The Embodied Rationality project aims to integrate two strands of research, one in bounded rationality and the other in the ‘embodied’ approach to cognitive psychology. Let’s briefly consider them singularly, and then see how they can be conceptually integrated.
Bounded rationality
Herbert A. Simon first introduced the notion of bounded rationality in the late 1940s, and mostly intended the bounds of rationality be conceived as the adaptation of human agents’ cognitive limitations to the structure of the task environment. In this framework, bounded rationality has progressively been rendered through the metaphor of ‘scissors’, according to which a theory of human rationality could be conceived as a pair of scissors, where the two cutting blades are agent’s cognition on the one hand and the task’s requirements on the other hand. Carrying on with the metaphor, a theory of rationality works only when the two blades work together.
What is important is that Simon developed his theory of bounded rationality hand in hand with his framework of cognitive psychology called ‘cognitivism’. According to cognitivism, human cognition fundamentally works through manipulations in the mind of representations of the external reality. Simon’s hypothesis that this framework is a necessary and sufficient framework for understanding human cognition was called ‘physical symbol system hypothesis’ (PSSH). Later theories of bounded rationality, most notably Kahneman & Tversky’s heuristics and biases approach and Gigerenzer’s ecological rationality then follow by fundamentally maintaining Simon’s cognitivist framework, although they try to respectively integrate Gestalt and experimental psychology insights and evolutionary psychology.
Embodied cognitive psychology
Embodied cognition, on the other hand, is the outcome of a 30-year-long paradigm shift with respect to cognitivism, which over time has assumed different terminological and conceptual nuances such as ‘situated’ cognition, ‘distributed’ cognition, ‘embedded’ cognition, ‘enacted’ cognition, etc. It would then be reductive to isolate a single claim able to distinctively render the gist of embodied cognition. For this reason, it is more correct to conceptually render embodied cognition as a cluster of tenets, not each by itself necessary for a theory of embodied cognition, but any of them fundamentally against cognitivist cognitive psychology. We can synthesize the cluster of tenets of embodied cognition:
- cognition fundamentally relies on action and interaction with the world;
- cognition constitutively depends on the sensory-motor system;
- cognition works through some form of externalism, i.e. use the external world as a resource for cognitive processes
The integration
These two strands of research, bounded rationality and ‘embodied’ cognitive psychology, are taken together in a unified framework by emphasizing the role of the human body for a theory of rationality. In a nutshell, the human body provides the adaptive and evolutionary interface between agent’s cognition and environment. As such, we build upon Simon’s metaphor to claim that the human body plays the role of pivot, by taking together both blades of cognition and environment.
