Practical embodied cognition as a constructive process: Towards a more complex idea of the world by acting on it

Abstract

Embodied cognition, which might be traced back to Immanuel Kant’s philosophy, is a sort of compatibilist (coupling) perspective regarding the problematic relation between mind and world. The point is that the very idea of an embodiment partly determines all the cognitive processes available to an organism such as the human being, since mind, body, and world interact and influence one another in order to achieve adaptive success in a Darwinian fashion. In this sense, I would like to investigate how some ideas (especially the ‘practical cognition’ – praktische Erkenntnis, according to Kant in the preface of his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals) such as the idea of God (of wholeness, since all cognition involves unification into a organic, coherent whole), of morals, and so forth, could be part of our learning about the world. To put it another way, in which sense thinking, e.g. about God, morals, democracy, liberalism etc., is the result of our ability to interact with our environment in order to be a well-adapted species? The embodiment of practical cognition, as well as the theoretical one, is the result of our sensorimotor experiences that, given the plasticity of our brains, enable us to successfully interact with our environment. In sum, “our” world, even from a practical point of view, is not observer-independent: it is the result of our agency on it.

Keywords: cognition, teleology, morals.