Excerpt: This brief chapter will focus on two types of arguments for extended cognition inspired by Clark and Chalmers (1998). First, there has been the thought that cognition extends when processes in the brain, body, and world are suitably similar to processes taking place in the brain. We might describe these as cognitive equivalence arguments for extended cognition. Second, there has been the thought that, when there is the right kind of causal connection between a cognitive process and bodily and environmental processes, cognitive processes come to be realized by processes in the brain, body, and world. We might describe these as coupling arguments for extended cognition. What critics have found problematic are the kinds of similarity relations that have been taken to be applicable or suitable for concluding that there is extended cognition and the conditions that have been offered as providing the right kind of causal connection.

Excerpt: The purpose of the current chapter is to explore what is implied when cognitive scientists describe cognition as embodied, embedded, or situated (Chemero, 2009; Clancey, 1997; Clark, 1997, 1999, 2003; Dawson et al., 2010; Dourish, 2001; Shapiro, 2011; Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, 1991). This will be accomplished by contrasting these ideas with some traditional foundations of standard cognitive science (Dawson, 1998). In so doing, issues related to Shapiro’s (2011) three themes of conceptualization, replacement, and constitution are developed.

Excerpt: As this volume makes clear, research on embodied cognition draws from a number of disciplines and is supported by a variety of methodological strategies. In this chapter I focus on what phenomenology has contributed to our understanding of embodied cognition. I take “phenomenology” to mean the philosophical tradition initiated in the twentieth century by Edmund Husserl and developed by a variety of philosophers, including Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Aron Gurwitsch, and numerous others. More recently phenomenologists following this tradition have been drawn into theoretical and empirical research in the cognitive sciences, and especially into discussions of enactive and embodied conceptions of the mind (e.g. Dreyfus, 1973, 2002; Gallagher, 2005; Gallagher and Zahavi, 2012; Thompson, 2007; Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, 1991). I’ll start by looking at some of the historical resources that define the phenomenology of the body. I’ll then consider how phenomenology, as a methodology, relates to scientific investigations of embodied cognition, and finally go on to identify some of the insights about embodied cognition that phenomenology provides.

Although dynamical systems have been used by cognitive scientists for more than a decade already (e.g. Kugler, Kelso, and Turvey, 1980), dynamical systems first gained widespread attention in the mid-1990s (e.g. Kelso, 1995; Port and van Gelder, 1995; Thelen and Smith, 1994) Dynamical systems theory was then, and continues to be, a crucial tool for embodied cognitive science. The word dynamical simply means “changing over time” and thus a dynamical system is simply a system whose behavior evolves or changes over time. The scientific study of dynamical systems is concerned with understanding, modeling, and predicting the ways in which the behavior of a system changes over time. In the last few decades, thanks to increasing computational power, researchers have begun to investigate and understand the dynamic behavior of complex biological, cognitive, and social systems, using the concepts and tools of non-linear dynamical systems. In the next section, we will describe the key concepts of modern dynamical systems theory (complexity, self-organization, soft assembly, interaction dominance, and non-linearity) In the second section, we briefly discuss some dynamical analysis techniques used in the cognitive sciences. In the third, we give some examples of the application of complex dynamical systems theory and analysis in cognitive science. In the last, we sketch some consequences of the widespread applicability of dynamical approaches to understanding neural, cognitive, and social systems.