University of Wollongong Research Online Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences & Humanities 1-1-2018 Decentering the brain: Embodied cognition and the critique of neurocentrism and narrow-minded philosophy of mind Shaun Gallagher University of Wollongong, University of Memphis,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/lhapapers Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons, and the Law Commons Recommended Citation Gallagher, Shaun, "Decentering the brain: Embodied cognition and the critique of neurocentrism and narrow-minded philosophy of mind" (2018). Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers. 3784. https://ro.uow.edu.au/lhapapers/3784 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library:
[email protected] Decentering the brain: Embodied cognition and the critique of neurocentrism and narrow-minded philosophy of mind Abstract Context: Challenges by embodied, enactive, extended and ecological approaches to cognition have provided good reasons to shift away from neurocentric theories. Problem: Classic cognitivist accounts tend towards internalism, representationalism and methodological individualism. Such accounts not only picture the brain as the central and almost exclusive mechanism of cognition, they also conceive of brain function in terms that ignore the dynamical relations among brain, body and environment. Method: I review four areas of research (perception, action/ agency, self, social cognition) where enactivist accounts have shown alternative ways of thinking about the brain. Results: Taken together, such analyses form a comprehensive alternative to the classic conceptions of cognitivist, computational neuroscience.