Enacting the search space for a science of perceptual awareness

VENTURELLI, NICOLÁS

Buenos Aires

Workshop; I Workshop on Philosophy and Cognitive Science; 2008

Sociedad Argentina de Análisis Filosófico

In this paper I will defend a way of interpreting the contribution of the by now all too familiar conglomeration of research programs, methodological stands and  philosophical speculations known as the embodied / embedded approach to cognition that, since the mid-eighties, is gaining increasingly widespread attention within the cognitive sciences. More specifically, I will focus on one such proposal: the so-called enactive approach to perception, especially as advanced by the philosopher Alva Noë and with a particular interest in the problem of perceptual awareness and the related dispute on the neural correlate of consciousness. The proposal I will develop is that the enactive approach should be best understood as providing a conceptual-cum-methodological framework to set better investigations for the study of perception and perceptual awareness; in particular, it should not be understood in the line of a common reading of work in embodied cognitive science, that is to say, as a group of typically extreme, radical or revolutionary theses about cognition in general and its relation to perception, action, world, body, or whatever else.