Many cognitive scientists have recently championed the thesis that cognition is embodied. In principle, explicating this thesis should be relatively simple. There are, essentially, only two concepts involved: cognition and embodiment. After articulating what will here be meant by ‘embodiment’, this paper will draw attention to cases in which some advocates of embodied cognition apparently do not mean by ‘cognition’ what has typically been meant by ‘cognition’. Some advocates apparently mean to use ‘cognition’ not as a term for one, among many, causes of behavior, but for what has more often been called “behavior.” Some consequences for this proposal are considered.
Shanon B. (2010) Toward a phenomenological psychology of the conscious. In: Stewart J., Gapenne O. & Di Paolo E. A. (eds.) Enaction: Toward a new paradigm for cognitive science.. MIT Press, Cambridge MA: 387–424.
Excerpt: In this text, I outline a new framework for the psychological study of the conscious. Essentially, the greater part of contemporary psychology and cognitive science is concerned with the unconscious. Specifically, the view dominating the field today is that the bulk of workings of the mind take place in a province that is not amenable to consciousness. This holds true of all major paradigms in cognitive science: the classical paradigm of symbolic processing (to be referred to here as the representational- computational view of mind, or RCVM, and occasionally referred to as cognitivism or representationalism), the alternative paradigm of connectionism, as well as models entertained in social psychology and in the neurosciences. By all these approaches, both the structures underlying cognitive activity and the processes that produce cognitive performance pertain to a covert level to which the cognitive agent is, in general, not privy. This has been labeled as the “cognitive” unconscious (Kihlstrom 1987), a notion that joins the more famous psychodynamical unconscious (be it Freudian or Jungian) as well as the Chomskian notion of “knowledge of language,” which, in effect, is not known to the speakers who are said to possess it (Chomsky 1972). All told, it can be said that in essence, the psychology of the greater part of the twentieth century is a psychology of the unconscious. This essay comes with a call for a radical paradigm change for the twenty-first century, one shifting the core of psychology to the realm of the conscious.