The strong program in embodied cognitive science [original]

Vol.:(0123456789)

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-022-09806-w

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The strong program inembodied cognitive science

GuilhermeSanchesdeOliveira1

Accepted: 7 February 2022

Abstract

A popular trend in the sciences of the mind is to understand cognition as embod-

ied, embedded, enactive, ecological, and so on. While some of the work under the

label of “embodied cognition” takes for granted key commitments of traditional

cognitive science, other projects coincide in treating embodiment as the starting

point for an entirely different way of investigating all of cognition. Focusing on

the latter, this paper discusses how embodied cognitive science can be made more

reflexive and more sensitive to the implications that our views of cognition have for

how we understand scientific practice, including our own theorizing about cogni-

tion. Inspired by the “strong programme” in the sociology of scientific knowledge,

I explore the prospect of an analogously “strong” program in embodied cognitive

science. I first draw from Dewey’s transactional notion of “situation” to identify a

broad sense in which embodied cognitive science takes cognition, as an embodied

phenomenon, to be situated. I then sketch a perspective I call situated reflexivity,

which extends the Deweyan analysis to understand scientific practice in the same

terms, and thereby illustrates what research in line with a strong program in embod-

ied cognitive science can look like. This move, I propose, has the potential of set-

ting up a new inquiry situation that makes more salient the embodiment of scientific

practice and that, through this, can help organize our own embodied cognitive activ-

ities as we try to make sense of scientific work, including our own.

Keywords Embodiment· Situation· Reflexivity· Scientific practice· Embodied

cognitive science

1 Introduction

An increasingly popular trend in the sciences of the mind is to eschew strict brain-

centric reductionism and instead view cognition as embodied, embedded, situated,

extended, enactive, ecological, and so on. Research under these labels (and related

* Guilherme Sanches de Oliveira

[email protected]

1 Department ofPsychology & Ergonomics, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

G.Sanches de Oliveira

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ones, such as “4E cognition”) is diverse, including a number of different projects

and perspectives. In some circles the label “embodied cognition” is used as a cat-

egory-term to distinguish some cognitive processes (i.e., those that are embodied)

from others (i.e., those that aren’t): understood this way, it makes sense to consider

particular phenomena such as social cognition, language and consciousness and ask

whether they are embodied or not (e.g., Goldman & de Vignemont, 2009; Arbib

etal.,2014; Prinz,2009). In other circles, however, “embodied cognition” desig-

nates not a category that applies only to some cognitive phenomena but rather a

way of understanding and investigating all of cognition: from this perspective the

“whether” question doesn’t arise (its answer in every case would be “yes”), and

investigation is instead concerned with the question “how.” This second use of

“embodied cognition” is illustrated by work on a variety of topics, from wide com-

putation (e.g., Wilson, 1994, 2004), distributed cognition (e.g., Hutchins, 1995,

Hutchins & Klausen,1996), the extended mind and the “natural-born cyborgs” view

(e.g., Clark & Chalmers,1998; Clark,2003; Menary,2010), up to the radical, anti-

representational views of ecological psychology (e.g., Gibson, 1979; Richardson

etal.,2008; Chemero,2009) and enactivism (e.g., Maturana & Varela,1980; Var-

ela etal.1991; Di Paolo etal.,2017; Gallagher,2017). In this sense, embodiment

is not a hypothesis about particular instances of psychological and behavioral phe-

nomena, but is rather the starting assumption that informs how we conceptualize,

investigate and understand any and all psychological and behavioral phenomena. In

other words, “embodied cognition” in this sense amounts to a research program for

cognitive science as a whole, rather than simply a complement to more traditional

theoretical and methodological commitments.

The focus of this paper is on this second sense of “embodied cognition” as a

research program. The goal here is to contribute to the field’s ongoing development

by proposing a specific way of understanding embodied cognitive science, organ-

izing our research activities and opening up new avenues for inquiry. Inspired by

and in analogy to the “strong programme” in the sociology of scientific knowledge

(SSK), this paper invites practitioners to think of their work in embodied cognitive

science as part of a similarly “strong” research program. Now, the label “strong

program” in the context of embodied cognitive science might lead some readers to

think of the “radical” anti-representational approaches already mentioned, which I

am also going to be drawing from in my proposal. So it’s good to make it clear

from the start that what’s at issue in the present paper is tangential to discussions

about representation, computation and information processing: as will become clear,

a crucial feature of the strong program is that it is marked by reflexivity, which has

more to do with how and what we study than with whether we posit representations

in our explanations of cognitive phenomena.

Section2 provides an overview of the original “strong programme” in SSK and

a brief preliminary discussion of reflexive research in the sciences of the mind. The

idea of a “strong programme” in SSK was only possible in light of some under-

standing of what the usual, “non-strong” program in SSK was. Similarly, in order

to develop a strong program in embodied cognitive science, it’s important first to be

clear on the nature of the research program itself. Section3 elaborates on the brief

description provided here in the introduction to propose a candidate account of what

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The strong program inembodied cognitive science

brings us together in embodied cognitive science. There I draw from Dewey’s notion

of “situation” to propose a view of what it means to take cognition, as an embodied

phenomenon, to be situated. Section4 then sketches how this account of embodied

cognition as situated (from Sect.3) can be made reflexive through application of

insights from the “strong programme” in SSK (from Sect.2). The resulting view,

which I call situated reflexivity, is offered as a particular example of what, more

generally, work in line with a strong program in embodied cognitive science can

look like. As such, after sketching the view, I conclude in Sect.5 by briefly discuss-

ing paths for future development, not only for situated reflexivity itself but also for

other potential approaches that embrace the strong program in embodied cognitive

science.

2 The “strong programme” inSSK andthechallenge ofreflexivity

The Strong Programme1 is the approach in the sociology of scientific knowledge

(SSK) developed in the 1970s by a number of researchers primarily at the Univer-

sity of Edinburgh and most prominently articulated under that specific name first

by David Bloor in his 1976 book Knowledge and Social Imagery (Bloor, 1991; see

also, e.g., Bloor, 1981, 1984, 2007). A seemingly obvious place to start describing

the Strong Programme would be to differentiate it from whatever the “weak” alter-

native in SSK was. But it’s helpful to begin with a prior and even more fundamental

distinction between the project of SSK in general and the philosophy of science it

was reacting to.

2.1 The strong programme andits four tenets

The dominant philosophical attitude in the mid-twentieth century was to approach

science with an almost exclusively logical and epistemological focus. This attitude

was neatly expressed by Karl Popper when he stated that in order to understand sci-

entific knowledge we need to understand “the objective logical relations subsisting

among the various systems of scientific statements, and within each of them” (Pop-

per, 2005, p. 22). From this perspective, leaving aside how certain ideas come to be

accepted or rejected by scientists, what matters is, given an ideal standard of ration-

ality, to understand why certain ideas ought to be accepted and others rejected. The

Strong Programme emerges alongside related but independent work (e.g., Kuhn,

1970) as a reaction to this overly abstract, intellectualized and normative picture

of scientific knowledge. As Barnes etal. (1996) put it decades later: “The concern

at that time was mainly to oppose the arguments of rationalist philosophers who

wished to treat science as a unique form of human activity, one which required no

empirical understanding other than that implied by describing it as rational” (p.

xii). In contrast, proponents of the sociological approach in science and technology

1 I will use the British spelling to refer to the original approach in the sociology of scientific knowledge,

and the American spelling for my proposal of an analogous approach in embodied cognitive science.

G.Sanches de Oliveira

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studies sought to develop causal explanations of science, understanding scientific

knowledge “purely as a natural phenomenon” (Bloor, 1991, p. 5). In direct opposi-

tion to the dominant philosophical attitude, this meant focusing on identifying “the

conditions which bring about belief or states of knowledge” (p. 7) independently of

ideal standards of rationality. Importantly, for them, the social factors that philoso-

phers had long neglected—such as perceptions of prestige and authority, at the indi-

vidual and interpersonal scales, up to institutional structures that sustain and rein-

force particular epistemic practices—become of central importance: after all, these

are key conditions that shape real-world science and that make a unique contribu-

tion to how scientific ideas, theories and practices fare, and especially to which are

rejected and which come to be accepted as knowledge.

This fundamental contrast with the dominant philosophical approach helps

delineate the contours of what a sociological approach to scientific knowledge was

generally interested in. But, out of all the different ways of doing research in SSK,

what made the strong programme “strong” was the fact that, in addition to favor-

ing a causal approach to understanding the nature of scientific knowledge, Bloor

proposed that explanations should be symmetrical and impartial as well as reflexive.

Beginning with symmetry and impartiality, the strong programme proposes

that, rather than using one set of explanatory principles to explain when things go

“wrong” in science and a different one to understand when things go “well,” the

same explanatory principles should be employed to make sense of all of science. For

example, we might think that extra-empirical social factors (e.g., racist ideology)

are important for explaining how, in the past, scientists embraced scientific theories

and practices that have since been discredited (e.g., eugenics). But it’s inadequate

to assume that social factors only play a role in these cases of “failure” or “bad sci-

ence,” and that these theories and practices came to be rejected and replaced on

purely rational grounds; rather, the idea is that social factors must also have con-

tributed to the shift to whatever is now accepted as “good science.” Bloor proposes

that we apply the same explanatory principles no matter the case: if our explanation

of the bad or failed science of the past is in terms of how certain social conditions

influenced the work of scientists, then it must have been a shift in those social con-

ditions (rather than the elimination of social conditions altogether) that occasioned

the better or more successful science of the present. As he puts it, our explanations

are to be “impartial with respect to [the] truth and falsity, rationality or irrationality,

success or failure” of the scientific theory in question; similarly, our explanations

are to be symmetrical in that “The same types of cause would explain, say, true and

false beliefs” (1976/1991, p. 7).

These stances on symmetry and impartiality help to shed light on the sense in

which, as mentioned above, the strong programme favors a “causal” explanatory

approach. Bloor (1976/1991) describes the pursuit of causal explanations of scien-

tific knowledge in contrast with what he refers to as a teleological perspective on

rationality. By this he means the assumption that instances of true belief, rational

behavior, and successful knowledge acquisition are natural and self-explanatory, and

that failure is the exception that demands explanation. He illustrates this teleologi-

cal perspective with the example of logical reasoning. When someone works suc-

cessfully from premises to a logically warranted conclusion, this success is seen as

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The strong program inembodied cognitive science

simply following from logic itself, that is, from relations of entailment between the

propositions in question. But, as Bloor puts it, “when someone makes mistakes in

their reasoning then logic itself is no explanation. A lapse or deviation may be due

to the interference of a whole variety of factors” (1976/1991, p. 8, emphasis added).

What makes this interpretation of logical reasoning ‘teleological’ is the assumption

that epistemic success is ‘meant to be’ and that failure, in contrast, is the result of

an interference on the natural flow of events, a divergence from what should have

been. Bloor gives another suggestive image to illustrate this perspective: “As when

a train goes off the rails, a cause for the accident can surely be found. But we nei-

ther have, nor need, commissions of enquiry into why accidents do not happen” (p.

8). Applied to scientific knowledge, this teleological perspective sees success as in

some sense uncaused and almost inevitable, leaving only errors to be explained by

reference to some cause or other: “the rational aspects of science are held to be self-

moving and self-explanatory. Empirical or sociological explanations are confined to

the irrational” (p. 10). The strong programme’s causal explanatory orientation is to

be understood as a rejection of precisely this teleological stance on success. In line

with the principles of symmetry and impartiality, the idea is that causal explanation

should apply across the board rather than being relegated to instances of error. Suc-

cess is not self-explanatory. If social and other conditions play a causal role in con-

tributing to bringing about failure, then causes like these must also be at play when

it comes to success, be it in logical reasoning, for instance, or in the development of

scientific knowledge.

Lastly, the principle of reflexivity complements the strong programme in propos-

ing that the explanatory lens that sociologists employ to understand science should

also be turned against sociological work itself and applied to make sense of the soci-

ologists’ own explanatory practices. As Bloor explains, “In principle [SSK’s] pat-

terns of explanation would have to be applicable to sociology itself” and this has to

be the case for, he adds, “otherwise sociology would be a standing refutation of its

own theories” (p. 7). Bloor elaborates on this view as follows:

There is no reason why a sociologist or any other scientist should be ashamed

to see his theories and methods as emanating from society, that is, as the prod-

uct of collective influences and resources and as peculiar to the culture and

its present circumstances. Indeed if sociologists tried to evade this realisation

they would be denigrating the subject-matter of their own science. (Bloor,

1991p. 44)

In short, according to the strong programme, if sociologists appeal to social

causes to explain scientific knowledge in all its instances (successful or not, in line

with currently dominant ideological leanings or not, etc.), then the same causes must

be seen as contributing to sociological explanations of scientific knowledge—that

is, the same types of causes sociologists identify elsewhere must also play a role in

explanations of their own work as sociologists of scientific knowledge. To do the

sociology of science in line with the strong programme, then, means reflexively to

approach your subject matter (e.g., specific aspects of scientific practice and knowl-

edge production) with the awareness that your own work must be amenable to expla-

nation in the terms of your analysis. Importantly, this opens up the possibility of

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