Moving Wisdom. Explaining Cognition Through Movement

The two driving questions are: What may be fruitful ways to modify existing research mores and theoretical
assumptions in cognitive studies? How do we integrate the cognitive sciences with the normative? These result
respectively in an overture to expand the cognitive canon, and uniquely derive the normative weight to excel from work
in the mind sciences and skillful coping connected to standards inherent to and resulting from the active pursuits central
to this examination: sports, performing and martial arts, and crafts. Animate bodies best show the connection between
the normative and the cognitive, and how these correlate with bodies, their kinetic capabilities, and the context of a
community. This leads to a reconsideration of how cognitive studies—to include neuroscience, cognitive science, and
philosophy—go about their business. The “cognitive canon” is thus extended and modified on a number of fronts
regarding methodology, subject matter, and focus. Specifically, I suggest the need to go beyond conventional research
foci embraced by both mainstream cognitivist and alternative embodied cognition approaches: the argument is to go
beyond vision, normality and the pathological to explicitly incorporate the kinetic-tactile and the exceptional under a
framework that re-conceptualizes matters across the board.