Was sollen wir tun? Was dürfen wir glauben? - bei DuEPublico ...

The arche of Cognition – Grounding
Representations in Action
Arne M. Weber & Gottfried Vosgerau
Unfortunately, the term “embodied cognition” does not refer to a unified theory and
questions like, ‘what does “embodiment” or “to be embodied” mean?’ are still to be answered
in detail as well as its explanatory advantage for theoretical progress remains unclear. To
achieve some progress in this regard, we clarify theoretical presuppositions of a certain
understanding of “embodied” cognition, namely “grounded” cognition. We present grounded
action cognition as a theoretical framework for understanding the interdependencies of
motor control and action-related cognitive processes, like perceiving an action or thinking
about an action. We distinguish between grounding qua acquisition and grounding qua
constitution of cognitive abilities and exhibit three possible theoretical conceptions,
Furthermore, we draw on recent empirical evidence to motivate our inclination towards a
particular theory. According to this theory we get a clearer picture of the architecture of mind
and expose the ground of cognition: there are certain representations involved in action
cognition and action perception that are not modality-specific as usually proposed by
advocates of grounded cognition. The explanatory advance of those multi-modal actionrelated
representations of the body can not only provide a clearer picture of the architecture
of the mind but also of its arche.
1. Classical Cognitive Science and Embodied Cognitive Science
The embodied cognition research program contrasts with classical theories in cognitive
science in that it motivates an understanding of cognition as embodied. This contrast of the
emerging program consists in a critic of two ideas in classical cognitive science—the
modularity of mind thesis (Fodor 1983) and the language of thought hypothesis (Fodor 1975).
Fodor and, for example, Newell & Simon (1976), proponents of the physical symbol systemhypothesis,
considered the elements of thought as symbols being manipulated and computed
during cognitive processing. Cognitive processes were treated as computational functions
over representations with syntactic structure and appropriate semantics. The productivity
and systematicity of cognition were thought of as to be entirely explainable by language-like
and rule-governed structures of thought. While thinking was understood by Fodor as some
kind of mental language operating on a higher level, motor control and perception are
conceived of as functioning on a lower level. Further, within this classical framework of
cognitive sciences, motor control, perception and cognition are viewed as strictly separated
faculties operating in different domains or modules of the mind; thought consisted in
operations generally distinct from operations found in the sensorimotor system. For example,
thinking and acting have been assumed to operate in different domains or modules because
thinking draws on conceptual representations, whereas motor control functions are thought
to rely on relatively low-level or automatic processes. Thus, thinking was characterized as
entirely distinct from the sensorimotor abilities, like those governing perception and motor
control. Consequently, the content of these representations was understood as independent
from bodily experience and its modal basis.
This traditional, modular perspective on the domains of action, perception and thought is
now often criticized as the “sandwich-model of the mind” (cf. Hurley 1998) since it assumes
that the mind is built out of three distinct, separable layers: the input layer (perception), the