Embodied Cognition, Collective Memory, and Other

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Reviews the book Embodied Cognition by Lawrence Shapiro. .... example of extended cognition that is relevant to the Constitution approach, the case of a.
Embodied Cognition, Collective Memory, and Other Socially Meaningful Activities

Embodied Cognition By Lawrence Shapiro New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2011. 237 pp. ISBN 978-0-415-77341-6 (hardcover); ISBN 978-0-415-77342-3 (paperback); e-ISBN 978-0-203-85066-4.

Reviewed by David Manier

Abstract

Reviews the book Embodied Cognition by Lawrence Shapiro. Shapiro gives a thorough and evenhanded account of various approaches to embodied cognition, arguing that they may best be considered, not as a refutation of standard cognitive science, but rather as an extension of it. Extrapolating from Shapiro’s analysis, we are led to conclude that, not only “private cognition” (if such a thing can be said to exist), but also other socially meaningful activities (such as collective memory), will best be understood if psychologists broaden the scope of cognitive science to encompass real-world interactions and situations (see Manier, 2004).

We psychologists can be rather good at devising experiments and making statistical analyses of the results, but we are often not as good at interpreting the results and drawing valid

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conclusions. A common tendency is to violate scientific principles of external validity – in other words, we sometimes tend to exaggerate the significance of our results, and generalize beyond what the research warrants. Like other scholars, psychologists also often fall prey to various kinds of bias, such as trendiness and fashion. A common manifestation of this is publication bias, which amounts to a type of selective reporting. The bias can be either positive or negative: If it is true that scientists often jump on the bandwagon of a popular theory, the opposite is equally true, and can be witnessed when scientists seem to have a taboo against attempts to reformulate anathematized theories (such as those of Freud) into scientifically testable hypotheses. Philosophy of science is the discipline that is devoted (among other topics) to considering issues related to the reliability and validity of scientific research, including whether the research includes adequate warrants to support its conclusions. Consulting this discipline can be a valuable tonic against making extravagant and overgeneralized claims, as well as against acting on the basis of taboos and anathemas, and so scientists would do well to pay attention when a philosopher produces an excellent monograph such as Embodied Cognition by Lawrence Shapiro. Embodied cognition is a controversial topic, and extravagant claims have been made both for and against it. Shapiro is a philosopher with an impressive grasp of cognitive science, and he does a superbly thorough job of summarizing the relevant scholarship and evaluating the various claims that have been made. His writing is clear and persuasive, and he never seems tendentious. Occasionally, there are welcome flashes of humor – my favorite is when he invokes the spirit of Theodor S. Geisel while discussing whether making gestures plays a role in benefiting spatial reasoning: “If gesture’s roles were purely communicative, we would not do it if we were blind, we would not do it from behind; we would not do it on the phone, we would not, could not all alone” (p. 173).

Approaches to Embodied Cognition

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Shapiro does not offer a concise definition of embodied cognition, but instead views it as a research program with diverse elements. He considers approaches to embodied cognition under three category headings: Conceptualization, Replacement, and Constitution. Each of these three approaches poses challenges to “standard cognitive science” (SCS), which Shapiro defines in terms of its attempt to understand human thought using the key concepts of representation and computationalism. Turning to Conceptualization first, Shapiro sums it up as the hypothesis that “to conceive of the world as a human being does requires having a body like a human being’s” (p. 71). Shapiro cites Lakoff and Johnson (1999) as an example of this approach. After reviewing several relevant experiments, Shapiro’s judgment is that “the experimental results on which Conceptualization rests can as well be explained by standard cognitive science” (p. 206), and so Shapiro says that the Conceptualization approach fails as an effective challenge to SCS. Advocates of the Replacement approach, according to Shapiro, “see embodiment and situatedness, rather than symbol manipulation, as the core explanatory concepts in their new cognitive science” (p. 156). Shapiro cites two main examples. First are the dynamicists, who emphasize the importance of principles such as coupling and simultaneity in modeling human thought. For example, Van Gelder (1995) argues that the Watt centrifugal governor (which controls the power produced by a steam engine) is a dynamic system that models human thought better than a computer. This might seem unlikely, yet Shapiro provides a coruscatingly brilliant account of Beer’s (2003) model of a dynamic system (a continuous-time recurrent neural network) that appears to capture important aspects of perception and response (or situated action) that SCS seems to miss. The second main example of the Replacement approach is what Shapiro calls roboticism – Brooks’s (1991) subsumption architecture is cited as an example. Although Shapiro admits that approaches such as these can add to our understanding of cognition, he judges that (at least for now) they fall well short of their goal of toppling SCS as the dominant paradigm for modeling human thought.

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The third main category of embodied cognition is what Shapiro labels the Constitution approach, with Andy Clark cited as its most prominent proponent. According to Clark’s (2008) “parity principle,” if something outside the head functions as part of a cognitive process, then it is part of the cognitive process. For example, some may store phone numbers in their heads, whereas others may store them in their cell phones, in which case, the phones are functioning as part of the cognitive process, just as much as what is “in the head.” Shapiro argues that the Constitution approach is best understood not as a refutation of SCS, or as an attempt to replace it, but as an extension of it. This is made clear in Wilson’s (1994) concept of “wide computationalism.” Yes, as SCS maintains, a computational approach can clarify some important aspects of human thought. But a more extended or inclusive approach to computation will provide a better account than one that is limited to the boundaries of the cranium. As Shapiro puts it, “computational descriptions of cognitive processes ... have nothing to say about the location of the constituents of algorithmic processes, opening the door to the possibility that cognitive processes incorporate parts of the world” (p. 199, italics added). Shapiro notes that one possible criticism of the Constitution approach is that it may have “consequences for personality identity [that] will prove to be unacceptable” (p. 210). If a cell phone is part of my remembering processes, is it part of me? Some might find this prospect troubling, but one who certainly would not is William James, who stated that “a man’s Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account” (James, 1890, p. 291).

Discussion Shapiro’s excellent book is highly readable, evenhanded, and clear to a fault (it is part of a Routledge philosophy series that strives to serve the purposes of widely diverse readers, ranging

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from undergraduates to professional philosophers, so it has some of the characteristics of a textbook, such as chapter summaries and a glossary). In his account, although the major points of embodied cognition are given a thorough presentation, SCS comes off very well. This may be, in part, because he gives relatively few examples from the Constitution approach. Consider, as an example of extended cognition that is relevant to the Constitution approach, the case of a basketball team known for its excellent passing game, such as the 1980s Los Angeles Lakers. SCS has little to say about the cognitive processes that enabled Magic Johnson to pass the ball with pinpoint accuracy to James Worthy, behind his back, while looking in the opposite direction. The dynamic system of a basketball team encompasses the interactions between players, as well as their individual skills at handling the ball and putting it through the hoop, and these are unlikely to be adequately captured by focusing simply on the computational capacities of individual players. Of course, the players must remember how to play the game, but even the skills of individual players (let alone the interactions between team members) are not best understood as being “in their heads,” but rather as being manifested in infinitely various acts of remembering that take place in real-world situations (see Manier, 1997, 2004). Another example is collective memory, or to be more specific, those memories that are held in common by members of a group, and which contribute to the sense of identity of the group’s members. One such group is a family, whose shared memories contribute to the identities of the family members. These memories are shaped, not only through the cognitive processes of individuals, but also through family conversations (see Manier, 1997). The course of family conversations is shaped, not only by family customs, but also by social norms, and “follow paths laid out in advance and completely independent of us, which society has been careful to point in the right direction” (Halbwachs, 1925/1992, p. 56). Once again, SCS has not done well at taking these larger systemic frameworks into account.

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Shapiro is correct, then, in stating that embodied cognition, and especially the Constitution approach, does not threaten to replace SCS. Instead, “it is an extension of standard cognitive science, one that the practitioners of standard cognitive science did not anticipate, but one that proper appreciation of the organism’s recruitment of extracranial resources renders necessary for understanding cognition” (p. 209). By expanding the scope of cognitive science to include real-world situations and interactions, embodied cognition therefore holds the promise of enhancing our comprehension of cognitive processes, which may best be understood as socially meaningful activities (as I have argued elsewhere, with reference to acts of remembering – see Manier 1997, 2004).

References Beer, R. (2003). The dynamics of active categorical perception in an evolved model agent. Adaptive Behavior, 11, 209-243. Brooks, R. (1991). New approaches to robotics. Science, 253, 1227-32. Clark, A. (2008). Supersizing the mind: Embodiment, action, and cognitive extension. New York: Oxford University Press. Halbwachs, M. (1992). On collective memory (L. A. Coser, Trans. & Ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Originally published in 1925). James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology. New York: Henry Holt. Retrieved April 20, 2011, from http://books.google.com/books?id=JLcAAAAAMAAJ&dq Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.

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Manier, D. (1997). Family remembering: Autobiographical remembering in the context of family conversations. Dissertation Abstracts International, 58 (5-B), 2688. (UMI No. 9732474). Manier, D. (2004). Is memory in the brain? Remembering as social behavior. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 11(4), 251-266. Van Gelder, T. (1995). What might cognition be, if not computation. Journal of Philosophy, 92, 345-381. Wilson, R. (1994). Wide computationalism. Mind, 103, 351-372.

© American Psychological Association. Embodied cognition, collective memory, and other socially meaningful activities. Manier, David PsycCRITIQUES, Vol 56(37), 2011. doi:10.1037/a0025063