Re-conceptualizing Self, Speaker, and Body: Applying an Enactive and Conversation Analytic Approach to Selfhood and Cognition

Abstract

In this article I review significant contributions to the subfield of Embodied Cognition that formulate an inclusive account of the body's role in cognitive processes. I argue that a reconceptualization of the mind–body problem must take into account some notion of the self as a nonlocalized, transient phenomenon that emerges through day-to-day interaction. Drawing on literature from epistemology, phenomenology, and Conversation Analysis, I aim to revise contributions that rely on essentialized notions of the self and speaker, in terms of an enactive and Conversation Analytic approach to selfhood and cognition.

KEYWORDS:

• Affordances
• Embodied Cognition
• enactive cognition
• interaction
• language
• selfhood