Critical Thinking in the Context of Embodied Cognition: a Review of Psychological Research and its Pedagogical Potential

Abstract

The article presents an overview of current research on critical thinking based on the hypothesis of embodied cognition and representing the so-called non-Cartesian approach to thinking, in which the rational and the sensual do not act independently from each other, but as a closely related group of processes. Despite the fact that the topic of critical thinking in this research area is yet in the process of formation, the review is systematic and contains indications of two main directions, their theoretical guidelines and methodological guidelines. A comparison of the identified approaches makes it possible to identify the mechanisms that are key to any embodied version of the critical thinking model: an individual's sensitivity to his own explicit and implicit epistemic signals, or dispositional attentiveness, and emotional non-activity. It is shown that interdisciplinary transfer in this topic is problematic: knowledge produced in the psychological framework of embodied cognition research is inherently different from knowledge that allows improving the learning process of critical thinking. The results obtained open up prospects for further research and ways to reorganize pedagogical practice in the field of teaching critical thinking