Part I.:         From Embodiment to Action


1. Embodiment

A well known concept:
        'en + BODY + ment'
        (ca. into + body + fication, i.e. putting the mind into a body, giving a body to the mind etc)
One direction: subjective experience and 'being-in-the-world'
         Varela Thompson and Rosch
        M. Merleu-Ponty
         E. Husserl, M. Heidegger                 phenomenology , "Lebensphilsophie", Existentialism
A more scientific direction:
         robotics     intelligence without representation, Brooks (1991)
         linguistics     Lakoff, Johnson    and the metaphorical meaning of concepts






2. Biology of Embodied Cognition
So far, we treated embodiment from a linguistic, control, representation perspective
(maybe indirectly based on biology). Making the link direct, from a biological
perspective, however, the phenomenon of embodiment reveals a lot more:

         typical minds are those of animals
        animal (and - qua evolution! - most of human) cognitition is pre-linguistic
         organismic        knowledge is relative to the autonomous body, inseparable from it
        Two powerful illustrations for biol.emb.:
                                  relationship of switch to network
                                  (i.e. gene to the organism - cf. human genome project!)
        or take the "blind flight" metaphor    H. Maturana 1980        (Lettvin etc: the frog's eye)

These metaphors may explain the extension of the role the body has in the mind, which goes way beyond what could be suspected
from the Lakoff et al linguistic examples. We can amplify this even further by looking into the details of organismic embodiment.



3. Developmental Psychology (a very brief note)
 
The inseparability of the mental content from bodily properties is dramatically proven
by several recent findings in developmental psychology. For instance,

 Thelen et al. show how to obtain concepts by own body actions, the example is "force".
In a nutshell: if you cant move, you will have no words.

 Thelen, E. (1995). Time-scale dynamics and the development of an embodied cognition.
 In R. F. Port & T. Van Gelder (1995). Mind as motion. Exploratiuon in the dynammics of cognitioin. (pp. 69-100).
Cambridge, MA: Bradford Book/MIT Press.

Thelen, E., Schöner, G., Scheier, C. & Smith, L., B. (2001)
The Dynamics of Embodiment: A Field Theory of Infant Perseverative Reaching.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24, 1-86
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.thelen.html

That is, not only the body as such, but the activity of the body is in the focus of mind.
5. Activity and Agency as Basis of Knowledge

Causal feratures of the body, of course.
In the theory of knowledge, a contemplative view of knowledge has dominated so far,
    cf Mach's Analyse der Empfindungen , where the mind was understood as a passive
    recipient and interpreter of independent external inputs.

The right view of embodiment supports an opposite, ( again , Baconian ), view.
We could stop to clarify this briefly

Active vs passive mind:    problem of realism
                                           if the mind (or whole organism) contributes,
                                          then do we have bias? error? is knowledge unreal?
 But note that activity is not some kind of additive element
                                 it's not some kind of knowledge
                                 but something which has a different nature:
                                not knowledge but action that leads to knowledge
                                 in philosophical jargon: not representative but performative




Summary of Part I.
Some consequences:
 scientific        knowledge is not about an 'outside world' but about a 'complex'
                              of which the organism is a part.
 philo I.           there can be no doubt about actions and activity   
                              cf definition of knowledge, foundationalism, Gettier problem
                               (now that's no more a question of philosophy but physiology)
 philo II.          no difference between inside (mental) and outside (body, world..)