How ironic, for the years I spent haunting the college philosophy club and/or trying to tease some feedback out of professors, or my various forays on the web - no one had the wherewithal to hand me the following search term, “Body-centered theory, 4E cognition.” Even if just to shut me up and get me off their backs, but apparently it’s an obscure topic - it shouldn’t be.
A few days back I read an article The Plea for Neurocentrism, by Wolfgang Stegemann Dr. at Medium. Upon superficial reading, it is a full throated direct rejection of the very notions I’m so enamored with. In a way it was thrilling to read specific criticism, guess it’s not such a dumb topic, after all. Given rereading and listening and musing, it occurred to me, we were are coming from very different realms, and dealing with different types of understanding.
Stegemann is the real deal authoritative scientist and his audience is serious scientists within the scientific dialogue. I’m a science enthusiast concerned with developing a serious humanistic understanding of myself and my place in the world. “How we relate to the knowledge that we possess,” and all that philosophizing.
For me it is a realistic (scientifically harmonious) holistic understanding that relates to me and how I’m relating to my own living life. Stegemann is after specific exacting scientific facts. We have different criteria, though I believe after I have a chance to digest Stegemann’s position, I will be able to argue that my humanistic personal conception fits hand in glove within his scientific understanding.
As for 4E cognition, that’s a hot topic, lots of criticism, that from what little I’ve gathered so far, is well placed. But there also seems to be an acceptance this it truly is part of the consciousness/mind equation, how to quantify the extend, that’s a whole different story that will be fascinating to watch develop.
4E cognition
4E cognition expands upon embodied cognition, encompassing four interconnected principles: embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended cognition.
Embodied: This aligns with the concept of embodied cognition, emphasizing the critical role of the body and its sensorimotor capabilities in shaping mental processes.
Embedded: Cognition is situated within, and influenced by, the natural and social environments in which it takes place. For instance, navigating a familiar city might rely more on environmental cues than purely on internal mental maps.
Enacted: Cognition is not just passive processing but involves actively engaging with and shaping the world through actions and experiences. Learning, for example, is viewed as an active process of interacting with and adapting to the environment.
Extended: Cognitive processes can extend beyond the brain and body to include external tools, resources, and technologies. For example, using a calculator to solve a math problem or relying on a notebook for memory can be considered extensions of cognitive processes.
… The Definitional Challenge
Even though I used “embodied cognition” as part of a search string, it is legitimate to wonder what is actually meant by “embodied cognition.” One might even wonder, what is “embodied” and what is “cognition”? Under the rubric of embodied cognition, we can find research inspired by theories that originated in the 1980s and 1990s, such as linguistic theories about the role of metaphors in language and cognition (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), neuroscientific theories about grasping behavior and action and language understanding (Rizzolatti & Arbib, 1998), as well as a more conventional cognitive psychological theory about mental representations in language comprehension, memory, and thinking (Barsalou, 1999). Among the empirical studies of embodied cognition, one can find experiments on grasping, lexical priming, learning, emotion, action understanding, discourse comprehension, education, social cognition, and marketing, just to give a non-exhaustive listing of topics.
It is not my goal here to review these theories or the associated empirical studies. I merely want to point out that when one looks under the hood of “embodied cognition,” what one finds is not a purring scientific engine. Rather, what unfolds itself before our eyes is a large collection of parts, many of which do not seem to be interconnected, and a good many of which may not even belong in the vehicle in question. That “embodied cognition” is anything but a coherent field, is not an original observation. …
But it seems obvious there is something worth studying there, that actually does have a bearing of our mind and that should perhaps be better understood..