Cognition is embodied when it is deeply dependent upon features ofthe physical body of an agent, that is, when aspects of theagent's body beyond the brain play a significant causal orphysically constitutive role in cognitive processing.

In general, dominant views in the philosophy of mind and cognitivescience have considered the body as peripheral to understanding thenature of mind and cognition. Proponents of embodied cognitive scienceview this as a serious mistake. Sometimes the nature of the dependenceof cognition on the body is quite unexpected, and suggests new ways ofconceptualizing and exploring the mechanics of cognitiveprocessing.

Embodied cognitive science encompasses a loose-knit family ofresearch programs in the cognitive sciences that often share acommitment to critiquing and even replacing traditional approaches tocognition and cognitive processing. Empirical research on embodiedcognition has exploded in the past 10 years. As the bibliography forthis article attests, the various bodies of work that will be discussedrepresent a serious alternative to the investigation of cognitivephenomena.

Relatively recent work on the embodiment of cognition provides muchfood for thought for empirically-informed philosophers of mind. This isin part because of the rich range of phenomena that embodied cognitivescience has studied. But it is also in part because those phenomena areoften thought to challenge dominant views of the mind, such as thecomputational and representational theories of mind, at the heart oftraditional cognitive science. And they have sometimes been taken toundermine standard positions in the philosophy of mind, such as theidea that the mind is identical to, or even realized in, the brain.

• 1. Embodied vs Traditional Cognitive Science
• 2. Some Historical Anchors for Embodied Cognitive Science
  • 2.1 Metaphor and Cognition
  • 2.2 Enactive Cognition.
  • 2.3 Rethinking Robotics.
  • 2.4 Ecological Perception.
  • 2.5 Dynamicism and Development
  • 2.6 Phenomenology
• 3. What Embodied Cognition Is
• 4. Embodiment vs Tradition on Three Issues
  • 4.1 Modularity
  • 4.2 Mental Representation.
  • 4.3 Nativism
• 5. Empirical Domains for Embodied Cognition
  • 5.1 Visual Consciousness
  • 5.2 Concepts
  • 5.3 Memory.
  • 5.4 Other Minds.
  • 5.5 Moral Cognition.
• 6. Sharper Divides Over Embodied Cognition
  • 6.1 Payoffs for empirical research.
  • 6.2 Accommodation by traditional cognitive science
  • 6.3 Embodied cognition and the extended mind thesis.
  • 6.4 Agency, the self, and subjectivity.
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Embodied vs Traditional Cognitive Science

Consider four evocative examples of phenomena that have motivatedembodied cognitive science.

1. We typically gesture when we speak toone another, and gesturing facilitates not just communication butlanguage processing itself (McNeill 1992).
2. Vision is oftenaction-guiding, and bodily movement and the feedback it generates aremore tightly integrated into at least some visual processing than hasbeen anticipated by traditional models of vision (O'Regan andNoë 2001).
3. There are neurons,mirror neurons, thatfire not only when we undertake an action, but do so when we observeothers undertaking the same actions (Rizzolatti and Craighero 2004).
4. We are often able to perform cognitive tasks, such as remembering, moreeffectively by using our bodies and even parts of our surroundingenvironments to off-load storage and simplify the nature of thecognitive processing (Donald 1991).

Although phenomena such as (1)–(4) motivate embodiedcognitive science, appealing to such phenomena to arrive at moresubstantive conclusions that have been drawn—for example, thattraditional cognitive science is deeply flawed, or that dominantpositions in the philosophy of mind, such as functionalism, aremistaken—requires further philosophical argument. Because therequisite argumentation typically appeals to other concepts central towork in empirically-informed philosophy of mind and cognitive scienceitself, such as modularity and nativism, debate over embodied cognitionhas become a hot topic in cognitive science in recent years (Adams2010; Aizawa 2007; Chemero 2009; Shapiro 2011).

Traditional cognitive science has certainly conceptualized centralcognitive processing, what we will call cognitionin thenarrow sense, in abstraction from bodily mechanisms of sensoryprocessing and motor control. Research programs within artificialintelligence exemplify this view of cognition in the narrow sense, andthey have been one of the clearest targets of embodied cognitivescience. More positively, embodied cognitive science aims to understandthe full range of perceptual, cognitive, and motor capacities wepossess, cognitionin the broad sense, as capacities that aredependent upon features of the physical body. In this article, weconsider cognition construed both narrowly and broadly, in thesesenses.

Finally by way of introducing embodied cognitive science, we noteits relationship tosituated cognition (Smith 1999, Robbinsand Aydede 2009). As a paradigm within situated cognition, embodiedcognitive science can be distinguished from both the study ofembedded cognition and the thesis ofextendedcognition.

Embodied cognitive science appeals to the idea that cognition deeplydepends on aspects of the agent's body other than the brain.Without the involvement of the body in both sensing and acting,thoughts would be empty, and mental affairs would not exhibit thecharacteristics and properties they do. Work on embedded cognition, bycontrast, draws on the view that cognition deeply depends on thenatural and social environment. By focusing on the strategies organismsuse to off-load cognitive processing onto the environment, this workplaces particular emphasis on the ways in which cognitive activity isdistributed across the agent and her physical, social, and culturalenvironment (Suchman 1987, Hutchins 1995). The thesis of extendedcognition is the claim that cognitive systems themselves extend beyondthe boundary of the individual organism. On this view, features of anagent's physical, social, and cultural environment can do more thandistribute cognitive processing: they may well partially constitutethat agent's cognitive system. (Clark and Chalmers 1998, R. Wilson2004; A. Clark 2008, Menary 2010).

We follow recent authors (A. Clark 2008; Rupert 2009b; Shapiro 2010,2011) in holding that while embodied cognitive science can be neatlydistinguished, in principle, from both of these other forms of situatedcognition, and that there are times when this is useful (even crucial),the broader philosophical issues in play are also revealingly discussedsometimes by considering these views together. Thus, although thisarticle focuses on the specific ways in which cognition depends on thephysical body, it also discusses situated cognition more generally, asappropriate.

2. Some Historical Anchors for Embodied Cognitive Science

A consideration (Sections 2.1–2.3) of three landmarkpublications provides a historical anchor for understanding early workon embodied cognition in the narrow sense: George Lakoff and MarkJohnson'sMetaphors We Live By (1980), the enactiveperspective on cognition developed by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson,and Eleanor Rosch in theirThe Embodied Mind (1991); and workon robotics and computationally intelligent action summarized andanalyzed in Andy Clark'sBeing There: Putting Mind, World,and Body Back Together (1997). We then turn more briefly toinfluential work on embodied cognition in the broad sense (Sections 2.4–2.5) and on the phenomenological tradition within continentalphilosophy that has inspired more recent embodied cognitive science(Section 2.6).

2.1 Metaphor and Cognition

Figurative languageclearly plays a role in cognition, and philosophers, linguists, andpsychologists have all contributed to its understanding in cognitivescience (Black 1962; Ortony 1979). Beginning in theirMetaphors WeLive By (1980), George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argued that suchlanguage, and metaphor in particular, was not simply a phenomenon to bestudied in the domain of cognition, but actively structures much ofcognition traditionally thought to be isolated from metaphor. Forexample, many central cognitive processes, such as those concerningspace and time, were, claimed Lakoff and Johnson, both expressed andinfluenced by metaphor (hence “metaphors we live by”). Ifhuman experience is intricately bound up with large-scale metaphors,and both experience and metaphor are shaped up by the kinds of bodieswe have that mediate between agent and world, argued Lakoff andJohnson, then cognition is embodied in a way not anticipated withintraditional cognitive science.

Although Lakoff (1987) and Johnson (1987) developed the basic idea herein different ways (see also Lakoff and Johnson 1999, Johnson 2007), thegeneral flavor of the view they share can be conveyed by considering awell-known example they discuss: that of love as a kind of journey.Those in a romantic relationship are often said to head off together,travel the same path, take wrong turns, retrace their steps, checktheir bearings, and pack their bags. For Lakoff and Johnson, thisnon-literal language is not merely peripheral expression useful foradding bells and whistles to the bustle of communication, but reflectssomething deep about how love is conceptualized. Importantly, thecentral organizing metaphor—love is a journey—involves amapping from one domain (journeys) to another (love), where the sourcedomain is informed by our bodily physicality and the embodiedexperience that we have as creatures who move through the world toachieve purposes and goals.

Spatial concepts, such as “front”, “back”,“up”, and “down”, provide perhaps the clearestexamples in which such embodied experience exists. These concepts arearticulated in terms of our body's position in, and movementthrough, space. Creatures like us that stand upright and move forward,for example, think of things that are “in front of”themselves as located in the line of vision or in terms of thedirection they are moving. Creatures that were long and flat and movedbackwards, by contrast, might have a very different concept of“in front of”, or perhaps none at all. Likewise for otherspatial concepts, such as “up”. We might get a first-handfeel for the embodied nature of such concepts in situations when weapproximate such creatures, such as when we try to use such concepts toguide our action when we are laying down, moving backwards, or evenlooking in a rear-vision mirror. The experience of“upness”, proponents of embodied cognition claim, dependson the particular kind of body we have, and how that body interactswith its surroundings (Lakoff and Johnson 1999).

This example can also be used to illustrate why embodied cognition hasproven to be a contentious view within cognitive science and thephilosophy of mind. One might argue that the dependence between ourspatial concepts and our bodies identified above is mundane andunremarkable. Consider the best-known of classic mind-body dualists,René Descartes. In his famous quip in Meditation VI, that he (his mind,for Descartes) was not merely lodged in his body “like a pilot ina ship”, Descartes clearly recognizes that there is some sense inwhich cognition depends on, and is integrated with, the body.Proponents of embodied cognition must, minimally, show that“front” and “up” depend on the body in somesense that Descartes would deny.

Of more relevance to contemporary debates, proponents of embodiedcognition must show that this dependence cannot be accommodated withintraditional cognitive science and its working commitments (e.g., to thecomputational and representational theories of mind). At least this istrue if embodied cognition is to mark a significant departure from, andpose a substantive challenge to, traditional cognitive science andassociated philosophical views of the mind. And that requires,minimally, not only identifying some kind of dependence or otherbetween cognition and the body, but specifying the nature of thatdependence.

2.2 Enactive Cognition

The bookThe EmbodiedMind (Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991) was an attempt to re-directthe cognitive sciences by infusing them with the phenomenologicalperspective developed in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945).(More ambitiously, and less successfully, it also aimed to integratecognitive science with Buddhist philosophy; the book also included somepassing discussion of psychoanalysis.) Varela, Thompson and Roschargued that the standard division between pre-given, external featuresof the world and internal symbolic representations should be dropped,as it is unable to accommodate the feedback from embodied actions tocognition via the actions of a situated cognitive agent. Thefundamental differences between their perspective and classical viewslies in the answers to the questions of what cognition is, how itworks, and when a system functions adequately.

Traditional accounts basically state that there are no computationswithout representations, and view cognition as successfullyfunctioning when any device can support and manipulate symbols tosolve the problem given to the system. Varela, Thompson, and Roschintroduced the concept ofenaction to present and develop aframework that places strong emphasis on the idea that the experiencedworld is portrayed and determined by mutual interactions between thephysiology of the organism, its sensorimotor circuit and theenvironment. Their emphasis on the structural coupling ofbrain-body-world constitutes the kernel of their program of embodiedcognition, building on the classical phenomenological idea thatcognitive agents bring forth a world by means of the activity oftheirsituated living bodies. As the metaphor of“bringing forth a world” of meaningful experience implies,on this view knowledge emerges through the primary agent's bodilyengagement with the environment, rather than being simply determinedby and dependent upon either pre-existent situations or personalconstruals.

One implication of this view is that only a creature with certainfeatures—e.g., eyes, hands, legs, and skills—can possesscertain kinds of cognitive capacities. This is because cognition is adynamic sensorimotor activity, and the world that is given andexperienced is not only conditioned by the neural activity of thesubject, but is essentially enacted in that it emerges through thebodily activities of the organism. This general approach encourages aview of enaction as essentially distinct from computation, as it istraditionally conceived. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch's most detailedillustration of their perspective is contained in their discussion ofcolor experience and categorization, a discussion that received muchattention in other venues (e.g., Thompson, Palacios, and Varela 1992;Thompson 1995), typically without reference to the more sweepingclaims about embodiment, phenomenology, and Buddhism made inThe Embodied Mind (see also Thompson 2007).

Since its origin, the enactive tradition has grown and enriched invarious ways and each of its strands, though sharing a commonframework with neighbouring accounts in embodied cognitive science,has developed one’s own theoretical trait and explored a conceptualterritory that differentiates them from one another. One variant,branded autopoietic enactivism, has developed in particular thebiological phenomenon of autopoiesis and attributed to it a centralrole in explaining fundamental properties of our mental life (Maturanaand Varela 1992; Thompson 2005; Di Paolo and Thompson 2014). Thenotion of autopoiesis describes living systems as active, adaptive,self-maintaining and self-individuating, that is, as having theproperty of self-reproducing through self-regulating strategies.Another variant, the so-called sensorimotor enactivism, has taken amore liberal route and, rather than stressing the role of autopoieticorganization in the living systems, it draws on the implicit grasp ofsensorimotor dependencies (that is, the way in which stimulationchanges contingent upon actions of the organisms) to explain consciousexperience and a broad range of behaviors (Noe 2004; O’Regan 2011,Degenaar and O’Regan forthcoming), Yet another, has gone as radical asto say that cognition and experience does not depend on autopoieticorganization and sensorimotor accounts remain committed to mentalismand representationalist thinking (Hutto and Myin’s 2013). In sum,although these respective varieties are broadly consonant, they cometo emphasize different features, and internal tensions motivated awiden fragmentation and various forms of elaboration andextension. Though we refer to other venues for a thorough discourse onthe demarcation line between varieties of enactive proposals (Degenaarand O’Regan forthcoming, Menary 2006, Hutto and Myin 2013), here wewill limit ourselves to a high-level overview of some reasons fortheir disagreement. One such reason concerns the role ascribed to thenotion of autopoiesis. Whereas the programme that issues from Varela,Thompson and Rosch maintains that autopoiesis (or self-production) isa necessary precondition for experience, leading to the idea thatthere is a deep continuity of life and mind (Thompson 2007) and thatconsciousness is a particular form of life, both sensorimotorenactivism and its radical formulation do not put autopoieticprocesses center-stage and do not commit to the view that cognitivephenomena build upon peculiar aspects of the organization of livingorganisms (Degenaar and O’Regan forthcoming, Hutto and Myin 2013). Afurther reason for disagreement concerns the rendering of the claimthat perceptual experience requires mediating know-how. Whereassensorimotor enactivism advocates that perceptual experience is madepossible by the possession and skillful exercise of practicalknowledge of sensorimotor contingencies, the other variants considerthe talk of mediating knowledge as a brand of cognitivism (Hutto andMyin 2013), somewhat consistent with the theory of mind that groundstraditional cognitive science. In its radical expression, the enactivethinking maintains that mentality is to be explained in terms ofdirect environment-involving embodied engagements.

2.3 Rethinking Robotics

By the early 1990s, work incomputational intelligence had started to explore ways of generatingintelligent action in robots that shortly became known as the embodiedapproach to robotics. In a pair of papers Rodney Brooks (1991a, 1991b)had presented a general and accessible overview of a new kind ofintelligent computational architecture, subsumption architecture, thatwas representation-lite and world-driven. In these respects, itdeparted from the representation-crunching intensive traditional viewsof planning and decision-making that had characterized classic AI andwas characterized by Brooks as providing “intelligence withoutrepresentation”. Together with computational work by Agre andChapman (1987) and Suchman (1987), Brooks's approach suggested aview of computational intelligence in which control was governedbottom-up by behavior and interaction with the world, rather than byplentiful and often complicated internal algorithms andrepresentations.

The sweep of work in reactive or behavior-based robotics, and itsidentification as marking a part of the embodied cognitive science, washeralded in Andy Clark'sBeing There: Putting Mind, World,and Body Back Together (1997). Clark here provided an integrativeframework for a wide-range of emerging work on embodiment in thecognitive sciences. The big idea inBeing There, one withlasting impact in embodied cognitive science, is that minds are not forthinking, traditionally conceived,but for doing, for gettingthings done in the world in real time. Rather than developing“walking encyclopedias”, robotics in the late 1980s andearly 1990s was starting to focus on the dynamic interaction betweenbody and world. Clark drew out affinities between this shift in theconception of intelligent action in computational systems and theemergence of the idea that cognition was scaffolded, embedded, andextended.

The work we have briefly recounted so far all concerns what wecalled cognition in the narrow sense, processes like human memory,categorization, and language processing (Lakoff and Johnson), human andnonhuman color categorization (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch), anddecision-making and planning in robots and robotic systems (Clark). Butembodied cognitive science aims to encompass cognition broadlyconstrued. To convey the flavor of early work here, we briefly considerthe work of James Gibson on perception, and Esther Thelen and LindaSmith (1994) on infant walking and reaching behaviors (cf. Shapiro2011).

2.4 Ecological Perception

James Gibson's(1979) account of vision challenged the idea that the central problemthat the visual system has to solve is how to reconstruct a full-blown,three-dimensional world from the information specified in thetwo-dimensional image on the retina. That idea has been prominent intraditional, information processing views of vision, including those ofRock (1983, 1997), Richard Gregory (1966) and Marr (1982). Gibsonthinks that this is not a problem the visual system faces becausevision does not begin with a static retinal array but with an organismactively moving through a visually rich environment. Gibson'spositive approach to vision was to attempt to specify this richness,the information in what he called theambient optic array,especially invariants in that array, which can be used to distinguishagent-dependent and objective features of one's environment. Byboth emphasizing the role of the movement of a perceiver and theintegration of that perceiver in a larger, visually rich environment,Gibson has been championed as at least a nascent proponent of embodiedvision (see also Wilson 2004: ch.7; Shapiro 2011: ch.2).

2.5 Dynamicism and Development

Esther Thelen andLinda Smith (1994) offered a radical challenge to traditional nativistviews of cognitive development by applying dynamical systems theory todevelopmental psychology. One important implication of dynamicalsystems theory is that systems can generate novel behaviors (e.g.,different solutions for reaching objects) through bodily activity,questioning the need to posit preprogrammed patterns that unfold overtime. Raising fundamental questions about shared assumptions in thefield, they argued that the stepping behavior in infants is not drivenby maturational processes somehow determined by a hard-wired geneticcode, but results instead from the interaction between theinfant's initial spontaneous limb movements and changingcontexts. Thus, they viewed this particular aspect of development as anemergent and self organizing product of many decentralized and localinteractions taking place in real time, with the promise ofgeneralizing this approach to cognitive development more generally.

2.6 Phenomenology

Finally by way of recent historicalanchoring, the idea that an understanding of the body underpins thevery possibilityof experience has roots in thephenomenological works of Edmund Husserl (1913, 1931), MauriceMerleau-Ponty (1945), and Jean-Paul Sartre (1943), roots we sawacknowledged by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch inThe EmbodiedMind. This earlier continental tradition was exploredconstructively early on within artificial intelligence, with specialreference to Heidegger, by Winograd and Flores (1986) and also formedthe backdrop to Dreyfus's (1972) classic critique of traditionalcomputationalism.

Embodied cognitive science pushes phenomenological accounts in newdirections. It seeks not so much to understand how physicality opens upthe experience of the self, the world and the others, but rather aimsto specify themechanisms that explain just how cognition isgrounded in, and deeply constrained by, the bodily nature of cognitiveagency. We shall not explore the convergence between the earlyphenomenological tradition and embodied cognitive science, although werecognize that phenomenological insights can be an indispensableresource for the ongoing investigation of consciousness,self-consciousness, action and intersubjectivity (see Gallagher 2009;Gallagher and Zahavi 2008; Thompson 2007; Gallagher 2005; Wheeler2005).

3. What Embodied Cognition Is

The general characterization of embodied cognition with which webegan provides the basis for what we will call the EmbodimentThesis:

Embodiment Thesis: Many features of cognition areembodied in that they are deeply dependent upon characteristics of thephysical body of an agent, such that the agent's beyond-the-brainbody plays a significant causal role, or a physically constitutiverole, in that agent's cognitive processing.

All five of the early examples of work in embodied cognition that webriefly summarized inSection 2 accept the Embodiment Thesis. Theworking hypothesis of embodied cognitive science is that this thesis istrue either because of the significant causal or the significantphysically constitutive role of the body in cognitive processing.Proponents of embodied cognitive science have advocated both the causaland the constitutive claim about the role of the body in cognition.While the ascription of a physically constitutive role to the body incognition has been taken to challenge traditional cognitive science ina more radical way than does that of a merely significant causal roleto it, both versions of the Embodiment Thesis mark a departure fromviews of the mind dominant in traditional cognitive science.

Rather than following those who attempt to explain embodied cognitionby appeal to the metaphor ofgrounding (e.g., Anderson 2003;Barsalou 1999, 2008; Glenberg and Robertson 2000; Glenberg et al.2005), we think that the best way to articulate the Embodiment Thesisfurther is to specify the nature of the dependence of cognition on thebody: what particular significant causal or physically constitutiveroles does the body play in cognition? (cf. Shapiro 2010, 2011; A.Clark 2008; Thompson 2007; Wheeler 2005; Anderson 2003; M. Wilson2002).

At the most general level, there are three such distinct functions orroles, each with its own implications for embodied cognitive science.The body can function as aconstraint on cognition, as adistributor for cognitive processing, or as aregulator of cognitive activity.

We can specify each of these functions or roles more precisely, anddraw attention to the distinctive implications that each has, and thework already described that appeals to each of these conceptions of theEmbodiment Thesis.

Body as Constraint: an agent's body functions to significantlyconstrain the nature and content of the representations processed bythat agent's cognitive system.

Amongst the alleged implications of the Body as Constraint thesisare two we would like to draw attention to:

• Someforms of cognition will be easier, and will come more naturally,because of an agent's bodily characteristics; likewise, somekinds of cognition will be difficult or even impossible because of thebody that a cognitive agent has.
• Cognitive variation is sometimes explained by an appeal to bodilyvariation.

The work of Lakoff and Johnson on the permeation of cognition bymetaphor, and that of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch on enactive cognition(especially in the domain of color perception and categorization), bothexemplify the Body as Constraint thesis.

Body as Distributor: an agent's body functions to distributecomputational and representational load between neural and non-neuralstructures.

Unlike the role of the body in the Body as Constraint thesis, herethe body is taken as sharing in cognitive processing itself, serving todistribute cognitive tasks between brain and body. The Body asDistributor thesis has three putative implications worth makingexplicit:

• Neural-realized cognitive structures may be more minimal than has beentraditionally assumed, and in principle absent altogether.
• Bodily structures themselves can be at least partial realizers of thephysical machinery realizing cognitive processes.
• Cognition is not bounded by the skull, so cognitive systems may includeboth non-neural parts of the body and even the beyond-the-bodyenvironment.

As these implications should suggest, it is Body as Distributor thatis in play for those who take embodied cognition to challengetraditional views of mental representation (Gibson 1979 and Thelen andSmith 1994; see also Glenberg 1997 on memory; Shapiro 1997 and Wilson2004: ch.7–8 on exploitative representation). The appeal tomorphological computation (MacIver 2009), whereby propertiesof anatomical structures (such as the shape of bats ears) play acomputational role in a cognitive process (such as echolocation), alsorelies on the Body as Distributor thesis. And in subsuming both anagent's bodily structures as well as aspects of its environmentas forms of non-neural structures, the Body as Distributor thesis drawsa connection between embodied cognition and versions of the extendedmind thesis that appeal to concepts such as realization and scaffolding(Wilson and Clark 2009; R. Wilson 2004: ch.5–6; A. Clark 2003).

Closely related to the Body as Distributor thesis is:

Body as Regulator: an agent's bodyfunctions to regulate cognitive activity over space and time, ensuringthat cognition and action are tightly coordinated.

We distinguish this version of the Embodiment Thesis from the Bodyas Distributor thesis because of distinctive supposed implications thatascribing a regulative role to the body in cognition has. Theseinclude:

• Bodily structures facilitate the real-time execution of complexbehaviors in response to complex and changing environmental events.
• Thebody does not merely function to transduce from world-inputs tocognition, and later deliver worldly-output in the form of behaviorfrom internal cognitive processing, but is integral to the onlinecontrol of cognition itself.

Here the body has a feedback-driven role in cognitive processing,and the Body as Regulator thesis has been especially prominent indynamic approaches to cognition (e.g., Port and van Gelder 1995; Beer2000; Thelen and Smith 1994; cf. also Chemero 2009).

To summarize this section: we have distinguished three ways toarticulate the Embodied Cognition Thesis, each specifying a particularway in which cognition depends on the body. Put more positively (and wethink informatively), there are three distinctive functions or rolesfor the body that embodied cognitive science might ascribe: as aconstraint on cognition, as a distributor for cognitive processing, andas a real-time regulator of cognitive activity. Such determinate formsof the Embodiment Thesis can ascribe the body either a significantcausal role, or a physically constitutive role, in cognition.

4. Embodiment vs Tradition on Three Issues

In this section, we explore the revolutionary promise of embodiedcognitive science with respect to three standard topics in thephilosophy of mind and cognitive science: the modularity of mind, thenature of mental representation, and nativism. (For alternative viewsof situated cognition and modularity, representation, and nativism, seeBechtel 2009; Rowlands 2009; and Rupert 2009a). We begin with somegeneral, putative contrasts between traditional and embodied cognitivescience.

Traditional views have tended to assume the existence of discrete,internal representations realized by underlying, sharply distinct andhighly specified mechanisms in the brain. These mechanisms, in turn,have been shaped by natural selection and encoded in geneticstructures. Thus, traditional views have been influential inneuroscience and have been committed to individualism or internalism,the claim that cognition supervenes on the intrinsic, physicalproperties of the cognizer. The research strategy of“methodological solipsism” (Fodor 1980, 1981) is oneclassic version of this individualistic conception of cognition. Theway in which central topics have been addressed deeply reflects theidea that cognitive phenomena can be accounted for locally, and thatelements beyond the boundaries of the skull are of interest onlyinsofar as they provide sensory input and allow behavioral output.Borrowing from Susan Hurley (1998), mainstream views of the mind havebeen committed to the “classical sandwich model”, the claimthat cognition (in the narrow sense) is segregated from processing inlow-level systems, therefore acting like meat in a sandwich em-breadedby perception andaction.

Embodied cognitive science, by contrast, has modeled cognition as theproduct of dynamic interplay between neural and non-neural processes,with no general fracture between cognition, the agent's bodilyexperience, and real-life contexts. Here the body is viewed asconstraining, distributing, or regulating cognitive processing.Specifying how the body performs these functions in particularenvironments raises the prospect that cognition itself is neitherbounded by the brain, nor perhaps even by the body itself.

We can express the prima facie contrast between traditional andembodied cognitive science in terms of opposed views of mentalrepresentation, computation, and realization. Whereas many traditionalaccounts tend to see cognition as representationally localistic,computationally fixed, and as properly characterized independently ofthe realizing neuronal system, the features of the physical body andthe surrounding environment., embodied cognitive science tends to viewcognition as, representationally distributed, computationally dynamic,and as properly characterized only by reference to details of bodilyrealization. Embodied cognitive science thus motivates an interrogationof some of the fundamental assumptions made in cognitive science. (Suchprobing is also manifest in views of cognitive modeling that themselvesare not especially embodied, such as connectionism, which we leaveaside here.)

4.1 Modularity

Modular systems are independent, domainspecific, encapsulated and hardwired, and function in a low-to-highprocessing hierarchy. When modularity theory was introduced incognitive science (Fodor 1983), central cognition—cognition inthe narrow sense—was characterized as non-modular, and as sharplydistinct from modular peripheral systems, such as those governingperception and motor control (plus, as Fodor says, language).Fodor's claims about central cognition have been challenged by awide variety of researchers (e.g., Carruthers 2006; Sperber 2001;Cosmides and Tooby 1997; Hirshfeld and Gelman 1994; see also R. Wilson2005, 2008). These critics have argued that higher-cognitive processesalso meet modularity criteria. In fact, the view that cognition in thenarrow sense is also modular is sufficiently widespread acrossdevelopmental, evolutionary, and cognitive psychology perhaps to countas the dominant form of modularity theory in contemporary cognitivescience, despite Fodor's contrary view (Fodor 2000).

Both the traditional, Fodorian account of modularity and itsrebellious, dominant offspring make reference to the body and theenvironment only indirectly. Modularity theory in either guise haslittle positive to say about the actual bearing of the beyond-theskull-entities on cognitive performance, other than viewing them as asource of input and repository of behavioral output. This view impliesthat all the tough work, cognitively speaking, is performed bycognition central alone, with peripheral processes simply providinginputs and executing instructions. The claims that cognitive processingoccurs purely in the brain in a modular fashion, and accomplishes itsbusiness by operating essentially independently from motor planning andmotor execution, however, are called into question by empirical studiesof embodied experience.

One example of embodied experience in relation to language, one thatexemplifies the Body as Constraint thesis is Glenberg's IndexicalHypothesis (Glenberg et alia 2009; Glenberg and Kaschak 2002; Glenbergand Robertson 1999, 2000). This view assumes that the understanding ofa sentence is achieved through the activation of relevant actionschemas, recruiting the same neural mechanisms active in overtbehavior, and by affordance combination. Consider the sentences:

(1a)

After wading barefoot in the lake, Erik used his shirt to dryhis feet.

(1b)

After wading barefoot in the lake, Erik used his glasses to dryhis feet.

Although both (1a) and (1b) are grammatical, the reason why (1b)does not make the same kind of sense as (1a) does is because theaffordances of glasses do not mesh with the action of drying.Understanding the meaning of such sentences requires knowing thepossibilities offered by objects referred to in them. Thesepossibilities are constrained by the interaction between bodilycapabilities and the referents. Another study showed that people arefaster to comprehend sentences where objects provide the affordancesneeded to accomplish an action (e.g., chair with four wheels to movelarge boxes) than sentences in which objects do not (e.g., a chair withfour missing wheels (Kaschak and Glenberg 2000).

Such findings indicate that the construal of meaning is constrained bythe embodied possibilities a scenario offers, and suggest thatsensorimotor processes contribute to language comprehension. Thisconclusion would likely be rejected by modularists because theircommitment to encapsulation and domain specificity implies thatlanguage processing cannot be modulated by motor information andbackground knowledge. Borghi, Glenberg and Kaschak (2004) have alsoreported that in language comprehension the perspective implied by thesentence guides the retrieval of information about objects, makingconceptual knowledge available. Responses to questions over whether anobject (e.g., a table) is part of the location described in thesentence are faster if there is compatibility between the object-nounand the perspective implied by the sentence (e.g., eating in arestaurant). Embodied responses are activated also in judging specificobjects' properties, suggesting that vision and action aretightly integrated in the biological organism, and that they jointlyconstrain cognitive processing.

The sharp distinction between vision and action that is part of thetraditional modular account of cognition has also been challenged bystudies of embodied experience. For example, when people are asked tochoose among stairs of different heights the one they can ascend mosteasily their responses are consistent with respect to theirstair-climbing abilities (Warren 1984). Similar results have beenreported for judgments of grasping objects (van Leeuwen et alia 1994)catching balls (Oudejams et alia 1996) and climbing walls (Wagman andCarello 2001). Studies such as these support the general claim thatperceptual experience incorporates anticipated embodied interaction,suggesting either that vision and action are integrated, or at leastfeedback linked, in ways that are incompatible with the flow-throughmodel of cognition postulated by modularists (Hurley 1998; R. Wilson2010).

Even ascribing emotions, intentions or beliefs to someone appears topresuppose a certain bodily realization. Unlike traditional views,which posit an innate Theory of Mind module to account for socialcognition (Leslie, 1987; Baron-Cohen 1995), an increasing number ofstudies in the field (Rizzolatti and Craighero 2004; Rizzolatti et alia1996; Gallese et alia 1996), suggests that the understanding of otherminds is primarily based on the motor expertise underlying our capacityto act. Such embodied understanding is not only different in naturefrom the modalities of mindreading as traditionally understood, butalso strongly indicates that the meaning of intentional behavior can begrasped only if we know bodily, experientially or both what it is liketo be in a mental state.

The processing that underwrites a variety of mentalphenomena—discerning meaningful sentences from those that arenot, extracting the possibilities afforded by objects, and detectingintentional behaviors—thus requires the orchestrated contributionof many components, neural and non-neural. If bodily states andbrain's modality-specific systems serve as the grounding ofvarious aspects of our cognitive life, then traditional, amodaldomain-specific modules are not the meaningful elements of analysisthey have been assumed to be under the Disembodiment Thesis. The claimthat cognition heavily relies on the processes evolved to alloworganisms to interact effectively with the environment suggests thatthe mind is not decoupled from embodied experience in the waypresupposed by traditional views in cognitive science. Rather, the bodycan act as aconstraint on cognition, and as adistributor for cognitive processing (seeSection 3).

4.2 Mental Representation

At the heart of thetraditional scientific understanding of cognition lies a particularconception of mental representation (Fodor and Pylyshyn 1988; Newelland Simon 1972). This conception claims that representations aresymbolic structures with quasi-linguistic and combinatorial properties,act as vehicles of contents, and are what are primarily appealed to inexplaining intelligent behavior. Mental representations are symbolicand abstract in that the same representation, such as“table” is used to mean different kinds of table. They areamodal in that the same representation can be employed when“table” is written or spoken about. Such representationsare arbitrarily related to their referents because the way in whichthey are formed and deployed, along with their characteristics, bearsno relationship to the physical and functional features of thereferents. Thus, on the traditional view, not only are the internalrepresentations employed in language, concept formation, and memoryessentially distinct from those processed by the sensorimotor system,but their meaning is divorced from bodily experience. Supporters ofthis view have been committed to at least three fundamentalprinciples:

• information conveyed by a mental representation exhibitsnomodality-specific feature. In this sense, representations areautonomous from perceptual systems, bodily action, and theiroperational details;
• knowledge is organized propositionally, with the meaning of wordsemerging from their relations to internal symbols. Determining themeaning of a symbol is like looking up in the dictionary in order tofind which definition is given by its relation to other symbols;
• internal representations are used to instruct motor programs, which areessentially separate and independent from cognition. Hence, cognitiveprocessing is not inextricably shaped by bodily actions.

Recently, several alternative explanations for adaptive behaviorhave gained attention. While diverse, they all call into question thecommitment to these principles. By advancing the idea that cognitiveactivity re-uses the processes and the representations deployed inperception and action, these explanations pose a serious challenge tothe notion that conceptual and semantic representations are (or mustbe) amodal. There remain significant differences between these viewswith respect to the radicalness of their anti-representationalistleanings (see Chemero 2009; Hutto and Myin 2013; Myin and Degenaar 2014).

Amongst the most influential anti-representationalist views isdynamical systems theory (Beer 1990, 2002, 2003; Brooks 1991a, 1991b,2002; Thelen and Smith 1994; Van Gelder 1992). Dynamicists tend tominimize and sometimes even deny the need for a centralizedrepresentational processor. The notion of representation that theseauthors challenge is relatively specific: an internal model capable ofreproducing the external environmental structure that is used by thecognitive agent to guide its behavior in relative independence from theworld. Dynamical systems theory has proven to be popular in roboticsand in work on artificial life, which has tried to explain adaptivebehavior in terms of embodiment and embeddedness. As long as a situatedcreature can sense its world so as to allow its body to be directlyinfluenced, abstract symbolic descriptions can be dispensed with.

Formulating an empirically adequate theory of intelligent behaviorwithout appealing to representations at all, however, faces insuperabledifficulties, and the idea that it is a relatively trivial matter toscale up from existing dynamic models to explain all of cognitionremains wishful thinking and subject to just the problems thatmotivated the shift from behaviorism to cognitive science in the firstplace. For example, organism-environment interaction alone cannotaccount for anticipatory behavior, which involves internal factorsbeyond the immediate constraints of the environment to achieve orfulfill future needs, goals or conditions. Domains raising arepresentation-hungry problem (A. Clark 1997) are those involvingreasoning about absent, non-existent or counterfactual states ofaffairs, planning, imaging and interacting (for a recent, contrastingview, see Chemero 2009).

Moreover, it is unclear why embodied cognitive science could not alsobe symbolic, representational, abstract, etc.. Puzzlement here ismagnified by the fact that many self-styled embodied approaches tocognitionare symbolic, representational, abstract, etc.. Whatthey offer are specific views of what mental symbols andrepresentations are, and how they function in our cognitive economy.Typically, they replace the conception of propositional encoding withone according to which symbols convey a modality-specific feature.

One view that adapts, rather than dispenses with, the notion of mentalrepresentation is Lawrence Barsalou's perceptual symbols theory(1999, 2003, 2008, 2009). This theory rests on the assumption thathuman cognition does not consist of amodal representations that beararbitrary relations to their referents in the world, but ratherrepresentations whose activation patterns include information fromvarious sensory modalities. For example, the symbolic structure thatrepresents the color of an object in its absence, say, during imageryor problem solving tasks, depends upon the same neural system that isrecruited when the color is actually perceived. Thus, not only docognitive and perceptual mechanisms share representational states, butcognitive processing essentially re-activates sensorimotor areas to runperceptual simulations. A further implication is that perceptualsymbols are not independent of the biological system that embodies themand the content conveyed would be likely to vary if intelligent systemsvaried physically. Since appeal to the body and sensorimotor processesconstrains the nature of symbols available to cognition,Barsalou's theory exemplifies the Body as Constraintthesis.

While defenders of modal representations argue that there is littledirect empirical evidence for amodal representations, with the adoptionof the traditional model of representation largely motivated bytheoretical reasons (Barsalou et alia 2003, 85), and that their ownviews are empirically plausible (see Pecher et alia 2003; Zwaan andYaxley 2003; Glenberg and Kaschak 2002; Martin and Chao 2001; Solomonand Barsalou 2001; Martin et alia 2000; Spivey et alia 2000), they alsounderestimate the difficulty of providing definitive evidence againstamodal accounts. As Machery (2007) points out, subjects'performance can be accommodated by both modal and amodal explanations(see also Rupert 2006). Since most amodal advocates (e.g., Simon 1995;Fodor 1975) do not deny the involvement of perceptual areas duringcognitive tasks, such as visual imagery, showing that visual cortex isactivated when, say, imaging the green of an apple does not provideevidence for Barsalou's theory over the amodal account. Moreover,as traditionalists point out, some mental problems are solved without(reportable) imagery, and subjects sometimes draw upon knowledge storedin modality-free representational systems. Hence, generalizing resultsconcerning the use of perceptual simulations in some tasks to alltasks, which is required for a general modal theory of representation,is problematic.

4.3 Nativism

Most researchers today recognize that cognitiondevelops as a result of the dynamic interplay of innateness andlearning, even if it is not always clear how this interplay proceeds.On the two-dimensional view of nativism defended by one of us elsewherethat distinguishes between strong and weak forms of nativism, (R.Wilson 2004: ch.3), strong nativists are committed to the following twotheses:

1. the internal structures and processes necessary for thedevelopment of an individual are rich, complex and causallypowerful;
2. processes external to the individual play asecondarycausal role in the acquisition and development of these structures.

Strong anti-nativists (such as classic empiricists), by contrast,deny both of these general views.

Paradigms committed to strong nativism has produced remarkableresults in the field of cognitive development of infants, in domainsincluding arithmetic and physics (Baillargeon 2002, Baillargeon et alia1985; Spelke et alia 1992, 1995). Those critical of nativism havelabeled nativism as antidevelopmental in nature (Haith 1998), andclaimed that conclusions that the mind consists of hard-wired traitsthat unfold through maturation on a fixed pattern conflict with thevery idea of learning and flexibility (Quartz and Sejnowski 1997;Thelen and Smith 1994; Bates et alia 1995; Karmiloff-Smith 1994). Ifnativism were true, then the body and environment (including culture),while relevant, should be regarded as no more than“triggers” of ontogenetically determined features thatdevelop in predictable ways.

Although prima facie it might be thought that embodied cognition has nodistinctive implications for the ongoing debate between“nativism” and “empiricism”, one contributionof embodied cognitive science here lies in its specific exploration ofthe roles that the body plays in cognitive processing. These rolesoften pose challenges to strong nativist and strong empiricist viewsalike. As such, embodied cognitive science does not simply assume, withempiricists, that cognitive processing depends to a great extent onenvironmental exposure, and that cognition is a causal reflection ofit. Further, while empiricists typically conceive of the world assomething objectively given to a subject, who thus forms a staticrepresentation of it that then guides action, embodied cognitivescience addresses how the dynamic interplay between embodied agent andthe world generates cognition. It is this focus on dynamic, worldlyinterplay that provides one link from embodied to embedded cognitionwithin situated cognitive science. Here we will explore whether, and inwhat ways, embodied cognitive science has been thought to underminestrong nativist claims.

By and large, embodied cognitive science generally downplays theinternal richness needed to perform complex behavior (Rupert 2009a),highlighting the fact that cognitive processing and development aredeeply affected by perturbation across changes in the environment andthe body in action (Griffiths and Stotz 2000; Clark and Toribio 1994;Thelen and Smith 1994; Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991; Ballard 1991).The body in action is a powerful constraint on how organisms conceivetheir niche, as this constraint allows certain interactions andexperiences to have an effect on concept formation and understanding oflinguistic meaning. For example, by having fingers capable of graspingobjects and legs capable of walking and climbing walls, we sort andcategorize stimuli in ways that are radically different from, say, theways in which they are sorted by butterflies. One's ownordinarily kinesthetic experiences essentially frame the acquisitionand development of cognitive structures. That appears to support thesignificant contribution of the beyond-the-skull components inrealizing cognitive phenomena, and in terms of the framework we haveintroduced (seesection 3) it exemplifies both the Body as Constraintand Body as Distributor theses.

Examples supporting the Body asDistributor thesis comefrom non-nativist research on perception. Many putative modules, suchas those for sensory processing, develop partly via learning. In thenewborn, sensory modalities and cortical pathways are not asdifferentiated as are those of mature brains but appear to emergethrough a series of strengthening interactions between the active bodyand the environment (Quartz and Sejnowski 1997). This implies that ininfants few, if any, cortical pathways are domain specific and highlyspecialized for most tasks, but during development by virtue of activeinteractions with the environment get recruited and tuned up forprocessing particular stimuli (Elman et alia 1996). Other empiricalresults in the study of sensory modalities point in the same direction,rejecting the idea that the senses are dedicated modules wired up forperception at birth, with the body's interactions with theenvironment playing only a secondary role in constraining or evendetermining the nature of perceptual processing.

Conversely, it seems that many relevant capacities are not asdomain-specific as they may initially appear. For example, even thoughthe visual cortex appears dedicated to process a particular class ofinformation, it can be recruited by a different sense modality duringthe reading of Braille—whether the subject has congenital,acquired or induced (blindfold) blindness (Sadato et alia 1996, 1998;see also Pascual-Leone and Hamilton 2001; Pascual-Leone et alia 1998).If we extend these observations to face recognition, further supportfor the hypothesis that specialization begins at later stage ofdevelopment, by virtue of experience, arises. Despite the fact that thefusiform face area (FFA) is highly selective to faces (Kanwisher 2000;Kanwisher et alia 1997), data suggest that it can also be activated inresponse to non-face features, such as birds and cars, provided thatsubjects have a substantial expertise in those categories (Gauthier etalia 2000).

While this evidence does not call into question the idea of brainspecialization, it does indicate the role of bodily activity ingenerating the differentiation of cortical pathways and the emergenceof specific functions, such as direction-selective responses in thevisual cortex. Embodied interactions with the world shape and controlthe mechanisms responsible for this information processing, offeringsupport for the Body as Distributor and Body as Regulatortheses. Additionally, consider studies investigating how switchinghandedness shapes cortical sensorimotor representations of fingermovements. A left to right switch of handwriting not only triggers ageneral re-organization of motor dominance but also has a wider impacton the functional neuroanatomy of the motor system that controls thehands, influencing even motor tasks that require little skill(Kloeppel et al 2007). The re-organization patterns found in convertedleft-handers show how flexible the brain is in terms of which regionscan do what in response to educational training and hand usethroughout life, and how bodily features and interaction schemas areconditions to which the brain is attuned to. These studies can beinterpreted as suggesting that embodied interactions and thebeyond-the-body environment may themselves be partial realizers of thecorresponding cognitive activity. Including non-neural parts of thebody amongst the physically constitutive building blocks of cognitionsuggests a more radical reading of embodied cognition.

Strong nativist claims may also be challenged when consideringcognition beyond the sense modalities. The issue concerning how muchlanguage-specific information, if any, is innate has been one of thedominant topic in cognitive science and the literature relevant to thematter provides us with a wide range of possibilities. Some (Pinker1994; Chomsky 1975, 1980), for instance, conclude that a specificinnate endowment help explain several aspects of children'slinguistic performance. Others (Cowie 1999; Bates 1998; Bates et alia1995), instead, find this conception unparsimonious and puzzling froman evolutionary standpoint, and claim that nonlinguistic learningfactors significantly constrain and control the range of possibilitiesthat characterize spoken language.

Encouragement for this latter view comes from evidence that showshow language acquisition heavily depends, beyond environmentalexposure, on a number of different factors, including working memoryand general cognitive development (Seung and Chapman, 2000). Firstlanguage learning, for instance, builds on what children already knowabout objects and events they experienced and this knowledge backgroundprovides them with the basis onto which they can map words (see E.Clark 2004 for reviews). Their ability to develop a language is alsoaffected by information they receive from adults and caregivers.Accordingly, they will be sensitive and prone to pick up theregularities they hear more often, such as frequent words, sounds,inflections and grammar constructions (Saffran et alia 1996; DeVilliers 1985). Also social interactions appear to be crucial to theprocess of language acquisition. Children more quickly learn to namethings that are physically present during a conversation and to whichthe joint focus of attention is directed (E . Clark 2003; Tomasello2003). Even language development in children affected by AutisticSpectrum Disorder (ASD), commonly held to have a genetic origin, can bemodulated by parental and social factors, such as gender and high levelof education (Grandgeorge et alia 2009). The same holds for normaldevelopment in which the size and production of a child'svocabulary appears to be deeply related to parents' lexicalrichness, monitoring of language interaction and socioeconomic status(Hoff 2003; Hoff and Naigles 2002).

Implications of these findings support the Body as Distributorthesis and place primary emphasis on the view that properties oflanguage-learning process heavily depend on the environmental andsocial conditions within which an individual is raised. They alsoindicate that direct engagement with the world and other individualsregulate language functioning and that this functioning is inseparablylinked to and exploits the affordances of the situation within whichlanguage processes take place.

Further support for the Body as Distributor thesis comes fromevidence that differences in early gesture explain disparities inchildren's vocabulary size (Rowe and Goldin-Meadow 2009a).Parents frequently appealing to gesture to translate their wordsprovide children with an opportunity to learn particular meanings byhands and this parent-child gesture use accounts for the correlationbetween early gesture of children at 14 months and later vocabularyskills and size at 54 months. Although gesture is not the only factormediating language development, evidence strongly suggests thatexposure to a broader range of embodied interactions determines lexicalrichness and vocabulary growth. Other findings (Rowe and Goldin-Meadow2009b; Rowe et alia 2008; Ozçalişkan andGoldin-Meadow 2005; Iverson andGoldin-Meadow 2005; Acredolo and Goodwyn 1988) point in the samedirection: parents who gesture very frequently encourage the child togesture and gesturing may then influence language development. Thesefindings collectively suggest that if learning is body-based andcorrelated with nonlinguistic aspects of behavior, then appeals to someforms of innateness seem unlikely to account for such features oflanguage development.

Additional support for the Body as Distributor thesis comes fromdata showing the role of gestures in reasoning. According to theGesture as Simulated Action (GSA) Framework (Hostetter and Alibabi2008), gestures derive from mental simulations of actions andperceptual states that people utilize when thinking, and they affectthe cognitive mechanisms in service of mental imagery, judgment andproblem solving by raising activation of sensorimotor areas (seeAlibabi et alia 2014 for a recent discussion).

It should be clear that no form of the Embodiment Thesis denies thebiological grounds of language processes and cognitive activity. Whatit challenges is the adequacy of current research programs thatcontinue to build heavily on the idea that language and cognitivedevelopment rely on processes and mechanisms that are domain-specificand causally powerful. Embodied cognitive science has generatedevidence that suggests that non-neural structures are not merelysecondary resources. Rather, they variously foster, constitute, anddetermine the acquisition and development of specific psychologicalcapacities, including those operant in language and perceptualprocessing.

5. Empirical Domains for Embodied Cognition

In this section, we focus on five empirical domains in which anembodied perspective has motivated novel insights about cognition andthe mind: visual consciousness, concepts, memory, the understanding ofother minds, and moral cognition. We limit discussion to these fivetopics for reasons of space and clarity, not because these are the onlyfive to which these theoretical tools can be fruitfully applied (seeGibbs 2006 for an extensive presentation and discussion of a widerrange of applications).

5.1 Visual Consciousness

Visual consciousness is typicallyviewed as a process within the brain. Yet the issues about therelationship between conscious experience and neural structures areempirically and philosophically controversial. Brain plasticity, forexample, provides some reason to think that there could be differentneural substrates for a given conscious visual experience, both withinthe same individual at different times, or different individuals at thesame time. And even if one assumes that brain states alone suffice forvisual conscious experience (‘the minimal substrate thesis’for short), one might still wonder whether neural correlates of visualconsciousness systematically match the content of perceptualexperience. While a considerable number of neuroscientists seem toshare the commitment to the matching-content doctrine, the literatureon the neural correlates of consciousness, as Noë and Thompson(2004) point out, says very little, if anything, to prove that neuralstates match visual conscious experience in content.

Hence, while seemingly obvious, upon closer examination thebrain-centered view (endorsed by prominent scholars, such as Koch2004; Chalmers 2000; Metzinger 2000; Crick and Koch 1990, 1998; Crick1996) appears problematic. Defenders of embodied cognition (mostnotably Noë and Thompson 2004; Noë, 2004; O'Regan andNoë, 2001; Thompson and Varela, 2001; Hurley, 1998;) advanceseveral arguments to cast doubt on the matching-content doctrine andthe minimal substrate thesis. One argument concerns theincommensurability of the features of the content of visualexperience. Whereas the content of a visual experience isexperiential—that is, represented from a point of view, activeand attentional—none of these properties seem to be ascribableto the content of a neural representational system (Noë andThompson 2004). Roughly put, while animals and people experience theworld relative to an egocentric standpoint and, phenomenologicallyspeaking, attend to portions of it that can be revealed and exploredthrough appropriate movements of the head and body, neurons do not(Noë 2004; O'Regan and Noë 2001). Just as the sense of ourvisual conscious experience depends on our implicit mastery ofsensorimotor contingencies—a set of rules concerning how sensorystimulation varies as a function of movement—conscious visualexperience is a temporary pattern of skillful activity. It issomething we do (Noë and O'Regan 2002). (A thorough analysis ofthe meaning of this claim, which affords at least two maininterpretations, one radical and one moderate, along with a review ofthe debate it generated, can be found in Loughlin 2014, O’Regan2011, Noe 2010, Shapiro 2010, Hickerson 2007). Whether or not theseauthors are right, their claim is significant, as it urgesneuroscientists and philosophers to pursue a rather different approachto understanding the basis of visual consciousness (Gangopadhyay,Madary, and Spicer, 2010).

Two striking, experimentally-generated phenomena that indicatesurprising dimensions to the limitations of our explicit visualknowledge have been invoked in support of embodied views of visualconsciousness. The first of these, change-blindness (Levins and Simons1997), occurs when changes to a visual scene are coordinated with theshort periods during which a subject is saccading; the second,inattentional blindness (Mack and Rock 1998; Simons and Chambris 1999),when such changes occur while subjects are engaged in anattention-intensive task. Under such conditions, subjects can fail toreport noticing even massive and (to other observers) striking changesto a visual scene, such as the appearance of a dancing gorilla walkingthrough the middle of the scene.

These phenomena call into question the traditional assumption that thebrain reconstructs detailed and accurate internal models of the visualfield. This assumption, while widespread, has obscured two importantpoints, each motivating a shift to an embodied perspective on vision:

1. Vision is not a mere brain process devoted to constructing mentalmodels, but rather a skill of the whole situated, embodied agent, onewhose movements are crucial to visual agency (cf. Gibson 1979)
2. Visual processing should be recognized as a temporally extendedactivity, where such activity is guided in part by the agentitself.

That subjects are usually capable of noticing large changes to, andunexpected elements in, the visual field, show several things. Mostimportantly for present purposes, visual conscious experience is askillful engagement with the world and heavily depends on what wedo with our eyes, head and body to bring something into visualconsciousness. This implies that we must ‘do’ something inorder to engage in a conscious experience, and only by way of ourbodily movements can attentional processes be directed to theenvironment. Thus, body and world not only matter as sources of causalinfluence, but act as non-neural substrates of the machinery realizingthe enactment of visual consciousness.

Given the current state of neuroscience, the conclusion that phenomenalexperience cannot be explained by processes in the head seems hard toaccept (Block 2005). Distributed consciousness has inescapableconsequences. One might assume, for example, that if two people withthe same internal states were in different environments, theirconscious experience would be different and that a brain in a vat wouldnot have any visual conscious experience, because a brain in a vat hasno body and accordingly cannot interact with the environment as wenormally do.

Regardless of how convincing these arguments are, the genuine insightabout the nature of consciousness that embodied cognitive science hasgenerated is that the character of visual experience results from theway we are dynamically hooked up to the world. Sensorimotor couplingwith the environment is crucial in providing the organism with theproprioceptive/kinesthetic feedback necessary for the sense ofownership of movement. When we touch an object, for example, we do notexclusively have experience of it, but while touching and beingtouched we experience ourselves moving, including the feeling ofcontrolling our own body in action. The account that agency (the senseof controlling one's own body) originates in processes that evolvedfor interaction with the environment—that is, mechanisms forsensory processing and motor control (Tsakiris et alia 2007; Berti etalia 2005; Haggard 2005; Farrer et alia 2003; Leube et alia 2003;Farrer and Frith 2002; Chaminade and Decety, 2002)—suggests thatembodied experience underpins self awareness.

For a recent contrasting, yet embodied, account of agency and itsrelated disorders refer to work in phenomenological psychiatry (Fuchs2011, 2010, 2009, 2005; Sass and Parnas 2001; Stanghellini2004). Here, Frith’s (1992) attempt to ‘neuralizing’consciousness, subjectivity and agency by causally tracing them backto neurophysiological correlates is challenged by a view that placesstrong emphasis on the notion of “lived corporality”.

Consistent with the view that consciousness and action may be closelyrelated, brain imaging studies have shown that delusions of control,often seen in schizophrenic patients, are associated with a failure inthe mechanism by which the predicted consequences of an action arelinked to the intended sequence of motor commands (Frith et alia 2000).Deficits of this kind suggest that the ability to control and holdconscious thoughts may recruit the same mechanisms employed ininteractions with theenvironment.

5.2 Concepts

A common assumption in traditionalaccounts is that concepts are context-independent amodal symbols. Thereare several problems with this view and research is strong insuggesting that conceptual capacities incorporate and are structured interms of patterns of bodily activity. Talking or thinking about objectshave been suggested to imply the reactivation of previous experiences,and the recruitment of the same neural circuits involved duringperception and action towards those objects would allow there-enactment of multimodal information (color, size, width, etc). Inprinciple, the view that concepts are represented through abstractsymbols, rather than modality specific features, and cognition requiresstable forms of representation should be either dropped or stronglyrevisited.

Evidence reveals that people construct concepts quite differently indistinct contexts (Solomon and Barsalou 2001; Wisniewski 1998; Medinand Shoben 1988; Barsalou and Ross 1986), and conceptualization canvary across individuals and be different for the same individual indistinct occasions. When subjects are asked to provide definitions forcategories, like bird and chair (see Barsalou 1993) only 44% of thefeatures in one person's definition exist in anotherperson's definition and a great deal of flexibility exists alsowithin individuals providing definitions for the same categories twoweeks later.

Also the pattern of interaction entertained with an object mayinfluence the way conceptualization is done. People dealing withcertain items and their structural parts more frequently andextensively than others will tend to develop representations thatreflect the nature of their interactions with them. Not surprisingly,distinct tree experts (such as a taxonomist, a landscape worker and apark maintenance personnel) will categorize trees in ways that differfrom one other and from non-specialists (Medin et alia 1997). Thesestudies draw upon and reinforce the theory ofperceptual symbolsystems (Barsalou 1999) and strongly indicate that perceptual andmotor mechanisms are engaged when people perform conceptual processing.They also suggest that completely modality-free categories are rare,because concepts, whether concrete or abstract, are distributed overmodality specific domains and involve reactivation of states insensorimotor systems (Boronat et alia 2005; Gallese and Lakoff 2005;Barsalou et alia 2003; Tranel et alia 2003; Beauchamp and Martin 2007;Martin and Chao 2001; Martin et alia 2000; Pulvermüller 1999;Martin et alia 1996).

Further support for the theory that modalities play a pivotal role inconcept representation comes from work on property verification(Solomon and Barsalou 2001; Pecher et alia 2003). Propertyverification consists in deciding whether a property in a specificmodality fits an object, for example, the auditorypropertyloud for BLENDER and the visualpropertygreen for APPLE. Findings demonstrated that subjectsperforming the task responded faster and more accurately when theprevious verification was in the same modality (e.g.,LEAVES—rustling) rather than in a different modality(e.g., CRANBERRIES—tart) (Pecher et alia 2003). Theeffect is explained by assuming that concept representation does notactivate the abstract features of an object but uses the same systemthat is recruited for perception in different modalities. So, if theauditory system is used for hearing the sound of a blender, then torun a simulation (that is, form a concept) of thesound of aBLENDER the auditory system will be recruited. Slower responses indifferent modalities are associated with cost in switching attention,and the effort made in switching modalities speaks against the ideathat knowledge is represented in a modality-free manner. Conversely,there should not be any differences between same-modality anddifferent-modality conditions.

The fact that sensorimotor circuits get recruited, or rather,re-used for purposes, like concept formation or languageprocessing, other than those they have been established for, such asmotor and sensory information processing, strongly favors modal andembodied approaches to cognition over amodal and abstract ones. It alsooffers an alternative perspective on several topics in the sciences ofthe mind, including the degree of modularity in cortical organization,the development of the brain and the localization hypothesis ofcognitive functions (see Anderson 2010 for a recent theory of neuralre-use).

While these findings have provoked revisions to traditionalaccounts, the specific conclusion that sensorimotor processes arephysically constitutive of conceptual processing has not beenuniversally accepted on the grounds that the data are consistent withdifferent theories (see Mahon and Caramazza 2008; Rupert 2009b:ch.9–10).

5.3 Memory

Consider the case of remembering how toolsand ingredients are displayed in the kitchen in order to instructsomeone to bake a cake. Traditional accounts would claim thatinformation storage and retrieval should be featured as essentiallyindependent from sensorimotor mechanisms. However, it does not seemfrom empirical evidence that remembering appeals to the semanticrelatedness of ingredients and tool but rather consists of forming animage revealing where ingredients and tools are located as a functionof our imagined movement throughout the kitchen. The location itselfserves as external aid to memory and imagined embodied actions withinthe location afford the retrieval of information that help figure outwhat is needed to bake a cake (Cole et alia 1997). That the time neededto recall and retrieve information is constrained by the imaged spatiallayout with reference to the observer's body has been shown by adifferent set of studies (Bryant and Wright 1999; see also Waller etalia 2008; Nori et alia 2004; McNamara 2003; Waller et alia 2002).

Embodiment effects on memory have been also found in accomplishingparticular tasks, including reasoning and language understanding, andseveral recent works suggest that memory reflects different bodilycapacities (M. Wilson 2001; Glenberg 1997; Carlson 1997). For instance,hand-arm movements, that often accompany speech, do not play a merecommunicative role but facilitate the maintenance of spatialrepresentations in working memory (Wesp et alia 2001) and recallingenacted action-phrases is significantly easier with respect to purelyverbal encoding (see Engelkamp, 1998 for a review). This effectsuggests that motor information may have become part of the memorytrace, thus indicating that action-phrases merely heard do not producethe same effective encoding of real enacted action-sentences. Empiricalliterature also supports the hypothesis that the memory trace includesthe body posture in which the experience was acquired (Barsalou et alia2003). Drawing on congruent-posture and incongruent-posture conditions,behavioral data have shown that the body contains the cue to recallautobiographical events and the retrieval of a memory of a pastexperience gets facilitated if the body posture assumed during thatexperience is reassumed (Dijkstra et alia 2007). Further evidence ofthe body's constraining capacities has been provided by Pressonand Montello (1994). In this experiment subjects were first asked tomemorize the location of objects in a room and then, while blindfolded,were asked to point to the objects. Pointing was fast and accurate.While some subjects were then asked to imagine rotating 90° and topoint to the objects again, the others were asked to actually rotate90° and to point to the objects. In this second half of theexperiment, pointing was slow and inaccurate only for those whoimagined the rotation.

A recent, informative survey of memory-related empirical phenomena,which also explains in what sense memory can be understood as anembodied skill, namely, a process incorporating bodily experience, canbe found in Sutton and Williamson (2014).

5.4 Other Minds

Folk psychology is the commonsenseunderstanding we have of one another in terms of internal mentalstates, such as beliefs and desires, that in combination can be used topredict and explain human behaviour. The traditional perspective onunderstanding folk psychology presupposes that our attributionaltendencies here are generated by an internal theory (Premack andWoodruff 1978), and on some versions of this “theorytheory” view of folk psychology, this internal theory is executedby a theory of mind module in the brain (Leslie 1987). Opponents ofthis view, simulation theorists, minimize the role played by the kindof abstract theorizing typical of theories, and question whether such atheory of mind module exists. They argue that discoveries and findingsfrom neuroscience are consistent with the approach that sees socialcognition as a form of body-based simulation, and conceives of bodilystates as the building blocks of intersubjectivity (Oberman andRamachandran 2007; Iacoboni and Dapretto 2006; Rizzolatti and Craighero2004; Ferrari et alia 2003; Rizzolatti et alia 2001; Umiltà etalia 2001; Gallese and Goldman 1998; Rizzolatti and Arbib 1998).

The discovery of mirror neurons in macaques and humans–cellswith sensorimotor properties that fire both when performing an actionand when observing the very same action executed by otherindividuals—has been seized on by simulation theorists and otheropponents of the theory-theory view in support of their preferredexplanatory frameworks. (For critical evaluations of fMRI and PETstudies aiming to show the presence of a mirror neuron system in humanssee Turella et alia 2009; see also Hickok 2008.)

Indirect evidence in support of a mirror system in humans comes fromstudies on the reactivity of cerebral rhythm, the posterior alpharhythm and the central mu rhythm, during action observation. While themu rhythm is present during motor rest, it disappears when activemovements are performed. Electrophysiological results have shown thatobserving the action executed by another individual blocks the murhythm of the observer, thus providing evidence for aresonancesystem, which links the observed action to the action of thesubject's own motor repertoire (Oberman et alia 2005; Cochin etalia 1998; Gastaut and Bert 1954, Cohen-Seat et alia 1954). Anotherbody of evidence in support of the existence of anobservation/execution matching system in humans comes from transcranialmagnetic stimulation studies (Fadiga et alia 1995). Left motor cortexof normal participants was stimulated both during the observation ofintransitive and goal-directed arm movements. Motor evoked potentialswere recorded from various hand muscles. The results showed a selectiveincrease in motor evoked potentials in the regions that participantsnormally recruit for producing the observed action. That means thatwhen we observe a person grasping a cup of coffee the very same neuralpopulation that controls the execution of the grasping movement becomesactive in the observer's motor areas.

On this view, it is the embodied imitation of the observed body inaction that directly enables us to recognize others as persons likeus, not an abstract, inferential and theory-like process. Thehypothesis that action understanding is based on a resonance mechanismdoes not exclude the possibility that other processes, based onmovement descriptions, could influence this function. It simplyhighlights the primacy of a direct, automatic and prereflexivematching between the observation and the execution of action. Byaccepting this premise the traditional tension between acting andthinking considerably shrinks, as the capacity to detect the meaningof the behaviors of others consists in employing the same resourcesused to model our motor behavior.

5.5 Moral Cognition

A dominant tradition in moraltheory for the past several centuries has placed reason at the centerof moral thought and moral behavior. Kohlberg's cognitivedevelopmental work on moral cognition (1969) reflects this spirit.Kohlberg consistently endorsed, along the lines of classic cognitivism,a rationalist model in which emotions and body states may be taken intoaccount by reason but it is pure reasoning that ultimately leads tomoral decisions. His paradigm inspired most leading studies in thefield, all characterized by the common view that cognitive processingin the moral domain is disengaged from the economy of emotions andbody.

Recent work in embodied moral cognition challenges this paradigm.Social intuitionist models, for instance, claim that many moraljudgments appear to be the result of affective components (Greene andHaidt 2002; Haidt et alia 1993). Subjects presented with descriptionsof actions that were harmless but likely to produce a strong affectiveresponse/reaction (e.g., eating one's pet dog after a car killedit) often judge the action described by the sentence to be wrong. Whenpressed to provide a justification, subjects typically focus onnonexistent harms associated with the actions, indicating thatconscious reasoning is not a good predictor of their judgment ofwrongness. If affective reactions play a pervasive role in moraljudgments, a role that escapes (and is in fact masked by) consciousreflection, this suggests that moral cognition is shaped andconstrained by “gut feelings”, rather than the product ofabstract reasoning.

Further examples supporting the embodied nature of moral cognition comefrom the experimental literature that specifically addressesdisgust/repugnance (Lerner et alia 2004; Wheatley and Haidt, 2005).Disgust involves strong physical components and explicit bodilychanges, such as nausea, stomach-turning, throat clenching,food-expulsion, thrusting out of the tongue, and wrinkling of the nose.Even if disgust evolved as a food-related reaction indicating that asubstance should be either avoided or expelled, it is also an emotionof social rejection, extending its reach and influence into the domainof moral cognition (Niedenthal et alia 2005; Prinz 2004).

Recent experiments have shown, for example, that the feeling ofdisgust induced by the exposure to a bad smell or dirty looking roommakes moral judgments more severe (Schnall et alia 2008a), and thatsubjects who physically cleanse themselves then find certain moralactions to be less wrong than do participants not exposed to acleanliness manipulation (Schnall et alia 2008b). These ‘moralharshness’ effects may be induced even for moral evaluations ofcertain issues or groups. In a recent study (Inbar et alia 2009)experimenters found that people reported more negative evaluationstowards gays and lesbians when exposed to a noxious odor in the roomthan when no odor was present. Even anger has been shown to deeplyshape the representations available to moral judgment. Anger over atraffic incident before going to work may lead to an increased relianceon prejudice when interviewing a job candidate afterwards (DeSteno etalia 2004).

Accumulating evidence that perception, emotion and judgment aregrounded in sensorimotor mechanisms motivated the body-specificitythesis (Casasanto 2011, 2009; de la Vega et alia 2012; Brunyéet alia 2012), the claim that people with different kinds of bodiestend to think differently. Right handers, for example, conceptualize“good” and “bad” in terms of motor dominancerather than cultural conventions and tend to prefer or make positiveevaluations of people or objects presented in their right side(Casasanto 2014, 2009, Casasanto and Henetz 2012). This space-valenceimplicit mapping can be manipulated via changes in body- environmentinteractions. Subjects who lost the use of their dominant hand or weara glove that impairs motor fluency show a reversal of their space–valence associations (Casasanto and Chrysikou 2011). For adetailed discussion of how affective judgments incorporate patterns ofbodily interaction with the environment and are constrained by a rangeof embodied capabilities see Casasanto 2014.

The empirical literature suggests that the specificity of one'sown bodily cues and affective reactions (e.g., nausea, arousal) guideand constrain cognitive processing in social and moral domains. Inaddition, it suggests that dramatic deficits occur when subjects do notexhibit and make use of these cues and reactions. Damasio'ssomatic marker hypothesis (1994, 1996) claims that bodily states,normally triggered during emotional experiences, are re-enactedwhenever certain situations occur or are considered, and suchre-enaction avoids deleterious consequences of one's course ofaction. When the capacity to integrate these feelings (either positiveor negative) with one's own knowledge of facts is severelycompromised, as is the case in ventro-medial-prefrontal cortex (VMPFC)patients, making judgments and decisions is severely impaired. As a‘gambling task’ (Bechara et alia 1994) reveals, in theabsence of embodied states (e.g., anticipatory skin conductanceresponse) VMPFC patients miss a fundamental source of information aboutthe possible outcomes associated with different actions (see alsoBechara et alia 2000). If Damasio's hypothesis is correct, thenthe affective and bodily feedback implicated in various types of moraljudgment do not simply lead to different understandings andconceptualizations of the situation at hand, but are part of thephysical machinery realizing cognitive processes.

While we think there is broad empirical support for the idea thatsensorimotor activity and central cognitive processing are more deeplydependent on one another than previously thought, and for the view thatbodily activity can constrain, distribute, and regulate neuralactivity, embodied cognitive science has also been invoked in supportof more radical philosophical ideas about cognition and the mind. Forexample, as we noted inSection 3, some have argued that embodiedcognition implies that cognition itself leaks out into the body (andultimately the environment (A. Clark 2008). Proponents of thetraditional view that cognition is skull-bound have argued, in reply,both that this inference is mistaken and the view it leads to isimplausible and metaphysically extravagant (Rupert 2009b; Adams andAizawa 2008; Aizawa 2007). We take up such further philosophical issuesin Section 6 below.

6. Sharper Divides Over Embodied Cognition

The difference that embodied cognition makes to the three issues wediscussed inSection 4—the modularity of mind, the nature ofmental representation, and nativism about the mind, remains a liveissue of debate in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Thesame is true of the interpretation of the particular empirical resultsdescribed inSection 5.

We think that some of these disagreements both reflect andcontribute to sharper divides over the significance of embodiedcognitive science. We discuss four such issues in this concludingsection, structuring our discussion around four correspondingquestions:

1. What payoffs forempirical research does embodied cognitive science have?
2. To what extent can thefindings generated by embodied cognitive science be accommodated by thetools of traditional cognitive science?
3. What is therelationship between embodied cognition and the extended mindthesis?
4. What implications foragency, the self, and subjectivity does accepting the embodied natureof cognition have?

Our aim here is not to provide extensive answers to these questions,but to indicate briefly what our review of contemporary work onembodied cognition indicates about the issues that they raise. We takeeach in turn.

6.1 Payoffs for empirical research

Insofar asembodied cognitive science has its origins in a variety ofdissatisfaction with traditional cognitive science, it has explorednovel questions about cognition and generated results that have, insome cases, been unexpected. As we have seen in the previous section,embodied cognitive science continues to produce empirical research thatis interesting, novel, and controversial. In this respect, embodiedcognitive science is not simply (or chiefly) a philosophical mantraempty of empirical content, but a cluster of perspectives on cognitionwhose empirical orientation and rootedness cannot be questioned.

But there is an alternative position that one might take on thisquestion that is more circumspect about the empirical payoff of“embodied cognition”. While there is no doubt about theempirical “oomph” of embodied cognitive science, the extentto which this work either challenges traditional views or requires oneor another of the determinate forms of the Embodiment Thesis that wearticulated—Body as Constraint, Body as Distributor, and Body asRegulator—might be questioned. For example, Lawrence Shapiro(2011) has argued that the views of Lakoff and Johnson on metaphor,thought, and the body are fully compatible with central tenets oftraditional cognitive science, such as the idea that cognitioncentrally involves computation over internal mental representations(see also Shapiro 2010). Robert Rupert (2009b) has argued moregenerally for compatibility between the empirical findings of embodiedcognitive science and the core assumptions of traditional cognitivescience. Likewise, Fred Adams (2010) has argued that one shoulddistinguish between the empirical premise in arguments for theembodiment of cognition, and a requisite logical-metaphysical premise,and that the latter of these is seldom supported. (Adams focuses onGlenberg's work on meaning affordances (Glenberg and Kaschak2002; see also Glenberg and Robertson 2000, Glenberg et al. 2005), buthis claims are quite general). From this perspective, one should siftthe empirical wheat of embodied cognitive science from therevolutionary, philosophical chaff that has characterized that movementfrom the outset. This issue, in turn, brings us to our next issue.

6.2 Accommodation by traditional cognitive science

For the most part, questioning whetherembodied cognitive science delivers on the revolutionary front hasproceeded not by drawing on general considerations—say, of theunderdetermination of theory by data—but by a detailedconsideration of particular empirical results (cf. Rupert 2009b: ch.11,however). By its nature, this kind of argument, which we endorse theneed for, is time- and space-consuming, especially given the diversityof work that falls under the label “embodied cognition”.This is more so in the evaluation of this type of challenge toproponents of embodied cognition. Here we settle for making one generalpoint about the state of the dialectic here, and state where we believethe burden of proof lies.

Suppose that we simply grant the historical claim that the focus andorientation of traditional cognitive science has not taken cognition tobe dependent, in any significant way, on the body. What does this implyabout the explanatory power of traditional cognitive science vis-a-visthe Embodiment Thesis? Recall that we have analyzed the EmbodimentThesis in terms of three determinate theses about the nature of thedependence of cognition on the body, each with its own particularimplications:

Body as Constraint: an agent's bodyfunctions so as to significantly constrain the nature and content ofthe representations processed by that agent's cognitivesystem.

Body as Distributor: an agent's bodyfunctions so as to distribute computational and representational loadbetween neural and non-neural structures.

Body as Regulator: an agent's body functions so as to regulatecognitive activity over space and time, ensuring that cognition andaction are tightly coordinated.

Those seeking to resist the challenge that one or more of theseviews poses to traditional cognitive science have two primary options:to deny the truth of the corresponding thesis, or to reject theinference(s) from that thesis to claims about what traditionalcognitive science can and cannot explain.

Defenders of traditional cognitive science have considerabledialectical power available here, and they have made effective use of afamiliar argumentative strategy in resisting the embodied cognitionchallenge: to grant that there is a weak or limited sense in which oneor more of these particular embodiment thesis is correct, but arguethat the inferential gap between such theses and the rejection of viewssuch as computationalism and representationalism is not bridgeable(Adams 2010, Rupert 2009a, 2009b) a strategy that those criticallysympathetic to embodied cognitive science have also made effective useof (e.g., Shapiro 2010, 2011). To this extent, the burden of proofcurrently lies squarely with proponents of embodied cognitive sciencewho hold that the revolutionary promise of embodied cognition is realto show how those gaps can be bridged.

6.3 Embodied cognition and the extended mind thesis

One such putatively radical implication of embodiedcognition is the Extended Mind Thesis, which says that an agent'smind and associated cognitive processing are neither skull-bound noreven body-bound, but extend into the agent's world. Unlike theEmbodiment Thesis, this thesis arose via more explicitlyphilosophically-driven discussions—of functionalism (Harman1988), of computationalism and individualism (R. Wilson 1994, 1995:ch.3–4), and of belief (Clark and Chalmers 1998). It thus bears adifferent kind of relationship to empirical work in cognitive sciencethan does the idea of embodied cognition. Despite the legacies of thesedifferent histories, as we noted in Section 1, embodied cognition andextended cognition have recently come to be viewed as peas in the samepod, as variants of situated cognitive science.

The first point to draw attention to is that nothing in any of thethree determinate forms of the Embodiment Thesis entails the extendedmind thesis. Thus, the view that cognition is embodied (in somespecific sense: constrained, distributed, or regulated) is compatiblewith the denial of the view that cognition is extended. Expressed interms of the Body as Distributor thesis, perhaps cognitive processingis distributed by the body across neural and non-neural resources, butall of the relevant non-neural resourcesare contained within theboundaries of the body. We believe that this is the positionoccupied by the core of the embodied cognitive science community. (Forexample, Barsalou's recent [2008] review paper on “groundedcognition”, which completely omits mention of any the largephilosophical literature on extended cognition, is indicative of thisstate of affairs.)

Second, many of the most influential defenses of the extended mindthesis appeal to considerations only tangentially related to thebody—to computationalism and individualism (R. Wilson 1994), todistributed and group-level cognition (Hutchins 1995), to parityprinciples (Clark and Chalmers 1998), to realization (R. Wilson 2001,2004: ch.5–6). For this reason, debate over those arguments and theextended view of the mind they putatively support have only recentlybecome conjoined by advocates (R. Wilson 2010; A. Clark 2003, 2008) andcritics (Adams and Aizawa 2008; Rupert 2009b) alike. This recent, jointconsideration is of mutual benefit to discussions of both embodied andextended cognition.

Thus, and third, despite their independence, some have claimed thatthe most powerful arguments for one of these views also provide strongreasons to accept the other. For example, Andy Clark (2008) argues fromthe active embodiment of cognition to the extended mind thesis.Similarly, some of the most trenchant objections to one of these viewswould also appear also to serve as the basis for rejecting the other.For example, critics of the extended mind thesis, such as Adams andAizawa (2008) and Rupert (2004, 2009b), have objected that thosearguing for the thesis have confused or elided the distinction betweenexternalcauses of cognition and externalconstituentsof cognition. This charge of committing a“coupling-constitution fallacy” is also readily madeagainst particular embodied cognition views, such as AlvaNöe's (2004) view that perceptual experience is constitutedby sensorimotor abilities (see Prinz 2009; Aizawa 2007; Rupert 2006;Block 2005). While there may be relevant differences between embodiedand extended cognition that imply that such arguments and objections donot transfer, there are at least default, parity considerations thatput the burden of proof on those claiming those differences.

Fourth, there may be deeper reasons for thinking that embodied andextended cognition stand or fall together. Rupert (2009b), for example,has recently argued against both embodied and extended cognition inpart by making a positive case for what he calls thecognitivesystems view of the boundaries of cognition, and that this viewsuggests, together with our best empirical science, that cognitionbegins and ends in the brain. If Rupert is correct, then cognition isneither embodied nor extended because both views are incompatible withan independently-motivated account of the brain-bound nature ofintegrated cognitive architectures.

Conversely, in laying out a general conception of situated cognitionas cognitive extension, Wilson and Clark (2009) claimed that“many forms of embodied cognition, properly understood, will turnout to involve just the kinds of cognitive extension that we articulatehere” (p.56), a promissory note that one of us (R. Wilson 2010)has attempted to cash in offering the following explicit argument tyingtogether embodied and extended cognition:

1. The function of somevisual processes is to guide action via visual information.
2. A primary way toachieve that function is through the active embodiment of visualprocessing (à la Body as Distributor).
3. Visual processes areactively embodied in this sense just if in their normal operation innatural environments, these processes are coupled with bodilyactivities so as to form an integrated system with functional gain.
4. But visual processesthat are actively embodied, in this sense, are also extended. Thus,
5. Some visual processes,and the visual systems those processes physically constitute, areextended.

Clearly, as the premise that explicitly draws a connection betweenthe Embodiment and Extended Mind theses, (4) is where this argument islikely to be scrutinized by those skeptical of the conclusion to thisargument. Whether that can be done while accepting (1)–(3),however, is unclear and the kind of issue that requires furtherattention in this debate.

6.4 Agency, the self, and subjectivity

If the mindis not skull-bound but at least embodied, and perhaps even extended,then what view should we adopt of the self, subjectivity, andconsciousness? The penultimate paragraph to Clark and Chalmers (1998)advocated the view that, to put it colloquially, where mind goes, theself follows: if the mind is extended, for example, so too is the self(see also A. Clark 2001, 2003). Since much of what matters to theidentity of one's self is cognitive in nature, at least ontraditional views of the self and personal identity, this“self-follows-mind” view seems a natural default.

If the boundaries of the self shift with those of the mind out fromskull to body, or even from body to world, as the self-follows-mindview implies, then accepting embodied or extended cognition will haveinteresting implications concerning autonomy, sociality, personalidentity, and responsibility. For example, it might be that in somecases interfering with someone's peripersonal space, the spaceclose to the body, or even certain of one's belongings, will havea comparable moral significance as interfering with a person'sbody. And as Clark and Chalmers (1998) suggested in their finalparagraph, certain forms of social activity might be reconceived as akind of thought activity. The social distribution of humandecision-making would also mitigate individual's responsibilityfor a transgression, thereby producing dramatic ramifications for ourpractices of attributing legal culpability. In effect, if situationalforces and environmental contingences played a physically constitutiverole in decision-making processes so as to become partial realizers ofone's own behavior, as the so called ‘Frail ControlHypothesis’ seems to suggest (see Churchland and Suhler 2009 forcritics to this view), then human beings would have little if anycontrol over their actions and presumably no normative competence.

Against the self-follows-mind view, Wilson (2004: 141-143) hasargued that even if one accepts that the mind is extended, there arereasons to resist the idea that the self is likewise extended. Thisresistance turns on precisely the kinds of implications indicatedabove, and their often radical, deeply counter-intuitive, and puzzlingconsequences. For example, if subjects of cognition (or agents, orindividuals) are themselves distributed across brain, body, and world,then why should we punish just one bit of this individual, the bitinside the body, when it commits a crime? (Consider this a truncatedreductio.) More generally, while agents as the subjects ofcognition are not just a bundle of neural circuits and bodilyexperience, re-casting agency and subjectivity within the extendedframework likely requires a far more comprehensive and somewhat uneasyreconceptualization of notions such as normative competence, freedomand control, and personal identity. Perhaps this simply tells us thatmuch further exploration is needed concerning how embodied experiencesin real-world contexts shape cognitive processing. Or perhaps itsuggests that more conservative strategies should be employed toaccount for what the subjects of cognitive processing really are.

One such strategy is to appeal to the ready-made distinction betweenthe subject or agent of cognition, which can be readilyidentified as being where the locus of control for a given cognitivesystem is, housed in the agent's body, and thecognitivesystems in which cognitive processing is realized, which are oftenextended (R. Wilson 2004, ch.5–6). Such a distinction is put toantecedent use in making sense of extendedbiological systems,such as spiders and the webs they spin—these organisms arebounded, roughly speaking, by their cohesive, organic bodies, but stillact in the world through the extended biological systems they construct(R. Wilson 2005, ch.1–4). Thus, an appeal to this distinction here isnot ad hoc, and provides a principled basis for a more conservative,traditional view of agency and the self within an extended cognitionframework.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge detailed editorial feedback fromSEP editors and reviewers for suggestions that led to improvements tothis article, and to the following people who provided useful earlyfeedback on what the article should cover: Fred Adams, Mike Anderson,Matt Barker, Paul Bloom, Andy Clark, Carl Craver, Terry Horgan,Edouard Machery, Bob McCauley, Alva Noé, Nico Orlandi, TomPolger, Phil Robbins, Rob Rupert, and Larry Shapiro.