An increasingly popular trend in the sciences of the mind is to emphasize the ways in which cognition is embodied, embedded, situated, extended, distributed, enactive, ecological, etc. This course combines lectures and seminars to provide an introduction to these and other approaches that fall under the umbrella of "embodied cognitive science." The first part of the course will be lecture-based and will focus on the history and the theoretical and methodological foundations of embodied cognitive science. Having covered the basic concepts and approaches, in the second part we will turn to discussion-based seminars on cutting-edge topics in embodied cognitive science, with a special focus on the nature of affordances and their relation to the environment and to sociocultural practices.
Foundational topics discussed include: behaviorism and the cognitive revolution; the phenomenological and pragmatist traditions; the computational theory of mind and criticisms of classical computationalism; connectionism and its philosophical implications.
Topics within embodied cognitive science include: conceptual and motor grounding; distributed cognition, wide computationalism, and the extended mind; anti-representationalism in evolutionary robotics and dynamical systems theory; the enactive approach and central elements such as autonomy, sense-making and autopoiesis; ecological psychology and central elements such as its theory of direct perception and affordances.
- Trainer/in: Guilherme Sanches Sanchez