Dr. Dr. Thomas Hünefeldt (Post-Doc)

In contemporary cognitive science, the term “situated cognition” refers to an emergent, but also quite heterogeneous research movement, which emphasizes aspects of cognition that have been neglected by or could not be sufficiently accounted for in terms of traditional cognitive science. The central claims associated with this research movement may be summarized in the thesis that cognition depends not just on the brain but also on the situation or context in which it occurs. Now, the dependence of cognition on situation or context may be conceived in different ways, which roughly correspond to the ways this dependence is conceived on the ground of the established paradigms of cognitive science. Therefore, rather than being a new paradigm of cognitive science, the “situated cognition” movement is really a symptom of an ongoing paradigm crisis in cognitive science. In fact, the question where and how cognition is situated eventually amounts to the question how a cognitive system is to be defined. Given this background, the aim of this research project is to develop a comprehensive understanding of the situatedness of cognition. In order to realize this aim, the research project ties in with two paradigms that are considered to be important antecedents of “situated cognition”: philosophical phenomenology and general system theory, i.e. the paradigm that allows a programmatically non-naturalistic “first-person” analysis of situatedness and the paradigm that allows the most generic naturalistic “third-person” analysis of situatedness. Tying in with these two paradigms, it attempts to provide both a non-anthropomorphic phenomenological analysis of situatedness and a general system-theoretic analysis of situatedness, and to integrate both into a comprehensive understanding of how to define a cognitive system, by means of a non-anthropomorphic phenomenological analysis of intersubjectivity.