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Reconstructing the Cognitive World.

Article Excerpt
Wheeler, M. (2005). Reconstructing the Cognitive World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Michael Wheeler's Reconstructing the Cognitive World is a good read for phenomenological psychologists and those from all the various disciplines who read the Journal of Phenomenological Psychology. The book is interdisciplinary and is written in a style geared toward accessibility for people with different backgrounds (most of the concepts and theories alluded to are briefly explained the first time they are used for the benefit of those unfamiliar with them).

Wheeler advocates the new "embodied" or "enactivist" approach to cognitive theory--which in many ways is an outgrowth of ecological psychology--and suggests that this approach should take a more Heideggerian turn. Wheeler uses both terms, "embodied" and "enactive," but I shall stick to "enactive" because I think "embodied" is often misunderstood to mean a variety of things that do not capture what Wheeler means (for example, many people use "embodied" as the mere thesis that the mind has some relationship to the body or is in some vague way grounded in the body). Enactivism, more specifically, holds that cognition and consciousness are better understood as actions of a self-organizing agent than as linear reactions in a causal sequence where the mental figures as the terminal step (as in an information-processing system). As J. J. Gibson and more recently Natika Newton have argued (see my 1997 review of Newton's book in this journal), we understand objects in the world not merely by receiving information input from them, but more importantly by imagining how we could act in relation to them. Newton specifically refers to Heidegger's notion of the "ready to hand" mode of relating to objects as the starting point for cognition and consciousness. The "ready to hand" is the...