The embodied mind extended: using words as social tools

The embodied mind extended: using words as social tools

The extended mind view and the embodied-grounded view of cognition and language are typically considered as rather independent perspectives. In this paper we propose a possible integration of the two views and support it proposing the idea of "Words As social Tools" (WAT). In this respect, we will propose that words, also due to their social and public character, can be conceived as quasi-exter...

Embodied Cognition and the Extended Mind

There is a seductive image of intelligent action that sometimes gets labelled Cartesian. According to this image, as I shall present it here, the psychological understanding of the operating principles by which an agent’s mind contributes to the generation of reliable and flexible, perceptually guided intelligent action remains conceptually and theoretically independent of the details of that a...

From Embodied and Extended Mind to No Mind

The paper will discuss the extended mind thesis with a view to the notions of “agent” and of “mind”, while helping to clarify the relation between “embodiment” and the “extended mind”. I will suggest that the extended mind thesis constitutes a reductio ad absurdum of the notion of ‘mind’; the consequence of the extended mind debate should be to drop the notion of the mind altogether – rather th...

Introduction: Memory, Embodied Cognition, and the Extended Mind

I introduce the seven papers in this special issue, by Andy Clark, Jérôme Dokic, Richard Menary, Jenann Ismael, Sue Campbell, Doris McIlwain, and Mark Rowlands. This paper explains the motivation for an alliance between the sciences of memory and the extended mind hypothesis. It examines in turn the role of worldly, social, and internalized forms of scaffolding to memory and cognition, and also...

The Embodied Emotional Mind