Cognition might emerge from embodied “grip” with the world rather than abstract mental processes
A new article published in Journal of Humanistic Psychology argues that cognition is not something that happens inside the head as abstract information processing, but emerges through an embodied person’s ongoing engagement with the world–a process the author describes as achieving an “optimal grip” on one’s environment. Traditional cognitive science has treated the mind as a kind of information-processing system, emphasizing internal representations and computations. This perspective gained traction during the cognitive revolution, when advances in artificial intelligence and formal modeling suggested that intelligent behavior could be explained through symbolic manipulation. However, as Garri Hovhannisyan points out, this approach struggles to account for something more basic: how organisms perceive and navigate the world in real time. For example, it has proven easier to design machines that outperform humans in chess than to build ones capable of holding an egg without breaking it. Hovhannisyan’s work builds on the phenomenological tradition, which shifts the focus from abstract mental content to lived experience. Rather than asking how the mind represents a pre-given world, phenomenology examines how the world …
