Abstract

Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary science to unlock the secret about human cognition, and it has the strategic position in the development of contem-porary science and technology. From the perspective of cognitive science and cognitive practice, the representation -computation is the core research pro-gram which integrates the research of all the fields about cognitive science. From the perspective of cognitive philosophy and cognitive theory, the development has undergone the paradigm changes of Information Processing Cognition, Brain Connectionist Cognition and Embodied cognition.

Embodied cognition is a new theoretic paradigm to interpret the human in-telligence. Since the end of 19thcentury, the exploration in the fields of psychology, biology and linguistics constitute the pre -history of embodied cognition theory. By the efforts of Hubert Dreyfus, George Lakoff, Rodney Brooks and Francisco Varela, embodied cognition has become a theoretic research paradigm of cognitive science which emphasizes on the roles of body and situation in hu-man cognition. From the 1990, embodied cognition has aroused the active re-sponses of the Chinese cognitive science and its philosophy researchers.

The epistemological turn in modern philosophy and its developments in contemporary is the philosophical background of the rise of embodied cognition. Specifically, embodied cognition is the Critique to theCartesianism epistemology of subject -object dichotomy thinking mode, and influenced actively by the epistemology of Phenomenology and modern trend of thought of Pragmatism. For embodied cognition concentrates more on the research of human natural intelligence that is subjective, experienced and situated, the issues of philosophical methodology, for example, the integration of the first personal perspective and the third personal perspective, experienced and positivist meth-od, phenomenological institution and logical analysis, etc. , appear more di-rectly and make the research method to human cognitive phenomena an subject in embodied cognition.

Human intelligence can roughly be divided into online intelligence and offline intelligence, the former contains perception, imagination, consciousness and emotion etc. , which is experienced, pre-linguistic and unreflective, and the latter contains the language, thinking and some social cognition etc. , which is reflective, propositional and abstract. By the direction of anti- Carte-sianism, embodied cognition research puts forwards the subjects of“perception is tightly linked to action”and“thinking is grounding in experience”, the for-mer criticizes the view of isolated mind and its representational view of perception, establishes the basic role of brain, body and environment, the latter re-solves the Dualism and the breakage of perception and thinking, grounds the abstract thinking into human experiences. However, in the research of online in-telligence and offline intelligence, there are kinds of controversial explanations about the form and function of representation, body and situation.

As the frontier of research to human intelligence and its function mechanism, embodied cognition has aroused the care of scientists and philosophers all over the world. As the human intelligence and cognitive phenomena is different to common physiologic and physical appearance, and the methods to research them are especially complex and systemic, so the metaphysics, epistemology and methodology in the philosophy should play a special role in the research of cognitive science.