Talk:Embodied cognition

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)

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)

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)