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cognition.

What those approaches share is the philosophical problem they come from: the symbol grounding problem.

This motivates the way they account for embodiment in mental processes. The mottos I wrote in order to sum-up the core claims of those views of cognition were:

i) «The mind is where embodied metaphors, built on image-schemas, structure our cognitive processes».

ii) «The mind is where there is a sensorimotor activity or a re- enactment of it in terms of perceptual symbols».

As the two sentences show, the idea of embodiment that Cognitive Linguistics (in Lakoff and Johnson’s version) and Grounded Cognition (as endorsed by Barsalou) give is strictly connected to semantic and conceptual issues. Cognition (and consequently the mind) is said to be embodied because meanings and concepts take the body as their “matrix of emergence”.

Even if in different ways, these two approaches still make use of the concept of representation as an explanatory tool to have an access to the body. Obviously, the idea of perceptual symbol and that of image-schema are peculiar ways to think of cognitive representations, which differ from standard views of mental representations, namely from representations modeled as “words”. In particular, perceptual symbols and image-schemas are attempts to account for cognition as active and embodied. As already shown, perceptual symbols are neuronal patterns that re-enact sensorimotor states in the absence of the sensory stimuli, by preserving an analogical relation with the sensorimotor state that caused the activation of the neuronal areas nearby. Image-schemas are what I defined “hybrid representations” (they are also called weak representations14

). They are not proper sensorimotor states (Gibbs, Colston 1995: 349), but analogical representations of them. Moreover, this perceptual (and emotional) implicit knowledge about the body is combined with the subject’s conceptual understanding of her body. This kind of representation, as in the case of perceptual symbols, acts as a mediator in the process which structures higher order cognitive processes (i.e. language and memory).

Cognitive linguistics’ approach (in Lakoff and Johnson version) to image- schemas particularly stresses the conceptual aspect of them. They are through to be conceptual (Lakoff, Johnson 1999: 34) and what is interesting is that when Lakoff and Johnson discuss the inseparability of categories, concepts and experiences, they define concepts as “neural structures that allow us to mentally characterize our categories and reason about them” (Lakoff, Johnson 1999: 19). Therefore, even if in other publications they state that the only concept of representation they endorse is not an “inner mental entity” but a “flexible pattern of organism-environment interaction” (Lakoff, Johnson 2002: 249-250, as cited in Gallagher 2011a: 64), Lakoff and Johnson seem to still refer to a sort of embodiment “neurally mediated”. If image-schemas are enabling conditions for the metaphorical thought, and if they are thought to be conceptual within an explanatory frame in which concepts are (sometimes) defined as neural structures, then it is possible to claim that, somehow, this approach to the body can be considered as a weak version of embodiment (Gallagher 2011a).

Now, some embodied approaches to cognition that come from phenomenology (Gallagher 2005), philosophy of psychology and biology (Shapiro 2004), and biology (Chiel, Beer 1997) reproach to approaches to cognition that look for the cognitive role of the body in embodied representations to underplay the role of the body “before and after the brain”. That is to say: those theories are said to underestimate the role of the body (conceived in its anatomical, motor, and chemical aspects) in pre-processing and post-processing information in the cognitive system (Gallagher 2011a).

According to those approaches -which do not constitute a philosophical school in a proper sense, but that nevertheless share the idea of “biological embodiment”- in order to actually account for the role of the body in cognitive process, embodied theorists should consider its very materiality as a factor that does the most part of the work in cognitive processes.

Reassessing what Gallagher points out (Gallagher 2011a: 61) quoting Shapiro (Shapiro 2004: 190), it can be said that the idea of “biological embodiment” holds that the materiality of the body not only constrains cognitive processes (i.e. the body affords some kinds of cognitive operations and prevents the cognitive agent from performing other kinds of cognitive activities). The body, precisely in virtue of its extra-neural “material constitution” (anatomy), its “dynamical constitution” (motor aspect), and its “chemical constitution” (see for instance hormonal processes), should be taken to be a constitutive part of the cognitive system. This is to say, those factors should not be considered as something that has just a causal influence on the

mind (also cognitivism recognized that –Shapiro 2011: 159); rather, they are constitutive of the mind. Indeed, changes and differences in anatomical, chemical and motor factors produce changes and differences in the effects of the cognitive activity (i.e. cognitive contents) and also in the modality in which cognition unfolds (i.e. fluency in performing the cognitive task). That is why they should be considered to be constitutive of the mind.

In Gallagher’s article previously quoted, empirical evidence to support this philosophical claim is given. For instance, he cites research done by Roll and Roll (Roll and Roll 1988: 162) that shows that changes in body postures caused by vibration-induced proprioceptive patterns change the way the environment is perceived, and how hormonal changes, visceral and musculoskeletal processes affect perception, memory and decision-making (Damasio 1994; Bechara et al. 1997).

Other empirical evidence to proof how the body plays a constitutive role in determining the mind’s contents and the qualitative aspects of cognitive processes (modality) before neural processing can be also found in some research developed by the neuroscientist and cognitive scientist Daniel Casasanto at the psychology laboratory of Chicago University. Those experiments are meant to verify the “body-specificity hypothesis” (Casasanto 2009), or “bodily relativity”. According to the “bodily relativity hypothesis”,

“to the extent that the content of the mind depends on our interactions with our environment, people with different kinds of bodies – who interact with the environment in systematically different ways – should tend to form correspondingly different neural and cognitive representations” (Casasanto 2011: 108)

The hypothesis that should be verified consists in saying that cognitive representations (namely mental contents) constitutively vary according to the cognitive agent’s body. Moreover, the hypothesis entails that the way the “anatomical and motor body” affects mental contents follows a continuous path: this does not only shapes perceptual contents, but it also constitutively determines the contents of higher order cognitive processes.

The basic idea of this hypothesis is that anatomical and motor differences of the body do not merely correlate with cognitive differences; they rather entertain a stronger relation with mental contents: mental contents, cognitive representations, neural representations entertain a relation of constitutive dependence with bodily features.

That is why, shifting the argumentation to a more philosophical level, those ones should be considered to be constitutive of the cognitive process, and then of the mind. The body matters for cognition not only because it is represented in a certain way (i.e. PSS and image-schemas) by the mind, and then those representations deeply influence the overall dynamics of cognitive processes, but also and especially because it entertains a “more primitive” relation with cognition. Representations that are said to give a cognitive access to the body are strictly dependent on the very materiality of the body they represent. Moreover, the body seem to be considered to be cognitive also before it is processed by internal representations.

To understand this point, it is worth to have a look to the experimental part of Casasanto’s research. In the article “Different Bodies, different Minds: The Body Specificity of Language and Thought” (Casasanto 2011), Casasanto describes an experiment made with Evangelia Chrysikou in which they studied how people think about “god” and “bad” and make judgments about those values after the ordinary function of their dominant hands has been handicapped. The experiment tested space-valence mappings (namely the association of positive or negative values and objects situated in different parts of the spatial context of the cognitive task) in a task in which healthy university students were asked to perform a motor-fluency task while wearing a clumber- some glove on their left hand or on their right one. This temporarily turned right-handed people in left-handed people and left-handed people in right- handed people. After 12 minutes of lopsided sensorimotor experience, students removed the glove. Then the cognitive task was performed again without the glove-constraint. Casasanto and Chrysikou discovered that students that had worn the left glove during the first task, still thought that “right” was good (that is, they associated “good” with “right” in their judgments about objects in the space). On the contrary, participants who had worn the right glove associated “left” with “good”, as naturally left-handed people usually do.

The conclusion the two scientists drew from that experiment (whose results were compared with those from experiments in which space-valence mappings were tested in relation to stroke patients with hemiparesis on their left or right side)15

is that higher order and complex forms of cognition (i.e. emotional judgments) are strictly connected to the very material constitution of the body (and to the way this has a great influence on motor habits). This means that the body matters for cognition, it “shapes the mind”, also before complex

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In order to check the explanatory efficacy of the results of this experiment, see also Casasanto 2009; Casasanto, Chrysikou 2011; De la Vega, Dudschig, De Filippis, Lachmair, Kaup 2011.

representational processes take place (this can be tested by looking at the timing of emotional judgments formation). The body does not only give a ground to mental representations, but it works as a “content shaper” also before brain processing.

This emphasis on the very materiality of the body is what another theory in the “4E cognition” debate, Enactivism, focuses on, integrating it with some philosophical assumptions taken from phenomenology.