A quotation from a paper I really enjoyed
I am dropping by to suggest that you read an insightful and thought-provoking paper of Prof. Anna Maria Borghi’s, a well-known Italian psychologist and an influential theorist of Embodied Cognition. Consider the first three or four lines of her contribution:
“Successful interaction with objects in the environment is the precondition for our survival and for the success of our attempts to improve life by using artifacts and technologies to transform our environment. Our ability to interact appropriately with objects depends on the capacity, fundamental for human beings, for categorizing objects and storing information about them, thus forming concept, and on the capacity to associate concepts with names.” (Borghi 2005: 8).
As you will have noticed, in a just a few lines, Borghi takes one of the basic tenets of Embodied Cognition, which also represents a foundational notion of Distributed Cognition, and puts it in an evolutionary perspective, getting us started to read her very interesting paper on the importance of everyday experience in the environment in order to be able to create concepts and conceptual categories. I really suggest that you read this paper, and then go on with the rest of the chapters which make up the interesting book on the experiential basis of human cognition.
References:
Borghi, Anna M. (2005). Object Concepts and Action. In D. Pecher and R. Zwaan (eds.), Grounding Cognition. The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking. New York: Cambridge University Press. 8-34.
