Supersizing the mind

by Clark, Andy

"Studies of mind, thought, and reason have tended to marginalize the role of bodily form, real-world action, and environmental backdrop. In recent years, both in philosophy and in cognitive science, this tendency has been identified and, increasingly, resisted. The result is a plethora of work on what has become known as embodied, situated, distributed, and even "extended" cognition. Work in this new, loosely knit field depicts thought and reason as in some way inextricably tied to the details of our gross bodily form, our habits of action and intervention, and the enabling web of social, cultural, and technological scaffolding in which we live, move, learn, and think." "Drawing on recent work in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, human-computer systems, and beyond, Supersizing the Mind offers both a tour of the emerging landscape and a sustained argument in favor of one approach to the key issues. That approach combines the use of representationa