Traditional views in philosophy of mind and cognitive science depict the mind as an information processor, one whose connections with the body and the world are of little theoretical importance. On the contrary, mounting empirical evidence shows that bodily states and modality-specific systems for perception and action underlie information processing, and that embodiment contributes to various aspects and effects of mental phenomena. This article will briefly review and discuss some of this evidence and what it implies. By challenging mainstream accounts of mind and cognition, embodiment views offer new ways of conceptualizing knowledge and suggest novel perspectives on cognitive variation and mind-body reductionism. WIREs Cogn Sci 2013, 4:319-325. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1226 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.
Traditionally, the BImagery Debate^has opposed two main camps: depictivism and descriptivism. This debate has essentially focused on the nature of the internal representations thought to be involved in imagery, without addressing at all the question of action. More recently, a third, Bembodied^view is moving the debate into a new phase. The embodied approach focuses on the interdependence of perception, cognition and action, and in its more radical line this approach promotes the idea that perception is not a process involving internal world-models (representations). The anti-representationalist version of the embodied paradigm covers, among others that we shall not discuss here, two quite different positions, namely the enactive approach and sensorimotor theory. Up to now these two anti-representationalist accounts have generally been confounded. In this paper we will argue that despite some important commonalities, enactive and sensorimotor accounts come with distinctive theoretical traits with regard to their approach to imagery. These become manifest when critically examining the role they assign to sensorimotor engagements with the world. We shall argue that enactive and sensorimotor approaches are different in their understanding of the role of embodied action, and these different notions of embodiment lead to different explanatory accounts of perception and imagery. We propose that, due to existing ambiguities in enactivism, the sensorimotor theory is a better framework for a skill-based approach to imagery.
We taxonomize the varieties of representational reuse and point out that all the sorts of reuse that the brain engages in (1) involve something like a model (or schema or simulator), and (2) are effected in bodily and external media, as well as neural media. This suggests that the real fundamental organizational principle is not neural reuse, but model reuse.
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