Cognitive Integration: Embodied Engagements and the Manipulation Thesis

It is through our bodies that we primarily engage with the world and through this engagement the body is constantly integrating with the environment. When body and environment co-ordinate, the environment becomes part of the resources the organism has for acting, thinking or communicating. How, though, ought we to understand the co-ordination, or reciprocal coupling, of body and environment as accomplishing thinking? Reciprocal coupling is a symmetrical relation, the organism manipulates its environment in one direction, but the result of this environmental alteration feeds back to the organism prompting further bodily actions. Our focus in this chapter is on the nature of bodily manipulations. There are two ways to understand manipulations that I want to explore.