ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the philosophers and cognitive scientists have investigated bodily involvement in cognition. The French philosopher Merleau-Ponty suggested that a blind man who uses a cane to navigate the world experience the cane as merely an object, but instead experiences it as though it were part of his own body. Starting in the 1990s, a series of modeling and experimental findings began to suggest that the brain does much less information processing than cognitive scientists at the time typically believed. In the 21st century, there has been a profusion of theories that fall under the general idea of embodied cognition, so much so that it is currently fashionable to lump them together as “4E cognitive science”, where the E's in question are embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive. The most pressing issue in embodied cognitive science is the debate over the explanatory value of representation and computation.
