Women’s minds matter
Sally Davies,
Aeon,
May 31, 2019
This is an interesting post on a number of levels. The central premise is essentially that cognitivism, by separating rationality from the influences of the human body, is "a profoundly gendered blueprint." It (cognitivism) is also wrong. I would like to argue, however, that it's wrong because it's wrong, not because it is gendered. It's being gendered is an undesirable consequence of the philosophy, and possibly a reason why so many people still cling to it, but at core it doesn't just deny women their humanity, it denies humans their humanity.
Let me explain (as this is is a position I have taken in the past and maintain to this day). "Within a broad church that can be called – not uncontentiously – embodied cognition, a growing number of psychologists, scientists and theorists are approaching mental life as something that is not just contingent on, but constituted by, the state of our bodies." The author cites, with approval, psychologist James J Gibson, who argued that the computational mind, manipulating content-bearing representations, was not the correct way to understand perception. This is also my view, and is one of the core differences between my own view of education and that of most other researchers in the field of education (at least, to my perception).
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