Roman Madzia - Pragmatism and Embodied Cognitive Science: From Bodily Intersubjectivity to Symbolic Articulation

Pragmatism and Embodied Cognitive Science

HUMANPROJEKT

Interdisziplinre Anthropologie

Im Auftrag der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften

herausgegeben von Detlev Ganten, Volker Gerhardt, Jan-Christoph Heilinger und Julian Nida-Rmelin

Band 14

ISBN 978-3-11-047889-1

e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-048023-8

e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-047893-8

ISSN 1868-8144

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2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Einbandgestaltung: Martin Zech, Bremen

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Roman Madzia and Matthias Jung

Over the last two decades, cognitive sciences, as well as human sciences in general, have witnessed a considerable paradigm shift with regard to their outlook on the nature of the human mind, cognition, perception and action. Traditional cognitive sciences have, without adequate critical examination, inherited their conceptual framework and theoretical outlook on what cognition is from representatives of the early modern philosophical tradition such as Ren Descartes, John Locke and/or David Hume. Within the early modern framework, the mind was understood as a peculiar sort of an object that could be characterized by specific properties. From the Cartesian perspective, the mind was perceived as an organ for thinking (Rowlands 2003). In a similar manner as the stomach digests and eyes see, according to early Modern thinkersthe mind thinks.With-in that philosophical perspective, the mind, being a specific kind of organ, was allegedly contained in the brain (internalism). Unlike other bodily organs that are situated entirely in the physical world and are, hence, governed by purely mechanical principles, the mind was taken to be governed primarily by the principles of reason (intellectualism).

In a very similar manner to the early Modern outlook on the mind as a capacity governed by the principles of reason, the so-called first-generation cognitive science (cognitivism and computationalism [see Lakoff & Johnson 1999]) understands the human mind as some sort of an abstract program of the brain, governed by the rules of formal logic. Within such a conceptual framework, cognition is viewed exclusively as a process of computation over formal symbols (in the early Modern renditionassembling and re-assembling of ideas), taking place in our heads. Hence, seen from the perspective of the first-generation cognitive science (but also first-generation artificial intelligence and robotics), the human mind and cognition are:

Since its formation as a discipline that aims for a naturalistic account of the mental, cognitive science has been dominated by a view of cognition as represented in 13. This classical paradigm has been partly fruitful and has stimulated important research in the early decades of cognitive science. However, starting two decades ago, significant criticisms have been raised with regard to various insufficiencies of the first-generation cognitive science in providing a viable and empirically responsible account of the nature of cognition, mentality and human experience in general (e. g. Varela et al. 1991; Dreyfus 1992; Clark 1997; Lakoff & Johnson 1999, etc.). As an alternative, the so-called embodied (Lakoff & Johnson), embedded (Rupert), enactive (Varela), extended (Clark) approaches to cognition were introduced. Although these approaches sometimes differ from one another quite significantly, their common denominator is the belief that cognition is not to be understood as a formal capacity for deriving world-models but rather, it has been emphasized that cognitive processes are so closely intertwined with action that they would be best understood as the exercise of skillful bodily know-how of organisms engaging with their environments. According to the proponents of 4EA (embodied, extended, embedded, enactive, affective) approach, cognition is not a process of creating representational models of the world, but rather models bodily interaction with the world. In the 4EA approach, the mind is not a disembodied and self-sufficient computing device but is understood as a never fully formalizable set of practical skills (strategies) by means of which physically embodied and environmentally embedded agents negotiate their worlds. The criterion for the success of cognitive operations is not to recover pre-existing features or to construct a veridical representation of the environmentas the classical, first-generation cognitive science would have had it. According to 4EA, cognition is not a process that unfolds exclusively in our heads. The cognitive feedback loops between organisms and their environments are so dense and continuous that, for scientists studying the nature of cognitive activity, the isolated brain is not a meaningful unit of analysis. Cognition, as more and more cognitive scientists are ready to admit, takes place on the entire brain-body-world chain without the possibility to indicate which one of these elements constitutes its substance. As Andreas K. Engel et al. (2013) write in their recent article Wheres the action? The pragmatic turn in cognitive science: Cognition is a form of practice. The function of the mind is to guide action, and cognitive mechanisms such as perception and memory must be understood in terms of their ultimate contribution to situation-appropriate behavior (Wilson 2002).Situation-appropriateness, however, would be misunderstood if taken to refer only to the immediate physical surrounding of the human organism. Human beings develop long-term plans, engage in various activities decoupled from immediate response to situations (cognitive science itself being a compelling example), and tend to frame their coping behavior by developing and adhering to comprehensive world views. The ultimate situation in which the embodied mind shapes action is thus nothing less than the conditio humana in general. This is one important reason, among others, why American pragmatism ought to enter the picture sketched so far. Pragmatism, keenly aware of the fact that cognition is for action, but action transcends specific situations, is embedded in a culture and ultimately refers to the place of human beings in the world, is a potent antidote against a too narrow identification of action with situated coping.