ABSTRACT
I outline two recent accounts of embodied cognition that take their lead from the phenomenon of neural reuse. The first is to be found in recent work of Alvin Goldman, and the second is based on Michael Anderson’s recent book After Phrenology. The two accounts differ in the implications they take embodied cognition to have for how cognitive scientists go about their explanatory business. According to Goldman, there is nothing in the idea of embodiment that calls for a revision in the beliefs of the cognitive science orthodoxy about how human cognition works. Anderson’s conception of embodied cognition by contrast requires cognitive scientists to think of cognitive processes as phenomena of whole brain–body–environment systems. I will side with Anderson in what follows and argue that Goldman is mistaken in his verdict about what embodied cognition means for cognitive science.
