Second-generation Cognitive Science And The Turn Of Embodiment In Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive science thrived in mid-20th century, and became a main direction of eastern psychology in the 1970's. Traditional cognition researches follow a crucial hypothesis which draws a parallel between mind and computer. Inner psychological processes are programs (software) which can be running on body (hardware or wetware). World can be properly represented, and mind manipulates these representations as inputs and work out outputs. Such a view in some sense leads to a tendency to dwell or even ignore the complex roles played by body and environment. An increasingly influential theme in recent years has been embodiment. Embodied cognition has developed from philosophical thought to nowadays empirical research. Compared with traditional cognitive science, embodied cognitive science denies Cartesian dualism, instead considers that biological brain and body are not only machines for running cognition programs, but as crucial and indivisible part of whole mind-body-world cognition system.Many researchers in various fields keep working on embodied cognition, including Thelen, Ziemke, Varela, Clark, Lakoff and Johnson from Philosophy, Psychology, Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, Dynamics et al, while these researches show somewhat disorganization such as disagreement on basic concepts, lacking common guidance and embodied paradigm. New mathematic methods such as Dynamic System Theory (DST) have been introduced to study the coupling (rather than linear) cause-effect relation. However, as DST requires some background in mathematics and engages complex factors in modeling and calculation, it has not received broad application in cognition researches. Reflection on such phenomena is a good point in theoretical psychology so as to guide the development of cognitive psychology.Lakoff and Johnson named the traditional cognitive science which takes the representation computing model as"first-generation cognitive science"(or"disembodied cognitive science"), and considered embodied cognitive science as"second-generation cognitive science". But I suppose representation-computing paradigm will go on taking the leading place in a long time, and embodied cognition is more a reflective trend than a revolutionary new paradigm as it still has too many limitations to be mature. Although Clark considered the conflict between embodiment and representation-computing paradigm is fundamentally irreconcilable, the change embodiment brings is not strong enough to replace the representation-computing paradigm, and in future a bigger possibility can lie on both thoughts compromise to form a much broader representation concept and a fixed method which take complex factors into account.