Abstract

This chapter examines the role of the biological brain. It considers a number of worries about recent appeals to embodiment, embedding, and cognitive extension—all of which take as their points of departure the incontrovertible fact that we are very smart indeed and the (only slightly more controvertible) fact that the brain is where the major smarts start. It addresses the question of whether work that stresses embodiment, embedding, distributed functional decompositions, and the well-groomed cognitive niche systematically distort the role of the biological brain. It is argued that attention to embodied, embedded, and extended cognition provides the essential lens through which to appreciate the startling power and elegance of the neural machinery, observed at home in its proper ecological setting.