The course aims to introduce students to the main ideas, problems, and discussions of embodied cognition, an interdisciplinary research program that challenges the dominant representational-computational paradigm of cognitive science. Against the brain- centric representational-computational conception of the mind as an information processing system performing computations over mental representations, embodied cognition contends that cognition is constituted by a dynamic coupling of the brain/mind, the body, and the environment. This fundamental idea has been formulated in various ways (also known as 4E cognition, cognition as embodied, embedded, extended and enactive) across different disciplines (philosophy, psychology, linguistics, dynamic-systems theory, artificial intelligence and robotics), and the course aims at introducing students with all its relevant aspects. The course will enable students to discuss and explore the significance of the brain-body-environment coupling for cognition, critically assess the contributions of embodied cognition in relation to the representational-computational paradigm of cognitive science and vice versa, and apply this knowledge in other closely related research areas.
The course is closely related and complementary to Introduction to cognitive science. While the latter emphasized the representational-computational paradigm of cognitive science which was dominant in the first phase of its development, this course focuses on the challenges to this paradigm from the perspective of embodied (or 4E) cognition, which determined the later developments of cognitive science.
- Izvođač: Matija Jelača