WHAT EMBODIMENT FOR HIGH-LEVEL COGNITION?

Rafael E. Núñez 
University of California at Berkeley
University of Freiburg

The term "Embodiment" has become very relevant in the contemporary study of the mind.
Among others, it brings to the foreground, the primacy of action in real time/worlds,
as well as the peculiarities of the biology of bodies (and the experiences they
sustain) as inherent grounding for minds. The study of high-level cognition (e.g.,
natural language understanding, mathematical thinking) poses important scientific
problems to the embodied oriented approaches to the study of the mind. For instance,
one needs to take into account species-specific genetically determined biological
features (i.e., Homo Sapiens' morphology, biophysics, neuroanatomy, and so on) which
are fifty thousands years old, and with this apparatus explain huge variations of
ideas, conceptual structures, and forms of reasoning. Concretely speaking, this is like
asking questions such as, What kind of "embodiment" allows a twentieth century
mathematician to reason about transfinite numbers, that wasn't available to Archimedes,
Galileo, or Descartes? Were their body/brains different? In precisely what aspects? The
answer to such questions require an approach that is evolutionary and biologically
tenable, AND at the same time that allows for cultural and historical variations. Some
interesting ideas to address these questions come from contemporary cognitive
linguistics (conceptual metaphor and blend theory) and psychology (speech-gesture
coordination). In this talk I will explore some of these issues bringing research data
of my own work in mathematical cognition (co-developed with George Lakoff in Berkeley),
and in cross-cultural psycho-linguistics (from a project I am conducting in the Andes'
highlands with the Aymara people).


Rafael E. Núñez is currently at the Department of Psychology of the University of
Freiburg, and is a research associate of the University of California at Berkeley. He
has worked for more than a decade on the foundations of embodied cognition, with
special research into the nature and origin of mathematical concepts. He has published
in several languages in a variety of areas, and has taught in leading academic
institutions in Europe, USA, and South America. He is the co-editor (with Walter J.
Freeman) of Reclaiming Cognition: The Primacy of Action, Intention and Emotion, and
co-author (with George Lakoff) of the forthcoming book Where Mathematics Comes From:
How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics Into Being.