical evidence can equally be accommodated by a 'disembodied' view of conceptual representation that makes explicit assumptions about spreading activation between the conceptual and sensory and motor systems. At the same time, the strong form of the embodied cognition hypothesis is at variance with currently available neuropsychological evidence. We suggest a middle ground between the embodied and disembodied cognition hypotheses -grounding by interaction. This hypothesis combines the view that concepts are, at some level, 'abstract' and 'symbolic', with the idea that sensory and motor information may 'instantiate' online conceptual processing.

Journal of Physiology-Paris

Many studies have demonstrated that the sensory and motor systems are activated during conceptual processing. Such results have been interpreted as indicating that concepts, and important aspects of cognition more broadly, are embodied. That conclusion does not follow from the empirical evidence. The reason why is that the empirical evidence can equally be accommodated by a 'disembodied' view of conceptual representation that makes explicit assumptions about spreading activation between the conceptual and sensory and motor systems. At the same time, the strong form of the embodied cognition hypothesis is at variance with currently available neuropsychological evidence. We suggest a middle ground between the embodied and disembodied cognition hypotheses -grounding by interaction. This hypothesis combines the view that concepts are, at some level, 'abstract' and 'symbolic', with the idea that sensory and motor information may 'instantiate' online conceptual processing.

There is a movement afoot in cognitive science to grant the body a central role in shaping the mind. Proponents of embodied cognition take as their theoretical starting point not a mind working on abstract problems, but a body that requires a mind to make it function. These opening lines by Clark (1998) are typical: " Biological brains are first and foremost the control systems for biological bodies. Biological bodies move and act in rich real-world surroundings " (p. 506). Traditionally, the various branches of cognitive science have viewed the mind as an abstract information processor , whose connections to the outside world were of little theoretical importance. Perceptual and motor systems, though reasonable objects of inquiry in their own right, were not considered relevant to understanding " central " cognitive processes. Instead, they were thought to serve merely as peripheral input and output devices. This stance was evident in the early decades of cognitive psychology, when most theories of human thinking dealt in proposi-tional forms of knowledge. During the same time period, artificial intelligence was dominated by computer models of abstract symbol processing. Philosophy of mind, too, made its contribution to this zeitgeist, most notably in Fodor's (1983) modularity hypothesis. According to Fodor, central cognition is not modular, but its connections to the world are. Perceptual and motor processing are done by informationally encapsulated plug-ins providing sharply limited forms of input and output. However, there is a radically different stance that also has roots in diverse branches of cognitive science. This stance has emphasized sensory and motor functions, as well as their importance for successful interaction with the environment. Early sources include the view of 19th century psychologists that there was no such thing as " imageless thought " (Good-win, 1999); motor theories of perception such as those suggested by William James and others (see Prinz, 1987, for a review); the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, which emphasized the emergence of cognitive abilities out of a groundwork of sensorimotor abilities; and the ecological psychology of J. J. Gibson, which viewed perception in terms of affordances— potential interactions with the environment. In the 1980s, linguists began exploring how abstract concepts may be based on metaphors for bodily, physical concepts (e.g., Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). At the same time, within the field of artificial intelligence, behavior-based robotics began to emphasize routines for interacting with the environment rather than internal representations used for abstract thought (see, e.g., Brooks, 1986). This kind of approach has recently attained high visibility , under the banner of embodied cognition. There is a growing commitment to the idea that the mind must be understood in the context of its relationship to a physical body that interacts with the world. It is argued that we have evolved from creatures whose neural resources were devoted primarily to perceptual and motoric processing, and whose cognitive activity consisted largely of immediate, on-line interaction with the environment. Hence human cog-nition, rather than being centralized, abstract, and sharply distinct from peripheral input and output modules, may instead have deep roots in sensorimotor processing. Although this general approach is enjoying increasingly broad support, there is in fact a great deal of diversity in the claims involved and the degree of controversy they attract. If the term embodied cognition is to retain meaning-625 The emerging viewpoint of embodied cognition holds that cognitive processes are deeply rooted in the body's interactions with the world. This position actually houses a number of distinct claims, some of which are more controversial than others. This paper distinguishes and evaluates the following six claims: (1) cognition is situated; (2) cognition is time-pressured; (3) we off-load cognitive work onto the environment; (4) the environment is part of the cognitive system; (5) cognition is for action; (6) off-line cognition is body based. Of these, the first three and the fifth appear to be at least partially true, and their usefulness is best evaluated in terms of the range of their applicability. The fourth claim, I argue, is deeply problematic. The sixth claim has received the least attention in the literature on embodied cognition, but it may in fact be the best documented and most powerful of the six claims.

We introduce here a special issue of this journal on the theme of "Conceptual Metaphor and Embodied Cognition in Science Learning." The idea for this issue grew out of a symposium that we organized on this topic at the conference of the European Science Education Research Association (ESERA) in September 2013. The eight papers collected in this issue reflect the emergence of a critical mass of studies in science education applying ideas from the perspective of "embodied cognition" in cognitive science. Up until the 1980s, most research in cognitive science assumed a view of the mind as an abstract information processing system. On this view, our sensorimotor systems were often seen as serving a peripheral, input/output role, conveying information to or from a central cognitive processor where abstract, higher level thought took place. The research focused on developing models of cognition incorporating language-like, propositional representations and syntactic processes, and largely ignored the specifics of human physiology and interaction between the person and the material and social world in which he or she thinks and acts. Since then, several different approaches to cognitive science have adopted some version of the assumption that cognition is embodied -that is, they have assumed that models of cognition need to attend to the characteristics of human brains and bodies, and the material contexts in which thought is taking place (e.g. ). The broad assumptions behind embodied cognition are not new to the study of the mind and may be traced back to Merleau-Ponty's (2002) Phenomenology of perception and Gibson's (1979) ecological theory of perception. They are also acknowledged in cognitive developmental traditions, such as the Piagetian emphasis on our sensorimotor system as a basis for the development of abstract concepts, and resonate with Vygotsky's (1978) recognition of the role of our interaction with physical and symbolic artefacts. With regards to the educational sciences, certain ideas of embodied cognition are in line with pragmatic and progressive traditions, e.g. those of Dewey (1916) which emphasise the role of personal and physical experiences in learning. Wilson (2002) carefully distinguishes and assesses six distinct claims that fall under the general heading of embodied cognition: (1) that cognitive processes are situated, varying depending on the real-world contexts in which they are carried out;

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 2014

It is currently debated whether the meanings of words and objects are represented, in whole or in part, in a modality-specific formatthe embodied cognition hypothesis. I argue that the embodied/disembodied cognition debate is either largely resolved in favour of the view that concepts are represented in an amodal format, or at a point where the embodied and disembodied approaches are no longer coherently distinct theories. This merits reconsideration of what the available evidence can tell us about the structure of the conceptual system. We know that the conceptual system engages, online, with sensory and motor content. This frames a new question: How is it that the human conceptual system is able to disengage from the sensorimotor system? Answering this question would say something about how the human mind is able to detach from the present and extrapolate from finite experience to hypothetical states of how the world could be. It is the independence of thought from perception and action that makes human cognition specialand that independence is guaranteed by the representational distinction between concepts and sensorimotor representations.

Philosophical Psychology, 2019

According to the embodied cognition hypothesis, the mental symbols used for higher cognitive reasoning, such as the making of deductive and inductive inferences, both originate and reside in our sensory-motor-introspective and emotional systems. The main objection to this view is that it cannot explain concepts that are, by definition, detached from perception and action, i.e., abstract concepts such as TRUTH or DEMOCRACY. This objection is usually merely taken for granted and has yet to be spelled out in detail. In this paper, I distinguish three different versions of this objection (one semantic and two epistemic versions). Once these distinctions are in place, we can begin to see the solutions offered in the literature in a new, more positive, light.