Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

Embodied cognitive science does not share this exclusive focus, because it attributes
some behavioural complexities to environmental influences. Apart from this
important difference, though, algorithmic investigations—specifically in the form
of behavioural observations—are central to the embodied approach. Descriptions
of behaviour are the primary product of forward engineering; examples in behaviour-based
robotics span the literature from time lapse photographs of Tortoise trajectories
(Grey Walter, 1963) to modern reports of how, over time, robots sort or
rearrange objects in an enclosure (Holland & Melhuish, 1999; Melhuish et al., 2006;
Scholes et al., 2004; Wilson et al., 2004). At the heart of such behavioural accounts
is acceptance of Simon’s (1969) parable of the ant. The embodied approach cannot
understand an architecture by examining its inert components. It must see what
emerges when this architecture is embodied in, situated in, and interacting with an
environment.
When embodied cognitive science moves beyond behaviour-based robotics,
it relies on some sorts of behavioural observations that are not employed as frequently
in classical cognitive science. For example, many embodied cognitive scientists
exhort the phenomenological study of cognition (Gallagher, 2005; Gibbs, 2006;
Thompson, 2007; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991). Phenomenology explores how
people experience their world and examines how the world is meaningful to us via
our experience (Brentano, 1995; Husserl, 1965; Merleau-Ponty, 1962).
Just as enactive theories of perception (Noë, 2004) can be viewed as being
inspired by Gibson’s (1979) ecological account of perception, phenomenological
studies within embodied cognitive science (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991) are
inspired by the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962). Merleau-Ponty rejected
the Cartesian separation between world and mind: “Truth does not ‘inhabit’ only
‘the inner man,’ or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and
only in the world does he know himself ” (p. xii). Merleau-Ponty strove to replace this
Cartesian view with one that relied upon embodiment. “We shall need to reawaken
our experience of the world as it appears to us in so far as we are in the world through
our body, and in so far as we perceive the world with our body” (p. 239).
Phenomenology with modern embodied cognitive science is a call to further
pursue Merleau-Ponty’s embodied approach.
What we are suggesting is a change in the nature of reflection from an abstract, disembodied
activity to an embodied (mindful), open-ended reflection. By embodied,
we mean reflection in which body and mind have been brought together. (Varela,
Thompson, & Rosch, 1991, p. 27)
However, seeking evidence from such reflection is not necessarily straightforward
(Gallagher, 2005). For instance, while Gallagher acknowledges that the body is
critical in its shaping of cognition, he also notes that many aspects of our bodily
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