Action, Perception and the Brain: Adaptation and Cephalic Expression (New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science)

Theories of brain evolution stress communication and sociality are essential to our capacity to represent objects as intersubjectively accessible. How did we grow as a species to be able to recognize objects as common, as that which can also be seen in much the same way by others? Such constitution of intersubjectively accessible objects is bound up with our flexible and sophisticated capacities for social cognition - understanding others and their desires, intentions, emotions, and moods - which are crucial to the way human beings live. This book is about contemporary philosophical and neuroscientific perspectives on the relation of action, perception, and cognition as it is lived in embodied and socially embedded experience. This emphasis on embodiment and embeddedness is a change from traditional theories, which focused on isolated, representational, and conceptual cognition. In the new perspectives contained in our book, such 'pure' cognition is thought to be under-girded and interpenetrated by embodied and embedded processes Front Matter....Pages i-xiii Introduction....Pages 1-24 The Slow Process: A Hypothetical Cognitive Adaptation for Distributed Cognitive Networks....Pages 25-42 Social Cognition and Cortical Function....Pages 43-67 Homo Heuristicus and the Bias–Variance Dilemma....Pages 68-91 Action, Embodied Meaning, and Thought....Pages 92-116 Neo-Pragmatism and Enactive Intentionality....Pages 117-146 Minds, Things, and Materiality....Pages 147-163 Contributions of Mirror Mechanisms to the Embodiment of Cognition....Pages 164-189 The Neural Systems Involved in Motor Cognition and Social Contact....Pages 190-217 Action and Cephalic Expression: Hermeneutical Pragmatism....Pages 218-258 Back Matter....Pages 259-272 Annotation A study of contemporary philosophical and neuroscientific perspectives on the relation of action, perception, and cognition as it is lived in embodied and socially embedded experience