Reduction and Embodied Cognition: Perspectives from Medicine and Psychiatry

TL;DRAbstract

This chapter dissociates the working cognitive sciences from various reductive strategies. It advocates that cognitive science should be more inclusive in terms of what it accepts as data in developing its theories, and that it should not be wedded only to reductive strategies. Appreciating how brains are embedded in complicated environments enlightens us about philosophical issues concerning the possibility of mind-brain reduction. Two fascinating case studies — depression and somatisation — support the claim that somatic states are part of our cognitive processes and, further, that as a result cognitive science cannot be reductive in the way it is normally taken to be.

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