A more radical, nonmainstream point of view

In the following lines, I am going to quote a passage from a book I read some months ago (Chemero 2009), which makes the case for an approach (labeled “Radical Embodied Cognitive Science”) which is very different from the one generally held by scholars who approach cognition from an embodied perspective. Indeed, Chemero takes issue with these more “mainstream” viewpoints on human cognition. Even though, all in all,  I (often strongly) disagree with the approach supported in Chemero’s book, I think his point of view still deserves to be mentioned.

“Situated, embodied cognitive scientists typically reject the antirepresentationalism of Gibson, Barway and Perry, and Brooks, while antirepresentationalism (which implies anticomputationalism) is the core of radical embodied cognitive science. Radical embodied cognitive science is a form of eliminativism, one that has its historical roots in American naturalism (Gibsonian ecological psychology, remember, is a direct descendent of the work of James and Dewey). I would suggest, then, than radical embodied cognitive science is not a radicalization of embodied cognitive science.  Instead, embodied cognitive science should be seen as a watering down of radical embodied cognitive science, and an attempt to combine a theory that is ultimately American naturalist and eliminativist in origin with the computational theory of mind” (Chemero 2009: 30, italics original).

References:

Chemero, Anthony. 2009. Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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