This article examines how the human perception of knowledge is structured in the empirical world. It is often argued by scientists that facts in this empirical world can be perceived, which makes us believe that this world is an objective world. However, the human way of making sense of the world is individual and embodied, which causes the creation of an individual world for every human: a body-world. The empirical world is in this case a shared space for multiple bodies that agree on the causality of certain events and objects in that space. Every body-world therefore has its own partial perspective on the knowledge in this shared space, which is formed by the physiology of the body, the cultural background, and the identity of the person. The theater has the power, through the techniques of re-enactment and disruption, to give its audience insight in other situated knowledges from different partial perspectives. It can therefore connect different situated knowledges and create ecological knowledge: the awareness of the connected network of knowledges that is produced in various body-worlds on what is happening in the shared space. Only then can we emancipate knowledge and embrace the various partial perspectives that this shared space of body-worlds has to offer.
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From the article: Abstract Over the last decades, philosophers and cognitive scientists have argued that the brain constitutes only one of several contributing factors to cognition, the other factors being the body and the world. This position we refer to as Embodied Embedded Cognition (EEC). The main purpose of this paper is to consider what EEC implies for the task interpretation of the control system. We argue that the traditional view of the control system as involved in planning and decision making based on beliefs about the world runs into the problem of computational intractability. EEC views the control system as relying heavily on the naturally evolved fit between organism and environment. A ‘lazy’ control structure could be ‘ignorantly successful’ in a ‘user friendly’ world, by facilitating the transitory creation of a flexible and integrated set of behavioral layers that are constitutive of ongoing behavior. We close by discussing the types of questions this could imply for empirical research in cognitive neuroscience and robotics.
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This investigation explores relations between 1) a theory of human cognition, called Embodied Cognition, 2) the design of interactive systems and 3) the practice of ‘creative group meetings’ (of which the so-called ‘brainstorm’ is perhaps the best-known example). The investigation is one of Research-through-Design (Overbeeke et al., 2006). This means that, together with students and external stakeholders, I designed two interactive prototypes. Both systems contain a ‘mix’ of both physical and digital forms. Both are designed to be tools in creative meeting sessions, or brainstorms. The tools are meant to form a natural, element in the physical meeting space. The function of these devices is to support the formation of shared insight: that is, the tools should support the process by which participants together, during the activity, get a better grip on the design challenge that they are faced with. Over a series of iterations I reflected on the design process and outcome, and investigated how users interacted with the prototypes.
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