Thinking with the Body and other things
Abstract:
My challenge is to explain how we think with our bodies and the things around us: how it can be literally true that there are times whendancers use their bodies as things to think with, or that students of physics can handle a cup of tea and, in that handling, co-opt the cup tohelp think about surface tension, suspensions, or gravity. Humans couple so closely and seamlessly with things that they behave as one. I will use datafrom an extensive ethnographic study of a world-class choreographer at work,and also report on a few simple experiments to show that indeed there is such a think as enactive thought: using the body and manipulable objects as things to think with.
Suggested readings:
- Kirsh, D. (2009). Projection, Problem Space and Anchoring. In N. A. Taatgen & H. van Rijn (Eds.), Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2310-2315). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
- Kirsh, D. (2010). Thinking With The Body. The Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
- Kirsh, D. (2010). Thinking With External Representations. AI & Society, Vol. 25, No. 4, February 2010.
- Kirsh, D. (2011). How marking in dance constitutes thinking with the body, Versus 113-115. pp (forthcoming)
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