Action, affordances, and anorexia

body representation and basic cognition

Stephen Gadsby

Daniel Williams

pp. 5297-5317

in: Synthese 195 (12), 2018.

Abstract

We evaluate a growing trend towards anti-representationalism in cognitive science in the context of recent research into the development and maintenance of anorexia nervosa in cognitive neuropsychiatry. We argue two things: first, that this research relies on an explanatorily robust concept of representation—the concept of a long-term body schema; second, that this body representation underlies our most basic environmental interactions and affordance perception—the psychological phenomena supposed to be most hospitable to a non-representationalist treatment.