Apparently it was Newton who wrote (in a letter to Robert Hooke in 1676):
If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
My harried academic version of Newton is not to actually stand on the giant shoulders, but merely point at the giants and say “what he/she said”. Polite people call this an annotated bibliography. Anyway, here is a first post on ‘giant pointing’.
Two People Who Understand Embodied Cognition
I strongly recommend you look at the Blog Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists run by Andrew Wilson and Sabrina Golonka of Leeds Beckett University. Their take on Embodied Cognition very closely aligns with mine. Their work is strongly influenced by J. J. Gibson and the work of ecological psychologists that have developed his work. It’s no surprise then to see that they also draw on Tony Chemero’s Radical Embodied Cognitive Science which has taken a strong ecological turn since I first came across his doctorate online years ago (see Chemero, 2009). They also like the work of comparative/evolutionary psychologist Louise Barrett who has written (amongst many other things) some great stuff on distributed cognition in primates and an excellent, approachable, embodied cognition book called Beyond the Brain.
Here are a few of Andrew and Sabrina’s blog posts that I think are well worth reading for starters:
A great overview of fundamentals of a truly radical Embodied Cognitive Science
Some critical thoughts about the role of the brain in cognition from an embodied perspective
A critique of the grounded cognition movement that is very much in keeping with my own worries
Twitter: @PsychScientists
The Knowledge Relation: Ed Baggs’ Blog
Ed Baggs has a lot of important and interesting things to say about social and linguistic activity from an ecological point of view. I highly recommend his blog The Knowledge Relation.
Twitter: @edbaggs