Abstract / Description of output
This essay argues that Herbert Simon anticipated what has emerged as the consensus view about human cognition: embodied functionalism. According to embodied functionalism, cognitive processes appear at a distinctively cognitive level; types of cognitive processes (such as proving a theorem) are not identical to kinds of neural processes, because the former can take various physical forms in various individual thinkers. Nevertheless, the distinctive characteristics of such processes — their causal structures — are determined by fine-grained properties shared by various, often especially bodily related, physical processes that realize them. Simon’s apparently anti-embodiment views are surveyed and are shown to be consistent with his many claims that lend themselves to an embodied interpretation and that, to a significant extent, helped to lay the groundwork for an embodied cognitive science.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Minds, Models and Milieux |
Subtitle of host publication | Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon |
Editors | Leslie Marsh, Roger Frantz |
Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan |
Pages | 7–33 |
Number of pages | 27 |
ISBN (Print) | 9781137442499 |
Publication status | Published - 6 Jan 2016 |