phainomena

Paulo De Jesus
MAKING SENSE OF (AUTOPOIETIC)
ENACTIVE EMBODIMENT:
A GENTLE APPRAISAL
1. Introduction
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With the advent of the cognitive revolution in the 1950s the intuitive idea
that cognition is exclusively a brain process gained considerable scientific
plausibility and credence. The last three decades, however, have seen various
researchers challenge this idea and argue that cognition is not just “embrained”,
but also embodied and embedded. As a consequence the notion of embodiment
has come to acquire special significance. So much so that some have argued
that we are currently witnessing a “corporeal turn” (Sheets-Johnstone 2009)
akin to the linguistic turn that took place in philosophy in the first half of the
last century.
Embodiment or embodied cognition is a thesis which can be summarized
as follows: cognition cannot be understood by studying the brain alone, we
also need to appeal to the whole body (see Calvo and Gomila, 2008). As
many theorists have recognized, this thesis is as ambiguous as it is important.
Naturally, what one makes of the thesis will depend on one’s understanding of
its two key concepts, the body and cognition. It should then come as no surprise
to find that currently there is no one unified embodied approach but rather a
number of loosely connected and partially overlapping, partially incompatible,