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PATRICK COLM HOGAN, Affective Space and Emotional Time

I do not wish to overstate this. I am not a partisan of situated
cognition. I simply believe that a complete account of space and time—
or other psychological topics—should include discussion not only of
recurring principles, but also of ongoing practices. It is important to
study both the enduring structures, processes, and contents of the
mind, and their integrated operation in life. Similarly, I am not an en-
activist, at least not in the maximal sense of someone who seeks to
ground a wide range of cognitive processes on motor activity (a more
minimal assertion of “the importance of motor areas and motor-to-
sensory pathways for the construction of object and space perception”
[Rizzola i et al. 191], is not only plausible, but compelling). However,
2
I believe that Noë is ge ing at something when he writes that “The
world shows up for us in experience only insofar as we know how to
make contact with it” (2), thus insofar as we are engaged in the world.
Noë goes on to comment that “One reason why art is so impor-
tant to us is that it recapitulates this fundamental fact” (2). I would
go further and say that art is one of the best ways we have of consid-
ering experiential complexity. Researchers treating space and time
often acknowledge the importance of situated cognition. For exam-
ple, Iacoboni notes that “a peripersonal space map . . . is a map of po-

2 Readers have asked what I mean by saying that I am not an enactivist, at
least in the maximal sense. This is clearly not the place (or time) for a treat-
ment of enactivism. To summarize very briefly, however, I might say the fol-
lowing: Enactivism, as well as embodied cognition and related approaches,
emphasize important parts of cognitive and affective activity that had been
ignored in traditional cognitive theory and research. In this respect, they are
not dissimilar to pragmatics in language study. Moreover, the discoveries by
Rizzola i, Gallese, and their collaborators, discoveries that have been impor-
tant to the development of enactivism and embodied cognition theory, are
of profound importance for our understanding of the brain. However, in my
view, enactivists and related theorists sometimes have a tendency to under-
estimate the more abstract and enduring structures and processes involved
in human cognition, such as statistical pa ern isolation or most of language
processing. (On statistical pa ern isolation, see Stanislas Dehaene’s lectures
at the Collège de France for 2011-2012 [“Le cerveau statistician”] and 2012-
2013 [“Le bébé statistician”], h ps://www.college-de-france.fr/site/stanislas-
dehaene/_course.htm [accessed November 20, 2017]. On embodied cognition
and language, see Hickok.) Thus, I see motor activity (or enactment) and em-
bodiment as deeply important, but still only part of cognition and emotion.

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