Embodying the Mind by Extending It

Review of Philosophy and Psychology 3 (1):33-51 (2012)
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Abstract

To subscribe to the embodied mind (or embodiment) framework is to reject the view that an individual’s mind is realized by her brain alone. As Clark ( 2008a ) has argued, there are two ways to subscribe to embodiment: bodycentrism (BC) and the extended mind (EM) thesis. According to BC, an embodied mind is a two-place relation between an individual’s brain and her non-neural bodily anatomy. According to EM, an embodied mind is a threeplace relation between an individual’s brain, her non-neural body and her non-bodily environment. I argue that BC can be given a weak and a strong interpretation, according to whether it accepts a functionalist account of the contribution of the non-neural body to higher cognitive functions and a computational account of the contents of concepts and the nature of conceptual processing. Thus, weak BC amounts to an incomplete version of EM. To accept a weak BC approach to concepts is to accept concept-empiricism. I raise four challenges for concept-empiricism and argue that what is widely taken as evidence for concept-empiricism from recent cognitive neuroscience could only vindicate weak BC if it could be shown that the non-neural body, far from being a tool at the service of the mind/brain, could be constitutive of the mind. If correct, EM would seem able to vindicate the claim that both bodily and non-bodily tools are constitutive of an individual’s mind. I scrutinize the basic arguments for EM and argue that they fail. This failure backfires on weak BC. One option left for advocates of BC is to endorse a strong, more controversial, BC approach to concepts.

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Pierre Jacob
Institut Jean Nicod

Citations of this work

How from action-mirroring to intention-ascription?Pierre Jacob - 2013 - Consciousness and Cognition 22 (3):1132-1141.
Embodied Cognition: Looking Inward.Przemysław Nowakowski - 2017 - Hybris. Internetowy Magazyn Filozoficzny 38:74-97.
Three misconceptions concerning strong embodiment.Liam P. Dempsey & Itay Shani - 2015 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 14 (4):827-849.

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