Embodiment and Situated Cognition

Embodied and situated approaches have become increasingly popular in contemporary philosophy of mind and cognition. They tend to be scientifically informed responses to the cognitivism predominant in mid-twentieth century analytic philosophy of mind and psychology. Cognitivism in philosophy assumed - either explicitly or implicitly - that the non-neural body and the environment in which we live and act are best factored out in our investigations of mind and cognition. Embodied and situated approaches along with other related responses to philosophical cognitivism have collectively come to be known as “4EA”: Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended, and Affective. While 4EA approaches are united in rejecting the conception of mind and cognition as supervenient only upon internal brain processes they each take a slightly different focus on the reasons why internalism should be rejected and the positions may be held independently. For example, what we might think of as orthodox embodied cognitive science makes little or no mention of the affective domain and it does not imply biological enactivism, which - by its very nature - is itself an inherently embodied approach to cognition. In a similar vein, some of these approaches may be thought to be extensions to twentieth century functionalist philosophy of mind and cognitive science, while in others there is a strong historical connection to the Phenomenologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (in particular Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty) and/or the American Pragmatists such as William James and John Dewey. 

Clark 1981 captured the imagination of a generation of researchers in philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences by drawing on research from robotics to argue that the mind is embodied and embedded in important ways. Gallagher 2005 integrates phenomenology and neuroscience with artificial cognitive systems research to argue that the body shapes the mind. Haugeland 1993 is an early - but classic - paper introducing embodiment and situatedness to philosophy of mind, and Brooks 1991 is the key reference from robotics in the field. Hutchins 1995 is the go-to book on embeddedness, and Dreyfus 1972 still stands as one of the main critiques of traditional artificial intelligence approaches. Enactivism was introduced to the world through Varela et al 1991, developed in detail in regard to what might be thought of as ‘biological’ enactivism in Thompson 2007, in regard to ‘perceptual’ enactivism in Noë 2004, and in regard to perception, agency and consciousness in Hurley 1998. Affective cognition is still underrepresented in the embodiment paradigm but Damasio 1994 and Damasio 1999 have been strong influences on philosophers in this area, Griffiths & Scarantino 2008 presents a strongly situated theory of emotions, and Colombetti 2013 provides an in-depth consideration of affective and emotional embodiment.

An overview of most of the 4E approaches is presented in the second edition of Clark's Mindware, an introductory textbook for the philosophy of cognitive science. Clark's Natural Born Cyborgs is a very readable lay-introduction to embodiment and the extended mind, but for a more thorough investigation see Supersizing the Mind. A scientifically informed introduction to the phenomenological approach to these issues is presented in Gallagher and Zahavi's The Phenomenological Mind and Noe's Out of our Heads provides an accessible introduction to perceptual enactivism. A thorough consideration of embodied approaches and their relevance to philosophy of mind can be found in Shapiro's Embodied Cognition and his (2014) edited collection The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition collates cutting-edge articles from many of the key players in the discipline.