The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition [Paperback]

This is an incredibly interesting, wide-ranging, approachable collection of essays from nearly every conceivable dimension of the newest trend in cognition which (finally) takes into account the fact that the creators of cognition and objects of its study are humans. These private, remote creatures have hitherto been ignored by cognitive scientists and linguists, who have preferred their lab coats and quantitive analysis to an actual contemplation of how, say, one's culture, body image, race, or mood that day might drastically shape their perception.
If it's not obvious, I'm a humanities guy, and not a scientist, but I've found all of these chapters immensely pleasurable and informative. The authors are all (it seems) top-notch in their fields, yet manage to keep from in-fighting and straw-manning. They are even able to present specialized theories and data in a way that makes sense to semi-intelligent and motivated neophytes. All of the authors portray an air of humility about their theories and the conceivable contributions of situated/embodied cognition, which makes for a balanced reading. Chapters are succinct, but don't feel rushed. Check the table of contents for the wide-ranging issues of discussion.

A quality product on good paper, written by confident people well versed in their field. [I like to get my money's worth.] The editors are generous and inclusive - allowing space for counter theories; even those dastardly, old fashioned Cartesians are allowed a voice [as misguided as it may be ;]

There's plenty of open and easy flowing prose from the highest grade US, French, Australian, UK and global academics, who seem to be having fun and enjoying the debate they're collating, summarizing, reviewing and extending here. Introductory papers concisely outline the historical philosophical antecedents and the contemporary philosophic and scientific concerns of the field of situated cognition; from Merleau-Ponty to cybernetics and the cognitive sciences. The book is well grounded and fleshed out in its field - seems itself a palpably socio-political phenomenon of the situation of cognition; playing out, as it does, the tension between the independently existing, ideal subject of cognition and a more socially and environmentally distributed experience of cognition's location. In chasing after the material location of cognition [or/and information processing or/and, 'Could this be consciousness here? The embodied substance of it?'] I enjoyed the perplexing and conceptual challenge presented by the way in which the functional successes of cybernetics and robotics seem to be ratifying understanding cognition, perception and information processing as taking place in the accessible world and not in some abstract or internal location. Consciousness and memory are off-loaded from the CPU and, somehow, seem to be hung on [and constitutive of] the structures of the 'external' world as much as those structure are of it, cognition is a two way street.

Metaphysics gets turned around so that it's the dualists who increasingly appear to be the unsubstantiated, abstract speculators. Their unlocatable homunculi and interior representations are gazumped by progressively understanding consciousness as utterly configured by its location, taken up by environment, bound even conceptually in dependence upon it and structured by its structures and manifest only there, not detached and isolated. This is therapy for the alienated subject. As the frontispiece says, 'Some argue that this new orientation calls for a revolutionary new metaphysics of mind, according to which mental states and processes, and even persons, literally extend into the environment.' It was only delusion and neurosis that imagined people could ever be detached from the world.

Wherever you personally track cognition down to during the process of reading this book, you're likely to find it located where you are. In your head? In the book? In the world? Where is this information?

A comment on the previous review suggests it is not. That can only be an argument from ignorance. A quick persual of feminist literature, such as Sue Campbell's distinguished work on memory, should make one aware that feminist work on the social locatedness of cognition is immensely valuable. As far as I can tell, Griffiths in this volume is also finding out that social locatedness is immensely important.

So it remains an interesting question why philosophers' studied ignorance of feminist work counts for them as an achievement. And why so many recommended the ignorant comment.