MacNeilage's target article develops a theory for the evolution of human speech articulation along the lines of “slot- filler” structure. His content/frame schema commits him to the tenets of embodiment, muscle sense, and a memory for speech. My commentary ties these aspects together in their historical and current perspective.

In order to address sociological concerns with embodiment and learning, in this article we explore the ‘weathering’ body in a currently under-researched physical-cultural domain. Weather experiences, too, are under-explored in sociology, and here we examine in depth the lived experience of weather and, more specifically, ‘weather work’ and ‘weather learning’ in one of the most extreme and corporeally challenging environments on earth: high-altitude mountains. Drawing on a theoretical framework of phenomenological sociology, and an interview-based research project with 19 international, (...) high-altitude mountaineers, we investigate weather as lived and experienced both corporeally and cognitively. We are particularly interested in conceptualizing and theorizing the ways in which embodied beings relate to the environment through different aspects of their being. The novel concepts of ‘weather work’ and ‘weather learning’, we argue, provide salient examples of the mind-body-world nexus at work, as an embodied practice and mode of thinking, strongly contoured by the physical culture of high-altitude mountaineering. (shrink)

Enactivism is a branch of embodied cognition theory that argues for a highly distributed model of cognition as a sense‐making process involving brain, body, environment, and subjective experience. It is a theoretical framework with potential value for nursing since it offers an integrated framework for human sense‐making that includes physiological and psychological factors as well as the primary experience of subjective perceptions. This paper presents an introduction to the background and main tenets of enactivist theory. These are discussed (...) in relation to nursing, and mental health nursing to argue for the relevance of enactivism in nursing knowledge. (shrink)

I will argue that the asynchronous discussion format commonly used in online courses has little hope of bringing about transformative learning, and that this is because engaging with another as a person involves adopting a personal stance, comprised of affective and bodily relatedness (Ratcliffe 2007, 23). Interpersonal engagement ordinarily is fully embodied to the extent that communication relies heavily on individuals’ postures, gestures, and facial expressions. Subjects involved in face-to-face interaction can perceive others’ desires and feelings on the basis of (...) their expressions and movements, to which they become attuned by way of bodily resonance. Moreover, social cognition is enactive in the sense that parties do not passively receive information from their environments, but instead actively participate in the generation of meaning. They do so not in isolation, but instead via ongoing engagement and coordination with their interaction partners, so that sense-making becomes a shared activity. This paves the way for what I will call ‘participatory sense-making.’ To the extent that it involves asynchronous discussion and disembodied social engagement, online learning severs these interactive links between students and makes this sort of participatory sense-making unlikely. (shrink)

This is an explorative work on teaching. The understanding of teaching that I use in my work is that teaching is action, it happens in the present – here and now. So, while teaching refers to shorter timespans, education in this understanding refers to timespans that are of a longer duration, meaning education is communication between generations. The notion of teaching I explore draw from experiences, for my own part between nature, dog and human. These are experiences of sensing where (...) one flows through and interconnects with others, so that boundaries are difficult to discern, and hence boundaries are not the point, but rather how sensing bodies and ‘movements between’ create experiences that are constitutive of who we become both as dog and human, in/with nature. Here I am not referring this to learning, as is usual in the equation “teaching and learning”. This does not mean learning is irrelevant, but rather that it is such an encompassing concept I cannot deal with it satisfactorily in this article. Also, I go beyond what is commonly understood as learning, in terms of making a change in someone’s cognitive or emotional structures. This article explores the kind of experiences our sensing body furnish us with and how these transfer to memory, in the here and now bodies sense, and how this creates memories. I argue this is especially important to recognize in teaching, but seldom addressed. I suggest we pay more attention to these experiences of sensing and how it becomes part of individual and collective memories. To me this is a vital and integral part in all teaching, in the present. (shrink)

Minds, Brains and Biology -- A Body of Knowledge -- Towards an Aesthetics of Behavior.

This volume takes two different, albeit intertwined approaches. The first concerns a reformulation of aesthetics in education—one which highlights the sensory dimensions of educational experience. The second concerns a turn to the body and the senses as that which is deeply involved in practices of teaching and learning.

The subject of musical emotions has emerged only recently as a major area of research. While much work in this area offers fascinating insights to musicological research, assumptions about the nature of emotional experience seem to remain committed to appraisal, representations, and a rule-based or information-processing model of cognition. Over the past three decades alternative ‘embodied’ and ‘enactive’ models of mind have challenged this approach by emphasising the self-organising aspects of cognition, often describing it as an ongoing process of dynamic (...) interactivity between an organism and its environment. More recently, this perspective has been applied to the study of emotion in general, opening up interesting new possibilities for theory and research. This new approach, however, has received rather limited attention in musical contexts. With this in mind, we critically review the history of music and emotion studies, arguing that many existing theories offer only limited views of what musical-emotional experience entails. We then attempt to provide preliminary grounding for an alternative perspective on music and emotion based on the enactive/dynamic systems approach to the study of mind. (shrink)

This paper examines an intersection between ecological psychology and the enactive approach, brought about by studying sense-making in relation to a behavior setting in Hong Kong and adopting a focus on embodied action and gesture. A cosmetics pop-up store in a downtown shopping mall provides the basis for a case study involving a two pronged analysis. I first use Barker’s behavior setting theory to describe the publically accessible structure and dynamics of the store, which reveals a bounded spatio-temporal structure (...) with several interdependent behavior-milieu parts. I then analyze video recordings of my research participant encountering, entering, and exploring this environment. Following an enactive-informed micro-ethnographic approach to embodied communication, I examine her movements, postures, gestures, and language use as she joins the behavior setting. These fine-grained descriptions of her embodied actions provide an empirical basis to analyze enactive sense-making. On the one hand, they disclose the affective and emotional experience of perceiving relevant affordances in the environment, and on the other hand, they show the specificity of sensorimotor abilities required to join the setting’s standing pattern of behavior. (shrink)

This thesis argues for the continuing possibility of Adorno set against the backdrop of a post-modern proliferation of affects. A major theoretical contention is the concept of the subject: a sticking point within philosophy. The thesis takes this up and offers a new pathway without falling into the cliché of a renewal of Adorno’s position. Drawing on Adorno’s theoretical thoughts on the subject the thesis contends that the subject is that which by turns dissolves all eventualities or more proportionally acts (...) like a place-holder for the newly emerging: structures that cannot be explained by recourse to the laws that govern its parts. These experiential structures present a surface, resistance, or solidarity that upon closer examination dissolve back into the ephemeral. Although such structures are profligate and prolific, the thesis adopts as its major concern artworks and aesthetics. Following Adorno, a claim is made for artworks that present open-ended possibilities. They are able for example to critically challenge the dominant hegemony the profundity that all too easily sides with the oppressors of life. What philosophy, a critical tool in furtherance of the good life, a concept restaged, here takes from art is not a sense of equivalence, art and philosophy are held apart in a creative and critical tension, but the sense of yearning that animates the nonconceptual side of art which the concept negates. The yearning, being experiential, is always embodied. Its fulfilment negates the immediacies, the mere appearance of life, particularly in its systematically reflexive form. The conclusion concurs with Adorno in the thought that affinity with the object is achieved not as the resultant of identity thinking, but through the act of definite negation of identifying schema. (shrink)

In this comparative study, we examine experiential disruptions of embodiment and affectivity in Moebius Syndrome and schizophrenia. We suggest that using phenomenological resources to explore these experiences may help us better understand what it’s like to live with these conditions, and that such an understanding may have significant therapeutic value. Additionally, we suggest that this sort of phenomenologically-informed comparative analysis can shed light on the importance of embodiment and affectivity for the constitution of a sense of self (...) and interpersonal relatedness in normal conditions. (shrink)

In this paper I analyze constitution embodiment, a particular conception of embodiment. Proponents of constitution embodiment claim that the body is a condition of the constitution of entities. Constitution embodiment is popular with phenomenologically-inspired Embodied Cognition, including research projects such as Enactivism and Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Unfortunately, PEC’s use of constitution embodiment is neither clear nor coherent; in particular, PEC uses the concept of constitution embodiment so that a major inconsistency is entailed. PEC (...) conceives of the body in a transcendental sense as a condition of the constitution of entities, and, in an ontic sense, as a scientifically describable entity. Yet, a condition of the constitution of entities cannot be itself an entity—rather, it is the very condition of the possibility of an entity. This inconsistency entails further problems, among them PEC’s misguided focus on the location of the embodied mind. In order to correct these mistakes, I develop a conception of constitution embodiment based on the work of Heidegger, Husserl and to a lesser degree Merleau-Ponty. This has two purposes. First, it provides the conceptual groundwork to secure the status of PEC as a consistent and coherent research project and to clarify PEC’s conception of the relationship between phenomenology and the sciences. In that spirit, my approach provides further guidelines for fruitful research alliances between PEC and other research programs such as Grounded Cognition and identifies current research alliances, such as those with Radical Enactivism, as undesirable. Second, my account provides an elaborate concept of constitution embodiment that can function as the basis for more sophisticated work in the future. (shrink)

The author proposes a model for theological anthropology as embodied sensing that is based on an interdisciplinary exploration of the corporeal turn from a southern African perspective. The work of James B. Nelson is acknowledged, stating that body theology starts with the concrete, the bodily expressions of life and not with doctrines about God and humanity. The theological anthropology of David H. Kelsey is evaluated as a theological anthropology with a sentiment of the flesh. Based on clearings in the work (...) of David Kelsey and an interdisciplinary research, the author proposes a model for theological anthropology as embodied sensing which functions within the intricate and complex connection of the living body, language and experiencing in a concrete lifeworld with an openness to the ‘more than’. The author considers the use of bodymapping within narrative therapy as a way in which to uncover the intimate and intricate connection between the living body, experience and language, and implementing insights from theological anthropology as embodied sensing. (shrink)

1 INTIMACY Among Descartes's most and consequential achievements has been his of the mental as an independent ontological domain. By taking the mind as a substance, with cognitions as its modes, he accorded them a status as self-standing and determinate on their own, without essential regard to other entities. Only with this metaphysical conception in place, could the idea of solipsism-the idea of an intact ego existing with nothing else in the universe-so much as make sense. And behind that (...) engine have trailed the sorry boxcars of hyperbolic doubt. the mind-body problem, the problem of the external world, the problem of other minds, and so on. -/- Although the assumptions have been under fire, off and on. at least since Hegel-including with renewed intensity in recent years … the Cartesian separation that is still so pervasive as to be almost invisible. In particular, inter-relationist accounts retain a principled distinction between the mental and the corporeal-a distinction that is reflected in contrasts like semantics versus syntax, the space of reasons versus the space of causes, or the intentional versus the physical. (Notice that each of these contrasts can be heard either as higher versus lower’ level" or as inner versus outer 'sphere‘.) The contrary of this separation-or battery of separations-is not inter-relationist holism but something that I would like to call the intimacy of the mind's embodiment and embeddedness in the world. The term 'intimacy' is meant to suggest more than just necessary interrelation or interdependence but a kind of commingling or integralness of mind, body,and world-that is, to undermine their very distinctness. The challenge is as much to spell out what this could mean as to make a case for it. Indeed, no sooner does such a possibility seem intelligible at all, than ways bring out its plausibility and significance turn up everywhere. -/- There is little original in what follows. The strategy will be to bring some well known principles of systems analysis to bear on the mind- body-world 'system' in a way that refocuses questions of division and unity, and then to canvas a selection of investigations and proposals - some fairly recent, others not-in the light of this new focus. The hope is that these superficially disparate ideas, none of them new, will seem to converge around the theme of intimacy in a way that illuminates and supports them all. Sorting and and aligning issues in this manner has sometimes been discussed under titles like 'embedded computation’ and 'situated cognition'. (shrink)

Interactional expertise is said to be a form of knowledge achieved in a linguistic community and, therefore, obtained entirely outside practice. Supposedly, it is not or only minimally sustained by the so-called embodied knowledge. Here, drawing upon studies in contemporary neuroscience and cognitive psychology, I propose that ‘derived’ embodiment is deeply involved in competent language use and, therefore, also in interactional expertise. My argument consists of two parts. First, I argue for a strong relationship among language acquisition, language use (...) and the real world (i.e. the world accessible to the senses). Biological constraints in very early childhood anchor language to the body. These constraints are by-products of our evolutionary peculiarity that we gain because of our physical and psychological immaturity at birth. Thus, infancy is predominantly concerned with the bodily needs and experiences of the concrete while language acquisition takes place. Particular interest in the concrete furnishes our linguistic world and installs ‘concrete’ language as the principal constituent of competent language use. Second, I argue that well-established concrete language implicitly and explicitly elicits mental representations, namely partial reactivations of sensorimotor states that occur during experience. These are stepping stones by which we subsequently make sense of expressions in new linguistic areas. Like any competent language user, the interactional expert, therefore, prompts multimodal imagination and re-enacts concrete experiences when acquiring linguistic knowledge pertaining to a specialist field. Finally, I outline the characteristics of those imaginative powers to identify mechanisms that improve interactional expertise and discuss the obvious relation between interactional expertise and ordinary knowledge acquisition after the concrete language stage. (shrink)

Due to the simultaneous linguistic and musical quality of voicing, voiced breath poses theoretical challenges to notions of ‘embodiment’, especially as they are used in theatre practice/studies. In this article, I make two intertwining arguments to address questions of the place of semantic meaning and conscious thought in performance practice/theories as they arose in my anthropological engagement with laboratory theatre. Firstly, theatre and performance practice/theories keen to embrace ‘embodiment’ often leave out things like explicit analysis, reflexivity, referential or (...) semantic meaning and so on because, as my ethnography shows, they are judged as secondary, and thus belonging implicitly more closely to disembodied ‘mind’. I engage in anthropological comparison to show how other ways of being/knowing complicate any sense in which practices labelled ‘embodied’ can be seen as primary in contrast to conscious, linguistic or explicit knowing. Instead I outline an onto/epistemology of emergence that offers an alternative imaginary in which no binaries exist a priori. Rather all is a matter of ongoing mutual constitution. Secondly, while the discourses of embodiment in performance practice/theory that I critique may continue to reproduce dualist assumptions, theatre approaches influenced by Grotowski’s anti-method, focusing on continual revision of practice, offer insights for scholarship concerned with the ontological indistinguishability of social, psychological and physical phenomena. Laboratory theatre practices offer a prospective way of knowing, enabling an exploration of the ontological equality of breath, in this case in song, and the sorts of meaningfulness associated with language and analysis. In 2011, my Nanna (grandmother in Maltese) passed away in circumstances that remain traumatic to me. I turned with to my daily practices to find ways to scream, to grieve: to anthropology and to a particular practice of song in laboratory theatre, where encounter is actively sought. Arising from ethnographic and analytic engagement with such practices, in this article, I offer an anthropologically inflected critique of notions of embodiment in performance studies and performance philosophy. I present the alternative imaginary of emergence onto/epistemologies and the prospective investigative practices of laboratory theatre. I do this by weaving autobiographical, ethnographic and anthropological threads to explore my own practice relating to the work of my collaborator Gey Pin Ang, a Singaporean director, actor and pedagogue. (shrink)

My aim in this chapter is to explain how and why all human cognition depends on the body for Leibniz. I will show that there are three types of dependence: (a) the body is needed in order to supply materials, or content, for thinking; (b) the body is needed in order to give us the opportunity for the discovery of innate ideas; and (c) the body is needed in order to provide sensory notions as vehicles of thought. The third type (...) is intimately connected to the faculty of the imagination, which supplies the sensory vehicles of thought. Hence, the paper will also examine Leibniz’s account of that faculty and its operations. Before doing any of this, however, I will address the elephant in the room: Leibniz’s claim that mind and body do not interact at all, metaphysically speaking. The correspondence between mind and body is merely a matter of what he calls ‘pre-established harmony’. At first glance, this Leibnizian doctrine may suggest a radical disembodiment of all human cognition. Yet, I will argue that this is not the case and that, quite to the contrary, pre-established harmony requires that cognition is embodied in one important sense. (shrink)

The pregnant subject has a unique experience of her body. The dichotomy between self and other, self and world, breaks down. She can experience a positive narcissism and sense of process. Some conceptualizations and practices of contemporary medicine, however, can alienate the pregnant subject from this bodily experience. Keywords: Embodiment, Split Subjectivity CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

Embodied Cognition is the kind of view that is all trees, no forest. Mounting experimental evidence gives it momentum in fleshing out the theoretical problems inherent in Cognitivists’ separation of mind and body. But the more its proponents compile such evidence, the more the fundamental concepts of Embodied Cognition remain in the dark. This conundrum is nicely exemplified by Pecher and Zwaan’s book, Grounding Cognition, which is a programmatic attempt to rally together an array of empirical results and linguistic data, (...) and its successes in this endeavor nicely epitomize current directions among the various research provinces of Embodied Cognition. The untoward drawback, however, is that such successes are symptomatic of the growing imbalance between experimental progress and theoretical interrogation. In particular, one of the theoretical cornerstones of Embodied Cognition —namely, the very concept of grounding under investigation here—continues to go unilluminated. Hence, the advent of this volume indicates that—now more than ever—the concept of grounding is in dire need of some plain old-fashioned conceptual analysis. In that sense, Embodied Cognition is grounded until further notice. (shrink)

There are two main pathways to investigate the sense of body ownership, (i) through the study of the conditions of embodiment for an object to be experienced as one's own and (ii) through the analysis of the deficits in patients who experience a body part as alien. Here, I propose that E is embodied if some properties of E are processed in the same way as the properties of one's body. However, one must distinguish among different types of (...) embodiment, and only self-specific embodiment can lead to feelings of ownership. I address issues such as the functional role and the dynamics of embodiment, degrees and measures of ownership, and shared body representations between self and others. I then analyse the interaction between ownership and disownership. On the one hand, I show that there is no evidence that in the Rubber Hand Illusion, the rubber hand replaces the biological hand. On the other hand, I argue that the sense of disownership experienced by patients towards their body part cannot be reduced to the mere lack of ownership. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the nature of “meaning” and “meaningfulness” in the context of instrumental music education. By doing so, I propose to expand the ways in which instrumental music educators conceive their mission and the ways in which we may instill meaning in people’s lives. Traditionally, pursuits of philosophical deliberation have claimed that meaningfulness comes from either personal happiness (e.g., Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill) or an impersonal sense of duty (e.g., St. Augustine, (...) St. Thomas Aquinas, and Immanuel Kant). However, philosopher Susan Wolf (2010) criticizes these positions in favor of a broader perspective, one that arises from understanding that there is a third sort of value, namely “meaningfulness.” Rightly understanding meaningfulness may help us engage more fully with a greater sense and understanding of the full potentials of eudaimonia: a life of significance and value for oneself and one’s community. Therefore, this paper links meaningfulness to a 4-E (embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended) account of “sense-making” in/for instrumental music education. In doing so, I discuss the aims of public-school music education; aims that engage teachers and students in meaningfulness—a meaningfulness that is ethical, embodied, enacted, and extended—in, with, and through musics and, more directly, “instrumental” music making. (shrink)

Human beings can be said to naturally seek familiarity in their environment for survival purposes, and this can explain why the mere-exposure effect, where being merely exposed to external factors in our environment, can increase preference for these factors. Familiarity in this sense can thus be framed as important for affect and preference formation and considered built upon both the subjective process of fluency and the objects of experience being processed. The feeling of uncanniness is often considered the opposite (...) of familiarity, yet within its semantic vicinity. By considering the term ‘uncanny’ as having a double meaning linked to both familiarity and unfamiliarity, however, this paper will show how this ambiguity allows for a semantic relatedness of this concept to process fluency rather than familiarity. This connection will in turn be shown to have ramifications for affect through the proposal of a fourth model of process fluency: The Embodied Fluency Model. Through consideration of Mori’s shinkawan, Freud’s notion of the uncanny, and Heidegger’s connection between uncanniness and Angst, an exploration into conceiving how fluency and uncanniness share attributes that allow for a different view on affect is propounded. (shrink)

The turn to descriptive studies of ethics is inspired by the sense that our ethical theorizing needs to engage ethnography, history, and literature in order to address the full complexity of ethical life. This article examines four books that describe the cultivation of virtue in diverse cultural contexts, two concerning early China and two concerning Islam in recent years. All four emphasize the significance of embodiment, and they attend to the complex ways in which choice and agency interact (...) with the authority of tradition. In considering these books, this article examines the relations between our academic claims concerning the self and ethics, conceptual or theoretical claims made in the elite writings of traditions, and the lived experiences of the people we study. The conclusion turns to our methodological foundations for studying these topics both comparatively and constructively. (shrink)

This study offers an embodied, action-oriented perspective on metaphor. It weaves together 3 theoretical ideas: (a) Lakoff & Johnson's (1980a, 1980b, 1980c; Lakoff, 1993) idea that metaphors are cross-domain conceptual mappings, (b) Lakoff & Johnson's (1999) idea that individuals are coupled to the world through embodied interactions with the environment, on which their sense of what is real is based, and (c) Gibbs's (1999) nascent idea that metaphors can be off-loaded into the cultural world. I argue that metaphors, as (...) cross-domain mappings, can be directly realized in the coupling of the external settings that frame and sustain one's activities and what people, individually and collectively, do to and in the world. A comparison of conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual blending theory is made from this perspective. I argue that the blending theory is overly stretched when it is applied to an analysis of metaphorical activity that can be jointly explained by cross-domain mappings and the external structures that constrain and modulate the activity. As for the conceptual metaphor theory, I argue that the theory is overly restrictive if domains are construed exclusively in neural terms. (shrink)

This paper develops a taxonomy of kinds of actions that can be seen in group agency, human–machine interactions, and virtual realities. These kinds of actions are special in that they are not embodied in the ordinary sense. I begin by analysing the notion of embodiment into three separate assumptions that together comprise what I call the Embodiment View. Although this view may find support in paradigmatic cases of agency, I suggest that each of its assumptions can be (...) relaxed. With each assumption that is given up, a different kind of disembodied action becomes available. The taxonomy gives a systematic overview and suggests that disembodied actions have the same theoretical relevance as the actions of any ordinarily embodied human. (shrink)

1 INTIMACY Among Descartes's most and consequential achievements has been his of the mental as an independent ontological domain. By taking the mind as a substance, with cognitions as its modes, he accorded them a status as self-standing and determinate on their own, without essential regard to other entities. Only with this metaphysical conception in place, could the idea of solipsism-the idea of an intact ego existing with nothing else in the universe-so much as make sense. And behind that (...) engine have trailed the sorry boxcars of hyperbolic doubt. the mind-body problem, the problem of the external world, the problem of other minds, and so on. -/- Although the assumptions have been under fire, off and on. at least since Hegel-including with renewed intensity in recent years … the Cartesian separation that is still so pervasive as to be almost invisible. In particular, inter-relationist accounts retain a principled distinction between the mental and the corporeal-a distinction that is reflected in contrasts like semantics versus syntax, the space of reasons versus the space of causes, or the intentional versus the physical. (Notice that each of these contrasts can be heard either as higher versus lower’ level" or as inner versus outer 'sphere‘.) The contrary of this separation-or battery of separations-is not inter-relationist holism but something that I would like to call the intimacy of the mind's embodiment and embeddedness in the world. The term 'intimacy' is meant to suggest more than just necessary interrelation or interdependence but a kind of commingling or integralness of mind, body,and world-that is, to undermine their very distinctness. The challenge is as much to spell out what this could mean as to make a case for it. Indeed, no sooner does such a possibility seem intelligible at all, than ways bring out its plausibility and significance turn up everywhere. -/- There is little original in what follows. The strategy will be to bring some well known principles of systems analysis to bear on the mind- body-world 'system' in a way that refocuses questions of division and unity, and then to canvas a selection of investigations and proposals - some fairly recent, others not-in the light of this new focus. The hope is that these superficially disparate ideas, none of them new, will seem to converge around the theme of intimacy in a way that illuminates and supports them all. Sorting and and aligning issues in this manner has sometimes been discussed under titles like 'embedded computation’ and 'situated cognition'. (shrink)

The extended mind view and the embodied-grounded view of cognition and language are typically considered as rather independent perspectives. In this paper we propose a possible integration of the two views and support it proposing the idea of “Words As social Tools” (WAT). In this respect, we will propose that words, also due to their social and public character, can be conceived as quasi-external devices that extend our cognition. Moreover, words function like tools in that they enlarge the bodily space (...) of action thus modifying our sense of body. To support our proposal, we review the relevant literature on tool-use and on words as tools and report recent evidence indicating that word use leads to an extension of space close to the body. In addition, we outline a model of the neural processes that may underpin bodily space extension via word use and may reflect possible effects on cognition of the use of words as external means. We also discuss how reconciling the two perspectives can help to overcome the limitations they encounter if considered independently. (shrink)

Environmental-embodied Education: Virtues for Social Hygiene and Self-enjoyment. The contemporary debates concerning environmental education and ethics are continuously growing, developing new ways of perceiving the self in relation to the biotic community and to nature as a whole. Sustainability virtue ethics is a field that can provide a theoretical and practical structure for what it means to live a good and pleasant life, building attitudes characterized by caring, awareness, awe and responsibility. The aim of this paper is to draw a (...) map of how to generate a context that facilitates a real transformation in the way individuals relate to nature, an education for empathy, with a sense of belonging and a maximum of adaptability. Based on my experience as an educator in a green school (Green School Romania) and as a researcher in the field of moral eco-pedagogy, I intent to talk about how environmental experiential education is an Archimedean point for what it means to develop a sensuous enjoyment and self-enjoyment in the biotic community, moving away from defensiveness and unjustified fears. In the context of risk management and long-term strategies for protecting and preserving the delicate equilibrium of life on Earth, environmental virtue ethics represents a necessary and helpful tool, based on interaction and on a focus on the process, discovering the miracle of being aligned with the rhythms of nature. This paper is designed to stand up against the instrumentalism and the dominant egoistic attitude of being above nature, trying to replace them with the attitude of fitting into nature with curiosity, simplicity and serenity. Using the model of moral eco-pedagogy (experiential learning about, for and from the environment) and non-violent communication, I will show that the individual begins to become that self that one truly is, a process of self- realization and engagement with an impact on how he relates to the moral patients and the natural world. (shrink)

Is bodily awareness a condition on bodily action? I approach this question by weaving an argument based on considerations from action theory, the phenomenology of embodied agency, and from the psychology and neuroscience of action. In this paper, I discuss two accounts on which bodily awareness is a condition on bodily action. The first is an influential philosophical account from O'Shaughnessy, which claims that bodily awareness is necessary for the online control of bodily action. I argue that there are empirical (...) counterexamples to O'Shaughnessy's account. Instead I propose an account on which the capacity for bodily awareness is a condition on our capacity for ordinary bodily action. This alternative account does justice to the causal and functional character of ordinary bodily action as well as its phenomenology. It is also consistent with the psychology and neuroscience of action. I provide a two-stage argument for my view. The first stage shows that a sense of the spatial possibilities of one's body is a condition on intentionally acting with one's body. The second stage demonstrates that bodily awareness is a condition on a normal afferented agent's sense of the actions open to him through examining the role of bodily awareness in motor imagery and the role of motor imagery in preparatory processes for everyday actions. (shrink)

This paper suggests that the enactive approach to ethics could benefit from engaging a dialogue with the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas, a philosopher who has given ethics a decisive role in the understanding of our social life. Taking the enactive approach of Colombetti and Torrance as a starting point, we show how Levinas’ philosophy, with the key notions of face, otherness, and responsibility among others can complement and enrich the enactive view of ethics. Specifically, we argue that Levinas can provide, (...) on the one hand, a phenomenological characterisation of ethics itself, of its nature and fundamental meaning, and on the other, an account of how sociality, affectivity and embodiment, as presented in Colombetti and Torrance’s work, combine to bring about the ethical experience. However, we also point out that introducing Levinas to the enactive approach could be challenging. It is not obvious how sense-making and value-making, as centred on the precariousness and potential death of the subject, would account for the ethical experience as grounded on the precariousness and potential death of the other. (shrink)

Being social creatures in a complex world, we do things together. We act jointly. While cooperation, in its broadest sense, can involve merely getting out of each other’s way, or refusing to deceive other people, it is also essential to human nature that it involves more active forms of collaboration and coordination (Tomasello 2009; Sterelny 2012). We collaborate with others in many ordinary activities which, though at times similar to those of other animals, take unique and diverse cultural and (...) psychological forms in human beings. But we also work closely and interactively with each other in more peculiar and flexible practices which are in distinctive ways both species-specific and culturally and historically contingent: from team sports to shared labour, from committee work to mass demonstrations, from dancing to reminiscing together about old times. (shrink)

Many models of cognitive ability and disability rely on the idea of cognition as abstract reasoning processes implemented in the brain. Research in cognitive science, however, emphasizes the way that our cognitive skills are embodied in our more basic capacities for sensing and moving, and the way that tools in the external environment can extend the cognitive abilities of our brains. This chapter addresses the implications of research in embodied cognition and extended cognition for how we think about cognitive impairment (...) and rehabilitation, how cognitive reserve mitigates neural impairment, and the distinction between medical and social models of disability. (shrink)

The traditional approach in cognitive sciences holds that cognition is a matter of manipulating abstract symbols followingcertain rules. According to this view, the body is merely an input/output device, which allows the computationalsystem—the brain—to acquire new input data by means of the senses and to act in the environment following its com-mands. In opposition to this classical view, defenders of embodied cognition (EC) stress the relevance of the body inwhich the cognitive agent is embedded in their explanation of cognitive processes. (...) From a representationalist frameworkregarding our conscious experience, in this article, I will offer a novel argument in favor of EC and show that cognitionconstitutively—and no merely causally—depends upon body activity beyond that in the brain. In particular, I will arguethat in order to solve the problem derived from the empirical evidence in favor of the possibility of shifted spectrum,representationalist should endorse the view that experiences concern its subject: the content of experience isde se.Ishow that this claim perfectly matches the phenomenological observation and helps explaining the subjective characterof the experience. Furthermore, I argue that entertaining this kind of representation constitutively depends on bodilyactivity. Consequently, insofar as cognition depends on consciousness, it is embodied. (shrink)

In our culture, intelligence, emotions and embodied intuitions continue to be seen as separate categories. The body is regarded as a medium of identity as well as social and sexual appeal, but neglected as the ground of embodied existence and silent knowledge, or the full understanding of the human condition. Prevailing educational and pedagogic practices also still separate the mental and intellectual capacities from emotions and the senses, and the multifarious dimensions of human embodiment.

This article argues that psychological discourse fails miserably to provide an account of learning that can explain how humans come to understand, particularly understanding that has been grasped meaningfully. Part of the problem with psychological approaches to learning is that they are disconnected from the integral role embodiment plays in how I perceive myself, other persons and other things in the world. In this sense, it is argued that a central tenet of any educational learning involves being taught (...) to perceive, come to know ourselves and the world around us. This may seem like stating the obvious, but there is a general tendency to take the experience of perception for granted. Since phenomenology according to Merleau-Ponty recognises that perceptual experience is the basis of ‘all rationality’ makes it particularly apt for explaining the significant role embodiment plays in understanding what has been learned, and understanding that has been grasped meaningfully. What makes this account of embodied learning educationally significant is that the whole person is treated as a whole being, permitting the person to experience him or herself as a holistic and synthesised acting, feeling, thinking being-in-the-world, rather than as separate physical and mental qualities which bear no relation to each other. (shrink)

Mike Anderson1 has given us a thoughtful and useful field guide: Not in the genre of a bird-watcher’s guide which is carried in the field and which contains detailed descriptions of possible sightings, but in the sense of a guide to a field (in this case embodied cognition) which aims to identify that field’s general principles and properties. I’d like to make some comments that will hopefully complement Anderson’s work, highlighting points of agreement and disagreement between his view of (...) the field and my own, and acting as a devil’s advocate in places where further discussion seems to be required. Given the venue for this guide, we can safely restrict the discussion to embodied artificial intelligence (EAI), even if such work draws on notions of embodied cognition.. (shrink)

This essay explores the intersection of racism, racial embodiment theory and the recent hostility aimed at immigrants and foreigners in the United States, especially the targeting of people of Latin American descent and Latino/as. Anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner sentiment is racist. It is the embodiment of racial privilege for those who wield it and the materiality of racial difference for those it is used against. This manifestation of racial privilege and difference rests upon a redrawing of the color line (...) that is meant towards preserving exclusive categories of political membership. The charge of racism, however, is elided by the fact that this hostility takes the form of a specious embracement of law and lawfulness. “Illegal” in this sense not only captures the actions of those who enter the United States through clandestine or informal means, but, in light of the history of immigration and citizen- ship law, the term operates as a racial trope that designates non-white status, thus marginalizing and alienating certain immigrants from ongoing nation-formation processes. I explain the source for anti-immigrant hostility in the United States, which I take to be connected to the longevity of white normativity as the basis for American identity. I then critically assess how the idea of national belonging is crucial to the perpetuation of white-ways-of-being, especially when citizenship has historically been a venue for the embodiment of racial and even colonial privilege. I conclude by posing several questions about the nature of racial identities and racism that suggest new avenues for further research on racial embodiment in a “postracial” era. pp. 65–90. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the central role of the notion of " habit " (Gewohnheit) in Hegel's theory of " embodiment " (Verleiblichung) and to show that the philosophical outcome of the Anthropology is that habit, understood as a sensorimotor life form, is not only an enabling condition for there to be mindedness, but is more strongly an ontological constitutive condition of all its levels of manifestation. Moreover, I will argue that Hegel's approach somehow makes (...) a model of embodied cognition available which offers a unified account of the three main senses of embodiment understood as both a physiological, a functional, and a phenomenological process. In this sense Hegel's approach to habit can make a useful contribution to the contemporary debate on embodiment in philosophy of mind, the cognitive sciences, and action theory. For a long time habit in 20th century philosophy and science has been mostly read in a negative way, identified with mechanical and repetitive routine. The reconstruction of Hegel’s approach is particularly relevant here and can fruitfully contribute to this discussion, since it offers us not only a model that assigns to habit a positive constitutive role in the formation of embodied human mindedness but which also overcomes the dualism between habitual motor routine and intentional activities that is prevalent nowadays in the cognitive sciences and in action theory, and allows for some sense of natural agency as belonging to animal life. Furthermore, Hegel’s approach cuts across the great divide between associationist and holistic approaches to habit that has for a long time dominated the philosophical debate on habit and still shapes the current opposition between classical cognitive science and embodied cognitive science. (shrink)

The present chapter discusses the implications of virtual reality for the theory and practice of embodied cognitive science. The chapter discusses how recent technological innovations are poised to reshape our understanding of the materially-embodied and environmentally-situated mind, providing us with a new means of studying the mechanisms responsible for intelligent behavior. The chapter also discusses how a synthetically-oriented shift in our approach to embodied intelligence alters our view of familiar problems, most notably the distinction between embedded and extended cognition. The (...) chapter concludes by challenging the idea that virtual worlds ought to be seen as nothing more than a scientific ‘sandpit’ for the study of the embodied mind. Some forms of embodied intelligence can, I suggest, exist solely in virtual reality. In this sense, the ‘Matrix’ is not just a means of testing ideas about the forms of embodied intelligence that inhabit our own physical reality; it is also a means of creating entirely new forms of embodied intelligence. It is by building virtual worlds that we open the door to a new reality—one that is home to a potentially infinite variety of embodied, embedded, and perhaps even extended beings. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for an embodied, embedded approach to predictive processing and thus align the framework with situated cognition. The recent popularity of theories conceiving of the brain as a predictive organ has given rise to two broad camps in the literature that I callfree energy enactivismandcognitivist predictive processing. The two approaches vary in scope and methodology. The scope ofcognitivist predictive processingis narrow and restricts cognition to brain processes and structures; it does not consider the body-beyond-brain and the (...) environment as constituents of cognitive processes.Free energy enactivism, on the other hand, includes all self-organizing systems that minimize free energy (including non-living systems) and thus does not offer any unique explanations for more complex cognitive phenomena that are unique to human cognition. Furthermore, because of its strong commitment to the mind-life continuity thesis, it does not provide an explanation of what distinguishes more sophisticated cognitive systems from simple systems. The account that I develop in this paper rejects both of these radical extremes. Instead, I propose a compromise that highlights the necessary components of predictive processing by making use of a mechanistic methodology of explanation. The starting point of the argument in this paper is that despite the interchangeable use of the terms, prediction error minimization and the free energy principle are not identical. But this distinction does not need to disrupt thestatus quoof the literature if we consider an alternative approach: Embodied, Embedded Predictive Processing (EEPP). EEPP accommodates the free energy principle, as argued for by free energy enactivism, but it also allows for mental representations in its explanation of cognition. Furthermore, EEPP explains how prediction error minimization is realized but, unlike cognitivist PP, it allocates a constitutive role to the body in cognition. Despite highlighting concerns regarding cognitivist PP, I do not wish to discredit the role of the neural domain or representations as free energy enactivism does. Neural structures and processes undeniably contribute to the minimization of prediction error but the role of the body is equally important. On my account, prediction error minimization and free energy minimization are deeply dependent on the body of an agent, such that the body-beyond-brain plays aconstitutiverole in cognitive processing. I suggest that the body plays three constitutive roles in prediction error minimization: The bodyregulatescognitive activity, ensuring that cognition and action are intricately linked. The body acts asdistributorin the sense that it carries some of the cognitive load by fulfilling the function of minimizing prediction error. Finally, the body serves toconstrainthe information that is processed by an agent. In fulfilling these three roles, the agent and environment enter into a bidirectional relation through influencing and modeling the structure of the other. This connects EEPP to the free energy principle because the whole embodied agent minimizes free energy in virtue of being a model of its econiche. This grants the body a constitutive role as part of the collection of mechanisms that minimize prediction error and free energy. The body can only fulfill its role when embedded in an environment, of which it is a model. In this sense, EEPP offers the most promising alternative to cognitivist predictive processing and free energy enactivism. (shrink)

Emerging neurotechnologies, such as brain-computer interfaces, interact closely with a user’s body by enabling actions controlled with brain activity. This can have a profound impact on the user’s experience of movement, the sense of agency and other body-and action-related aspects. In this introduction to the special issue “Mechanized Brains, Embodied Technologies”, we reflect on the relationships between embodiment, movement and agency that are addressed in the collected papers.

This article offers a philosophical-empirical account of embodied skilful performance in the practice of plant biotechnology. Drawing on the work of Merleau-Ponty and others, we elaborate how skilful performance emerges from and through reciprocal relations encompassing the body-in-the-world and the world-in-the-body. The contribution of this article lies in offering an account of skilful performance that is attentive to a perceiving, motile, feeling body entwined with world. In genetically modifying plants, scientists direct their senses of touch and vision to manipulating plant (...) materials and matter, ‘reading’ subtle changes in tissue cultures, plantlets and so on. In rhythmic movements, they extend their bodies through skilful use of complex equipment, while calling on ‘intuition’ to guide their work. Skilful performance, then, relies on our lived body that is not merely a physical object among other objects, nor a passive instrument for the mind, but dynamic and inescapably entwined with people and things in a world in flux. Bringing to the fore how perceiving, motile, feeling bodies are implicated in skilful performance has significant implications for education and workplace training. (shrink)

The paper presents and discusses the “which-is-which content of handedness,” the meaning of left as left and right as right, as a possible candidate for the idea of a genuine embodied cognitive content. After showing that the Ozma barrier, the non-transferability of the meaning of left and right, provides a kind of proof of the non-descriptive, indexical nature of the which-is-which content of handedness, arguments are presented which suggest that the classical representationalist account of cognition faces a perplexing problem of (...) underdetermination of reference of left and right in the which-is-which sense. By way of contrast, no such problems occur in a framework were embodied contents are not mediated by some extra body model which carries the representational power, but are instead directly represented. (shrink)

In this chapter we consider the theories of embodied cognition and extended mind with respect to the human ability to engage in numerical cognition. Such an enquiry requires first distinguishing between our innate number sense and the sort of numerical reasoning that is unique to humans. We provide anthropological and linguistic research to defend the thesis that places the body at the center of our development of numerical reasoning. We then draw on archaeological research to suggest a rough date (...) for when ancient humans first were able to represent numerical information beyond the body and in enduring material artifacts. We conclude by briefly describing how these capacities for embodied and extended numerical cognition shaped our world. (shrink)

Reading, even when silent and individual, is a social phenomenon and has often been studied as such. Complementary to this view, research has begun to explore how reading is embodied beyond simply being ‘wired’ in the brain. This article brings the social and embodied perspectives together in a very literal sense. Reporting a qualitative study of reading practices across student focus groups from six European countries, it identifies an underexplored factor in reading behaviour and experience. This factor is the (...) sheer physical presence, and concurrent activity, of other people in the environment where one engages in individual silent reading. The primary goal of the study was to explore the role and possible associations of a number of variables (text type, purpose, device) in selecting generic (e.g. indoors vs outdoors) as well as specific (e.g. home vs library) reading environments. Across all six samples included in the study, participants spontaneously attested to varied, and partly surprising, forms of sensitivity to company and social space in their daily efforts to align body with mind for reading. The article reports these emergent trends and discusses their potential implications for research and practice. (shrink)

Based on in-depth interviews, this article examines a sample of 48 Canadian women’s feelings about their changed postpartum bodies, their sense of self, and the factors that affect both. Our findings suggest that understanding women’s postpartum feelings requires contextualizing them in the work of infant care and women’s life circumstances, as well as ideologies about mothering and feminine appearance. Motherhood afforded the women in this study a new appreciation of their bodies, and a positive embodied sense of themselves, (...) but only if they felt their bodies performed maternal functions well. Concerns about appearance persisted and became especially salient when women faced the return to paid work. Moreover, varied life circumstances influenced women’s overall feelings about their changed bodies as insecurities were displaced onto women’s body images. (shrink)

“I quite rightly pass for an atheist,” Jacques Derrida announces in Circumfession. Grace Jantzen's suggestion that the poststructuralist critique of modernity can also be trained on atheism helps us make sense of this playfully cryptic statement: although Derrida sympathizes with the “idea” of atheism, he is wary of the modern brand of atheism, with its insistence on rationally arranging—straightening out—religion. In this paper, I will argue that poststructural feminism, with its focus on embodied epistemology, offers a way to re-explain (...) Derrida's “I rightly pass,” and also to carry it forward. Poststructural feminist atheism leads us through Derrida to an embodied disbelief drawing on three dimensions of poststructural feminism: feminist epistemology and material feminism, relationality, and affect theory. (shrink)

Local foodshed proponents in the United States seek to change the food system through campaigns to “buy local” and to rediscover “good food” in the local foodshed. Presumably, common sense dictates that the word “local” signifies spatial proximity to the consumer. For some populations, however, both the terms “local” and “local food” signify various different meanings. The local food definition generally used by scholars and activists alike as “geographically proximate food” is unhelpfully narrow. Localist rhetoric often does not incorporate (...) the food choices and practices of immigrants, migrants, and refugees. In this paper, I report the various characterizations of local food among Filipino immigrants in San Diego, California: (1) geography-based local food; (2) (US) America-based local food; (3) community-based local food; and (4) immigrant identity-based local food. Local foodshed proponents should acknowledge those who have a starkly different definition of “local”—those who possess translocal subjectivities, for whom “local-ness” is both mobile and embodied. My study underscores how the movement of food—or its containment within a geographic space—cannot be viewed in isolation from the movement of people. (shrink)

Originally published in 1965. For hundreds of years the thinking of philosophers, psychologists, and theologians on the problem of the mind’s relation to the body was dominated by the Cartesian notion that mind and matter are distinct substances. That Descartes also held that there is a union of mind and matter, in a person, has largely been ignored. This may be because, as he admitted in his private correspondence, it is impossible to think of mind and matter both as being (...) distinct substances and also as being, in some sense, united. The fact of mind being united with matter in a person – our experience of ourselves as embodied minds – cannot be accounted for on Cartesian principles. This book rejects the panaceas of the Double Aspect Theory and the Identity Theory and investigates the possibility of accommodating this experience within a conceptual framework derived from Kant, the basis of which is the concept of mind, not as immaterial substance, but as a subject related, in experience, to its objects. (shrink)

The ‘embodied self’ is the purposeful dimension of any organism capable of acting toward a unified motivation to maintain a self-organizing structure by appropriating, replacing, and reproducing material components to serve as substrata. We reflect on the ‘self’ in this sense when we direct attention away from the objects of experience and toward the way our bodies motivate our experiences in terms of emotional purposes of the organism, by looking, searching, shifting the focus of attention, etc.---actions rather than reactions (...) of our bodies and nervous systems. The ‘transcendental self,’ by contrast, cannot be identified with any particular embodied state of consciousness, because it is that which unifies all the particular stages and gives them direction. It is argued here that affect and motivation are the keys to understanding and unifying the transcendental and embodied selves, because both reflect the organism’s self-organizing tendency; and that we can know ourselves by understanding the way affect and motivation shape the pattern and direction of our stream of consciousness. (shrink)