Abstract
The paper discusses how research on embodied cognition in cognitive science can contribute to the naturalization of rationality. The investigation takes place in two steps. First, we provide a conceptual map of possible new ideas of rationality inspired by embodied cognition. Given the plurality of theories of embodied cognition, we distinguish different approaches according to their increasing degree of radicalism. We consider ecological rationality as currently the best candidate for naturalizing rationality, and, after identifying its descriptive and normative building blocks, we provide an increasingly radical embodied interpretation of them. The outcome is four new concepts of rationality, in increasing order of embodied radicalism: embodied bounded rationality, body rationality, extended rationality, and radical embodied rationality. We emphasize that while less radical concepts currently align better with the idea of methodological naturalism, radical concepts are best conceived of as instances of ontological naturalism. The second step of our investigation concerns comparing the four embodied rationality concepts in light of three meta-criteria: internal epistemic values, empirical success, and intertheoretic compatibility. While empirical success currently favors less radical concepts, intertheoretic compatibility demonstrates the promises of rationality’s embodied radicalism.
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05 May 2023
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04152-z
Notes
Our analysis is confined to rationality in individual judgment and decision-making, which, as Gigerenzer & Sturm (2012) make clear, is also connected to practical (i.e., means-ends) rationality. We will not discuss rationality in other domains such as epistemology or ethics.
It’s worth emphasizing the use of the attribute “grounded” here, as “groundedness” is what we are looking for in a naturalized theory of rationality, and, importantly, what we think an alliance with embodied cognition can provide. Although it is a term usually associated with the approach of Barsalou (2008), we take groundedness to be a distinctive feature of all the approaches within embodied cognition.
As we’ll see in Sect. 3, reformulating the descriptive and normative building blocks has important ontological and methodological implications.
We will not decompose the normative building block into further components (hence our use of “singular”), but normative criteria can certainly be analyzed in a more granular fashion.
Exaptation also works at the neural level in the form of “neural reuse,” where sensorimotor, interoceptive, and affective neural resources are phylogenetically and ontogenetically refunctionalized (Anderson, 2014). As such, it is also relevant for embodied bounded rationality, even if, again, it is not clear whether exaptation is relevant only descriptively or also normatively. A crucial philosophical question concerns whether, and to what extent, an exapted neural process not at the disposal of individuals can be assessed in terms of individuals’ rationality.
Constructionist insights in the form of niche constructionism can also be found in Clark (2006).
It’s worth noting here that radical embodied cognition shares many affinities with James Gibson’s (1979) pioneering approach to “ecological psychology” in that it also dispenses with mental representations entirely in the study of perception. For the complementarity between the two approaches, see McGann et al. (2020).
See Hertwig et al., (2021) for a recent attempt to extend ecological rationality along a more dynamic direction.
Though, see Favela et al. (2021) for promising methodological developments in dynamical cognitive science.
Sturm’s argument is aimed at naturalism with respect to the rationality of judgment and decision-making. He does not claim that critical methodological naturalism should be adopted in all cases where the naturalism of a theory is at issue (see Sturm, 2021, p. 84).
Although we are focusing on individual theories of judgment and decision-making, there is good reason to think that many of the same heuristics also can be applied to social contexts where decisions are made by collective entities such as firms, states, etc.—see, for example, Hertwig & Hoffrage (2013).
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Acknowledgements
We thank Shaun Gallagher and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments. The usual caveats apply.
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James Grayot acknowledges funding from Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, CEEC 4th edition.
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Petracca, E., Grayot, J. How can embodied cognition naturalize bounded rationality?. Synthese 201, 115 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04124-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04124-3