Embodied Knowledge

Last January Iwrote on this blog that our linguistic “understanding is sensual, not an abstract mentalese.” So naturally I am pleased to end this year by discussing a chapter in a new book that defends the same proposition. The book,Embodiment in Evolution and Culture, includes a chapter byThomas Fuchs entitled, “The Embodied Development of Language,” (availablehere) and is part of a movement to rid the cognitive social sciences of their dependence on symbols and ethereal meanings. They emphasize the physical body and the things we learn from actions and sensations.Bodies are unimportant to computers. It does not matter whether I solved a problem on my smartphone or my desktop device. But animals make use of their bodies in many social ways that have no role in computer networks. For example, two animals react to one another on the basis of their bodies. One may stand next to the other, revealing a bigger body size that scares the other away. Or one animal may become excited by the sexual readiness of the other. Activities like these play no role in designing computer networks and are absent from discussions of artificial intelligence. Indeed, theTuring test assumes that artificial intelligence trials can hide the body without affecting the results. Thus, in a Turing test, you cannot have an exchange in which one participant asks, “How much do you love me?” and the other participant answers by spreading arms and saying, “This much.”Since these examples of body...
Source: Babel's Dawn - Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Source Type: blogs