Erin Glass
In recent years, researchers in various fields have begun to appreciate the
role of the body in human thought and behavior. In this one-day conference at the CUNY Graduate Center, speakers discussed embodied approaches to developmental psychology, sociology, perception, and aesthetic response. For more information about The Mellon Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies, see: http://sciencestudies.gc.cuny.edu/.
Source
EMBODIMENT CONFERENCE – ALVA NOE
This is such amazing and important work. I certainly hope the world stands up and listens to what Noe has to say.
Some say that Noe's notion of perception as involving skillful bodily activity requires a kind of practical knowledge that is itself dispositional and brought about conceptually in ways that collapse his view into Indirect Representationalism. What elevates sensory presence to phenomenal experience can't be conceptually-mediated know-how if what perceptual content is said to consist of can't be representational; the difference is the representation.
I don't see how Noe's view (which seems to me a continuation of Merleau-Ponty) requires conceptual mediation, so much as practical skills. A body can have skills and practical knowledge without any concepts at all. It merely has to know which games to play with which types of objects under which types of circumstances (to borrow from Wittgenstein). So there is no representation, there are just particular kinds of pieces in particular games that we skillfully learn to play.
Anyone notice the fifth person coming through the door late was actually a gorilla…