ABSTRACT
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of the nature and mechanisms of mind. It seeks to explain how thinking, reasoning, and behavior are possible in material systems. Work in embodied cognition explores the various ways in which cognitive functions and capacities are grounded in distributed webs of structure spanning brain, body and world. Higher cognition may also depend, in complex and ill-understood ways, upon the reuse of basic sensorimotor capacities offline, and upon interactions between inner resources and bioexternal structures such as pens, papers and smartphones. The embodied approach itself seems to come in two distinct varieties. The simple embodiment stresses the role of body, world and action in informing and constraining stories that still focus on inner computation, representation and problem-solving. The radical embodiment sees such a profound interplay of brain, body, and world as to fundamentally transform both the subject matter and the theoretical framework of cognitive science itself.
