Construing the Mind Relative to its Relationship to a body interacting with the World

Abstract

Conventional cognitive science conceived of the mind as a system that processed abstract information, having a relationship with the outside world that was of near inconsequential import. Perceptual and motor functions did not count in understanding cognitive processes.  In cognitive psychology, knowledge was restricted to the propositional.  In artificial intelligence, computer models busied themselves predominantly with processing abstract symbols.  In philosophy, concepts were no more than abstract symbol systems. The philosophy of mind became the philosophy of propositional concepts.  Fodor (1983) insisted cognition was not modular, though its links to the world were (modularity hypothesis). The perceptual-motor processing bore only curtailed informational input and output. Alternatively, we have in our day an embodied way of conceptualizing cognition that admits, in its various facets, that cognitive processes are extensively grounded in the body’s interactions with the outside world, on sensory-motor processing.  It is no longer a mind that goes about rectifying abstract tasks; it is now a body needing the solidarity of mind to do its chores.  Well back in the 1890s, William James was already advancing an ideo-motor theory of perception.  Jean Piaget (1950) showed how cognitive abilities arose from sensory-motor abilities. J. J. Gibson (1979) insisted in his ecological cognition that perception entailed direct interaction with the environment. Behavior afforded behavior, he held (Gibson, 1979, 135)¹.