2022 Volume 29 Issue 4 Pages 652-660
This paper discusses fieldwork as an endeavor to grasp significant shapes of intelligence and wisdom, sometimes including so-far-unidentified ones, from situated interactions between the own mind and body and its surrounding environment. The academic notion supportive of this understanding is situated cognition, which has been advocated in the late 80s. Cognition generated in a situated manner, however, is hard to observe and describe. The intrinsic difficulty might be the reason why little practical literature has shown specific and concrete shapes of situated cognition. We have proposed a practical method of observing and describing diverse manners of cognition that occurs in situated interactions, what we call embodied meta-cognition. Its main thrust is to observe and describe what multi-layered relations hold between one’s body/mind and the environment, from not just the third-person’s view but also the first and second-person’s one. That is in a way an enriched version of conventional meta-cognition. We show the effectiveness of this method, briefly presenting an exemplar study to explore shapes of intelligence and wisdom about how to make oneself situated in a café calmly and pleasantly.
