Cognitive science explains mind and brain in terms of computation, information-processing, and representationalism: the ability of a cognitive system to change internal microstructure so as to correspond with important features of the internal or external world. One could do worse than to sum up the cognitivist model of the mind as “computations over representations”, in [...]
Part II of Leder’s The Absent Body
“Spatiotemporal Continuity
The mysterious quality of our visceral space is based not only on such experiences but on all that is not experienced of our inner body, I have hitherto focused on what interoceptions we do have; they are marked by a limited qualitative range and a spatial ambiguity that together restrict our perceptual discriminations. Furthermore, [...]
Body-knowledge: what is it?
I use the term“body-knowledge” in my dissertation research primarily to refer to the experience of knowing about one’s own body, and especially embracing perception and assessments of the body through the body. It is meant to straddle the classic cognitive psychology distinction between explicit knowledge that is verbalizable, and implicit knowledge that may only be [...]
A critical look at the information-processing theories used to explain body-knowledge
The psychologist Raymond Gibbs (2006) in Embodiment and Cognitive Science asks (pg. 28) “What underlies people’s abilities to move as they do and have any awareness of their bodies?”
The conventional answer given by psychology, medicine, and cognitive neuroscience is physiological and cognitive systems using information-processing. Gibbs cites the work of Bermudez, Marcel, and Eilan (1995) [...]
the legacy of Cartesian “objectivity” makes it hard to understand patient verbal reports
Psychiatrist Allan Beveridge (2002) hones in on a facet of the patient-physician relationship relevant to neurophenomenology: the over-adoption in medicine of the scientific attitude of objectivity towards phenomena. While entirely appropriate in the many research contexts, this may make understanding the personal body-knowledge of the patient more difficult (pg. 101):
“In the mental state examination, a [...]
Gallagher and Coles on body schema vs. body image and the body percept
The philosopher Shaun Gallagher has collaborated with neurologist Jonathan Coles on the significance of patients with enigmatic body-knowledge problems (Gallagher and Coles, 1998). Gallagher has analyzed this clinical data in the light of phenomenology and neuroscience, and has an essential book for anyone interested in neurophenomenology: How the Body Shapes the Mind
Gallagher is formulating a [...]
neurophenomenology and body alienation in cognitive science
It is worth exploring the historical, Cartesian “body alienation”, or default privileging of depersonalized, dismebodied, system-centric theories of mind, of much or most of the fields grouped under the label of cognitive science and neuroscience. Psychologists, linguists, philosophers, and neuroscientists have spent decades using computational and information-processing metaphors and models to explain behavior, problem-solving, memory, [...]
