Summary
Embodied cognition is the view that thinking depends on the body and its dealings with the world, and isn’t something the brain does alone. A research programme more than a single theory, it grew in opposition to the computer model of mind. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives its unifying idea as “the body or the body’s interactions with the environment constitute or contribute to cognition”.
Its sources include J. J. Gibson’s ecological psychology, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s argument that basic concepts such as ‘up’ come from having an upright body. Critics reply that the body may influence thought without being part of it.
Rationale
We liken deep dispositions to habits that gradually ‘set’ in our nervous systems. This research is behind that image: if thinking involves the body, argument alone is unlikely to reach what lies beneath it.