Does embodiment need to be pushed even further?. Comment on "Embodied language, best fit analysis, and formal compositionality" by J. Feldman

Abstract

In his paper on Embodied Language, Jerome Feldman [1] puts his finger on the right spot. He points out that Embodied Cognition has been a major advance in recent research on mind and brain but that the way this new paradigm has been explored so far exhibits a major flaw. Embodied cognition takes into account the grounding of language in perception and action and is therefore in a better position to deal with the physical and social contextualisation of language, which was a major short coming of earlier disembodied theories. Embodied cognition also takes into account constraints that come from neural information processing and has therefore a higher chance to bridge the gap between functional descriptions of cognition and brain architectures. However, the major flaw of embodied approaches so far, is that they fall far short of dealing properly with the compositional nature of language and thought.