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Is perceiving bodily action?

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Abstract

One of the boldest claims one finds in the enactivist and embodied cognition literature is that perceiving is bodily action (PBA). Research on the role of eye movements in vision have been thought to support PBA, whereas research on paralysis has been thought to pose no challenge to PBA. The present paper, however, will argue just the opposite. Eye movement research does not support PBA, whereas paralysis research presents a strong challenge that seems not to have been fully appreciated.

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Notes

  1. Cf., Gibson 1980, p. 238.

  2. Here I presuppose a distinction for which there is a large philosophical literature. Classic sources for this include Anscombe 1957, and Davidson 2001.

  3. Gangopadhyay, 2010, and Wilson 2010, also seem to embrace the view.

  4. Smith et al. 1947.

  5. For one account of this sort of case, see Miura et al. (2001).

  6. See, for example, Moerman et al. 1993, Osterman et al. 2001, Sandin et al. 2000, Schwender et al. 1998, and Sebel et al. 2004.

  7. For reviews, see Patterson and Grabois 1986, and Smith and Delargy, 2005.

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Correspondence to Kenneth Aizawa.

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Aizawa, K. Is perceiving bodily action?. Phenom Cogn Sci 18, 933–946 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-018-9592-9

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