Abstract

Phenomenology of the body and the third generation of cognitive science, both of which attribute a central role in human cognition to the body rather than to the Cartesian notion of representation, face the criticism that higher-level cognition cannot be fully grasped by those studies. The problem here is how explicit representations, consciousness, and thoughts issue from perception and the body, and how they cooperate in human cognition. In order to address this problem, we propose a research program, a cognitive phenomenology of the body, which is basically motivated by the perspective of Merleau-Ponty. We find a substantial clue in developmental psychological studies on the body and language.