# 22. Embodied Cognition and Enaction

## Central question

How do body, action, environment, and social interaction participate in cognition?

## Why it belongs here

This module grounds the claim that intelligence is not only an internal computation. Embodied cognition and enactive approaches ask how knowing emerges through ongoing organism–environment coupling while preserving distinctions among perception, action, representation, and interpretation.

## Outline

1. **Against the disembodied mind** — compare brain-only, brain–body, and organism–environment accounts.
2. **Sensorimotor loops** — study how action changes the field that perception samples.
3. **Skilled and situated knowing** — examine habits, tools, posture, timing, and context.
4. **Participatory sense-making** — map how interaction changes what each participant can perceive and do.
5. **Language as coordination** — treat words as actions in a shared practice, not merely labels for private objects.
6. **Five-Foci practice** — observe bodily phase, situational field, action thresholds, stable habits, and social/technical supports.
7. **Bounded exercise** — perform the same simple task under two physical arrangements and compare performance, effort, and reported experience.

## Evidence boundary

Embodiment does not mean that every bodily sensation reveals hidden truth. Subjective experience is data about experience; causal claims require controls and measurement.

## Deliverable

An embodied loop map showing posture, sensation, action, environmental response, interpretation, and learning.