Taking the grounding problem seriously

摘要

Cognitivistic approaches to human thought and behavior have been very successful in tracing, identifying, and analyzingthe processes and mechanisms underlying human cognition. However, they have created and strengthened the image ofhumans as couch potatoes that have incredibly interesting thoughts and mental simulations but hardly translate any ofthose into real action. Moreover, the strategy to construe human cognition as symbol manipulation, that is, as theprocessing of abstract units of information that are not related to, and grounded in real-world events in straightforward andtheoretically well-understood ways, has led to a growing dissatisfaction with traditional cognitivistic approaches. Apromising alternative is the embodied-cognition approach that construes cognition and cognitive representations asemerging from, and as being grounded in perceptual, affective, and action-related states and processes (see Pecher &Zwaan, 2005). Ideally, the meaning of a perceived or produced event can be reduced entirely to the sensorimotor (andaffective) states and processes directly involved in its perception or production, so that cognitive representations lose theirexplanatory overhead and become mere summaries of, or pointers to well-understood sensorimotor componentprocesses—as in the Theory of Event Coding (TEC; Hommel, 2009; Hommel, Miisseler, Aschersleben, & Prinz, 2001).