Online research in philosophy

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.

That about sums up what is wrong with Clark.

After introducing several different approaches to distributed cognition, I consider the application of these ideas to modern science, especially the role of instrumentation and visual representations in science. I then examine several apparent difficulties with taking distributed cognition seriously. After arguing that these difficulties are only apparent, I note the ease with which distributed cognition accommodates normative concerns. I also present an example showing that understanding cognition as distributed bridges the often perceived gap between cognitive and social theories of science. The paper concludes by suggesting some implications for the history of science and for the cognitive study of science in general.

Introduction: toward an understanding of embodied cognition -- Standard cognitive science -- Challenging standard cognitive science -- Conceptions of embodiment -- Embodied cognition: the conceptualization hypothesis -- Embodied cognition: the replacement hypothesis -- Embodied cognition: the constitution hypothesis -- Concluding thoughts.

Recently internalists have mounted a counter-attack on the attempt to redefine the bounds of cognition. The counter-attack is aimed at a radical project which I call "cognitive integration," which is the view that internal and external vehicles and processes are integrated into a whole. Cognitive integration can be defended against the internalist counter arguments of Adams and Aizawa (A&A) and Rupert. The disagreement between internalists and integrationists is whether the manipulation of external vehicles constitutes a cognitive process. Integrationists think that they do, typically for reasons to do with the close coordination and causal interplay between internal and external processes. The internalist criticisms of the manipulation thesis fail because they misconstrue the nature of manipulation, ignore the hybrid nature of cognition, and take the manipulation thesis to be dependent upon a weak parity principle.

This book evaluates these arguments and suggests that, typically, it does not.