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Petracca Enrico | Fellow Postdoctoral
2023-09-01 - 2025-09-30 | Research area: Cognition and Sociality
Embodied Rationality: Normative and Evolutionary Foundations

This project introduces a new naturalistic view of rationality called “embodied rationality”, which combines the traditional idea of bounded/ecological rationality with embodied cognition in cognitive science. Given the plurality of views within embodied cognition, I introduce four concepts of embodied rationality following an increasing order of embodied radicalism (i.e., increasing degree of rejection of information-processing assumptions): “embodied bounded rationality”, “body rationality”, “extended rationality”, and “radical embodied rationality”. The project focuses on the normative and evolutionary foundations of these concepts, showing that the more radical the view of embodied cognition gets, the more the idea of rationality it informs needs to depart from adaptationism (and embrace non-adaptationism). The project also challenges the view that evolutionary theory would be per se incompatible with radical embodied cognition. I show that far from being incompatible, non-adaptationism can provide new foundations for radical embodiment.