Talk:Embodied cognition/Archive 4

Comments from User:Greta Munger
The first step we plan on taking to improve this article is to add a section titled "Embodiment in Cognitive Psychology". We will provide a more understandable definition of embodied cognition from the perspective of cognitive psychology. The abundance of hyperlinks to other pages are confusing and not necessary. We would like to reformat the sections of the article into the sections of psychology articles provided in Moodle. By having initial description, basic methods, specific results, and theory sections we will be able to offer a more coherent and unbiased article. We will evaluate the existing sections of the article in order to determine which are superfluous and which can be revised to fit our new format. -- Preceding unsigned comment added by Greta Munger (talk)


 * Thank you so much for helping with this (very unloved) article. I'm looking forward to seeing what you all will bring to this page.


 * A few notes on this, the talk page. (1) Add new comments at the bottom of the page. Note that there is a "Plus" sign at the top of the editor that will do this automatically. (2) Sign your posts, using four tildes, like so: . This helps us to figure out who is saying what to whom.


 * Thanks again. CharlesGillingham (talk) 06:25, 23 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Man, I really do not like what you've done to this article. At all. As a cognitive anthropologist I came here looking for a quote from it to throw at somebody on Facebook and found instead that it had been co-opted from a multidisciplinary view of embodied cognition to, well, just a lot of stuff on cognitive psychology. Some of which is way too narrowly tailored. Ugh. I don't even wanna mess with this right now, but please remember your field is only one in the ongoing multidisciplinary study of cognition. 24.178.188.16 (talk) 01:48, 25 October 2011 (UTC)


 * I did want to come back and make clear I think the psychology section at the bottom is great. It's that the top part is a wreck and the general description at the top now gives undue weight to psychology. Also, you removed rather than improving the section on cognitive linguistics which is a big area of linguistics. It wasn't a great section but it shouldn't have been removed, just improved. I'm not sure I'm the person to do that, but, I mean, parts of the top that were sequential were randomly put out of order. Not what I'd call coherent and unbiased... 24.178.188.16 (talk) 05:03, 25 October 2011 (UTC)


 * I see what you mean, and I will try to put back the other sections. The plan was not to co-opt, but to improve the psychology.  Thanks for pointing this out. Greta Munger (talk) 14:31, 1 December 2011 (UTC)


 * I agree that the section on Lakoff & company was essential and should be restored. (The guy has written best-sellers and has been pushing this idea since the late 70s. I.e., he's WP:Notable) I also agree with 24.178 that the introduction made more sense as set of short paragraphs on each field. I will split the paragraphs. Do you think you could knock down the "psychology" paragraph to just three or four introductory sentences? I think the best way be to simply remove the pencil example, but I won't do it in case you want to use it elsewhere. CharlesGillingham (talk) 18:47, 1 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Actually, the example might work well in the first paragraph. CharlesGillingham (talk) 18:50, 1 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Okay, I've finished reorganizing the introduction and article. It now presents "embodied cognition" as a multidisciplinary movement. We still need to (1) fix the paragraph on psychology in the intro to shorten it. (2) write something about Cognitive Science (3) remove the off-topic and POV-pushing junk that has accumulated outside the psychology section. CharlesGillingham (talk) 19:54, 1 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Thank you so much for reorganizing and restoring! I've shortened the psychology introduction, trying to keep the internal links to other pages. Greta Munger (talk) 18:22, 6 December 2011 (UTC)


 * I started writing a section on Lakoff et al., so you don't need to worry about restoring it. I don't have time to finish at the moment, but I will get to it in the coming weeks. I've used the same general structure as the psychology section (i.e., a subsection for each line of evidence) and I've tried to narrow Lakoff's ideas to those that directly address the embodied mind thesis. CharlesGillingham (talk) 21:11, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Let's axe the last section
I think the section titled "Evolutionary Epistemology" is incoherent and misuses its source. I would suggest we give it the axe. Any objections? CharlesGillingham (talk) 19:58, 1 December 2011 (UTC)


 * One month, no reply. This section is being removed. CharlesGillingham (talk) 02:57, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

Criticism: understanding of concepts or actions that we have never experienced ourselves
van Elk,Slors& Bekkering (2010) mention the problematic issue "it is unclear how an embodied approach to cognition can account for the understanding of concepts or actions that we have never experienced ourselves." Can we discuss this on the page? Any ideas on this?


 * Of course. We have a "criticism" section. You could write a short paragraph about their ideas there.  CharlesGillingham (talk) 10:55, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Sorry I don't know enough about this issue to go into deep writing at the moment I think, but I know its one of the criticisms of Embodied cognition (along with the idea that neural resonance is neither necessary nor sufficient for language comprehension). I hope someone else will elaborate a bit about this on this page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 189.188.147.102 (talk) 23:10, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Overlap with The Extended Mind
The article entitled The Extended Mind is currently supposedly about Richard Menary's 2010 edited essay collection, but as I noted on that article's talk page, only the first two lines of the article are about the book; the rest is about extended cognition. This article is entitled "Embodied Cognition," but the bolded title in the lead is the extended mind thesis, which is the actual topic of most of that other article. Perhaps the two should be combined? I've also added references and a Further reading section to that other article, and this article lacks the Further reading; everything I've added over there could also be added here, but it would make more sense to collapse the two articles into one. Hong12kong (talk) 23:51, 21 August 2012 (UTC)


 * They are related, to be sure, but I think that the "extended mind" idea is different enough from the "embodied mind" idea that they each merit their own article. CharlesGillingham (talk) 10:17, 23 August 2012 (UTC)


 * True ... but then perhaps both should be edited to reflect the differences? The fact remains that as they currently stand, each overlaps substantially with the other; and The Extended Mind is really more about the concept than the book. Hong12kong (talk) 08:03, 24 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Where, exactly, is the overlap? This article is about the embodied mind thesis, in which aspects of mind are "shaped by aspects of the body." This has to do with the internal workings of the mind. The extended mind has to do with external aids to mental function. __ Just plain Bill (talk) 13:32, 24 August 2012 (UTC)
 * I agree, these are definitely separate topics with to different bodies of literature. If there is some overlap that is not a problem.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 14:54, 24 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Hm, okay. I guess my sense of overlap comes from my observation that (a) proponents of the EXTENDED mind thesis almost always base their claims heavily (though not exclusively) on the EMBODIED mind thesis, and that (b) critics of the EXTENDED mind thesis (say, Rob Rupert) typically find it most convincing in the area of the EMBODIED mind thesis. But you're right, these aren't true areas of overlap! Hong12kong (talk) 22:47, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

"Six views of embodied cognition" and "Criticism of the Six Claims"
I suppose I should comment a bit on my edits here, since Lova Falk immediately edited out one aspect of them. As these two sections stood before my edits, they were technically plagiarized: the writer/editor had quoted Margaret Wilson, without quotation marks, both in the numbered list ("Six views") and in the criticism section that followed, and then added his or her own commentary to the quotations. Without quotation marks it was impossible to tell whether anything had been written by MW; it could all have been the Wikipedia editor's work. In fact each item in the numbered list consisted of a quotation from MW's article, followed by the editor's commentary. In "Criticism of the Six Claims," the entire section had been plagiarized from MW--taken almost verbatim, with a parenthetical reference, but no page number or quotation marks. All I did, then, was to clarify: add quotation marks, make the quotations accurate, and thus mark off the commentary as belonging to all of us as editors rather than to MW.

Strangely, what Lova Falk did was to remove the opening quotation mark from each MW citation--leaving the second. I'm not quite sure what would lead any editor to believe this would be a worthwhile edit--but I've reverted her edits, in the name of academic accuracy. Hong12kong (talk) 14:26, 28 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Please, everybody can make a mistake. I did and I am sorry. You correctly reverted. The opening citation marks were for a bold part and I missed that the closing citation marks were a bit further in the text. Some people in my country (Sweden) have a citation style that just repeats the opening citation mark for every new paragraph without a closing citation mark, and I thought that that was what you had done.  Lova Falk     talk   18:23, 28 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Okay, good, no harm done! Hong12kong (talk) 07:53, 29 October 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm sorry I was a bit grumpy. I felt exposed, first by your (accurate) edit summary and on top of that this section on the talk page... But I'm fine now! Face-smile.svg  Lova Falk     talk   17:42, 29 October 2012 (UTC)
 * And I was feeling touchy, because I'd recently been railroaded by a high-handed idiot (on another talk page) who understood Wikipedia editing policies far better than he did texts and academic norms for presenting and interpreting them. I was worried that your edits were of a similar ilk! The fact that you were so reasonable relieved my anxieties. Hong12kong (talk) 22:44, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

The problem with the philosophy and neuroscience sections
(1) They are poorly written and (2) they are not comprehensive (i.e., they are a random collection of academics rather than a complete overview of the topic). But my big concern is really (3) several of the people cited aren't really pushing the embodied mind thesis as it is defined at the top of the article. Many of them are simply arguing for some (interesting and original) form of physicalism. This is not the same thing. Certainly Patricia Carpenter falls in this category, and I think Damasio and Edelman are really in this category as well.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that some of these people actually call their work "embodied" something-or-other. I think that Verala and Maturana actually originated the term "embodied mind", but their work is not really in the same vein as the cognitive science and psychology we're writing about. (It's more abstract, less evidence based, and even has methodological connections to all that mid-century continental philosophy.)

We need a source that has some kind of overview, so we can give the reader this information. But the source has to have a multidisciplinary and historical viewpoint that Wikipedia needs. This is kind of source is really hard to find, because very few sources use as wide a lens as Wikipedia does. CharlesGillingham (talk) 21:08, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

The part about Kant seems off: I tried verifying it, but could not find any sources corroborating it. The reference given at the end of the chapter does not mention Kant at all. It is either original research, or the reference is missing. Can anyone clarify? Wikikrax (talk) 19:46, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

I put in a citation which shows I think (!) that Kant operated with the idea that humans were physical, as opposed to the pure mind of God. And that is what distinguishes them. Does this mean he held an embodied view of the mind? I think possibly, but its a bit tenuous. TonyClarke (talk) 22:54, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

Added a better citation which seems to settle it. Thanks Google TonyClarke (talk) 00:09, 28 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks for taking the time to look into this. I have a few worries, though. First, where did you get the name of the journal? As far as I can read from the pdf, the journal is called FALSAFEH. The only reference to it seems to be in German and Farsi, neither of which I read very well. Second, according to Google Scholar, the paper has never been cited, so it might not be the most reliable academic source. 130.234.73.234 (talk) 09:06, 28 February 2013 (UTC) Oops, wasn't logged in. Wikikrax (talk) 09:07, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes I had a few worries myself. The article seemed to have few citations or references.

I looked at it again since you wrote the above, so hope this helps. I got the reference from a Google search on 'Kant, embodied cognition'. Two close to the top of the results were and. The latter shows it comes from the University of Teheran database of journals. Also the article says it is from Ellis College. I suppose the main, and reliable references in the article is Kant's original writing which it quotes extensively, so the claims are checkable. What Kant said seems to be in the area of embodiment, although clearly before the concept became relevant today. Some of his quotations would serve as alternative citation. The article doesn't look like original research to me, but worries remain as I can't come up with any of Andrew Carpenter's articles on Google Scholar. What do you think? TonyClarke (talk) 23:24, 28 February 2013 (UTC)

I think the problem is similar to what has been pointed out earlier here: Kant's idea of embodiment is probably not very similar to the idea under discussion. The article now referred certainly quotes Kant, and seems to make sense, but without either extensive knowledge of the topic or other articles corroborating the claim I'm wary. The problem is perhaps also one of structure: the idea of embodied cognition is certainly discussed in philosophy, but the philosophers mentioned are not actually part of the discussion as it is today. A separate chapther on the background and history of the concept could perhaps do the trick, highlighting the fact that the concept does not spring out of nothing, but is still significantly different in the present context. Wikikrax (talk) 11:28, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

The last chapter in the philosophy section is highly misleading, since it definetely does not apply to all the examples discussed. I'm in favour of removing it entirely, but it would also work if somebody can limit it's scope to the relevant examples. Wikikrax (talk) 09:42, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

No one objected or clarified the section, so I removed the last chapter of the philosophy section. Wikikrax (talk) 13:00, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

Embodied cognition and AI
I'm not a specialist, but isn't it important to note Dreyfus' work on AI in the artificial intelligence section? It seems like it has a lot of overlap... Fephisto (talk) 12:27, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

Simulating the brain
The section on simulating the brain is not only unsourced but unintelligible in its present form. I have removed it. Brews ohare (talk) 13:27, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Missing reference: 15
The reference for 15 (Carpenter, A.: Kant on the Embodied Cognition, Philosophy (Volume:36 Issue:1)) leads to an error page and the journal page is written in a language I don't read. Anyone have a reference that works?Wikikrax (talk) 08:13, 22 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Fixed: see A Carpenter. Brews ohare (talk) 13:49, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Introduction
There is a lot that could be done to the introduction, but there is one particular part that I'm worried about: "Embodied cognition reflects the argument that the motor system influences our cognition, just as the mind influences bodily actions." Isn't this putting the issue too narrowly? Embodied cognition is a broader topic than simply the effect of the motor system. Can "the motor system" be replaced by something more general to cover all the aspects discussed in the article? Wikikrax (talk) 10:49, 4 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Introduction has been rewritten to reflect actual sources and a subsection on Embodiment thesis added with sources. Brews ohare (talk) 13:51, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Somatic Therapies?
Would somatic therapies fall under embodied cognition? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mr Robot 2020 (talk • contribs) 00:57, 9 October 2020 (UTC)