Basic Ideas Of Enactive Cognition And Its Empirical Examples

Phenomena of mind is an important topic in cognitive science. After having gone through two developing stages, the cognitivism and the connectionism, cognitive science is increasingly facing a wide range of criticism, which mainly comes from Phenomenology. In the view of Phenomenology, cognitive science ignores the experiential nature of consciousness or the subjectivity in cognitive process, and the representation-computation approach ignores the dependence of cognition, emotion and consciousness on body.Both the Cognitivism and the Connectionism ontologically and methodologically belong to Computaionalism, both regarding cognition as the representation-computation process of information. This kind of idea could date back to Descartes’view of mind-body dualism—mind and body are entirely different entities, and consciousness is just the representation and reflection of the outer world. As more and more science experiments and phenomenological analysis have approved this thought wrong, the reanalysis of the cognition become an important work for cognitive science nowadays. And enactive cognition come into being against this background.The basic ideas of enactive cognition are that cognition is not an ability to make representations, but is constructed, situated, embodied and enactive; the body as a cognitive subject constructs the "life-world" for the person. The enactive cognition reflects some ideas of the philosophy of action, emphasizing the emergence of cognition depend on specific body-brain-environment dynamical system. The real purpose of cognition is not to reflect information of the world, but to preserve the life itself by certain assignments in actions. Information is not stored in the world, but is the functional result in the operation of dynamical system. This paper tries to make a few critics of traditional cognitive paradigm and incorporate recent experimental results with theoretical analysis in order to show the basic viewpoints, theme and methods of the enactive cognition. The innovative aspects of this paper are to incorporate the most recent experimental results with theoretical analysis and then make a systematical account of several basic ideas of enactive cognition. As far as the basic ideas of enactive cognition and cognitive science are concerned, my analysis and review are constructive in some sense.