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Handedness, self-models and embodied cognitive content

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Abstract

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

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Notes

  1. A forerunner of SETI was the Project Ozma, named by it’s director Frank Drake in admiration of Frank Baum’s Oz stories and one of its fancy characters, the Long Eared Hearer. Hence Gardner’s name-giving.

  2. In more technical terms, the difference we observe here is the one between the continuous rotational symmetry group in space (with transformations connecting top–down and front–back) and the discrete mirror symmetry (connecting left–right).

  3. The fact that P- or CP-violation may perhaps help to solve the Ozma problem for communication settings in our 3D world (as described above), does not affect our statement about the non-descriptive nature of WWCH, since a solution by means of P- or CP-violation is based on the pure contingent fact of the instantiation of the which-is-which handedness as a natural property of certain particles. But we should not confuse WWCH with that property. Whether nature realizes not only handedness as such, but also left- and right-handedness in the which-is-which sense, is a purely empirical question . Surely, as things stand, this is the case because of P-violation in modern physics, but even if this were not the case, we must nevertheless attribute a WWCH to ourselves simply because we possess an asymmetric body.

  4. Cf. Gallagher (2005) and Metzinger (2003) for different views and versions of self-models and body-models.

  5. As indicated in the beginning, for some this is even a reason to give up representationalism altogether. For our consideration, however, there is no need for such a strong philosophical claim.

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  1. Philosophy Department, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany

    Holger Lyre

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  1. Holger Lyre
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Lyre, H. Handedness, self-models and embodied cognitive content. Phenom Cogn Sci 7, 529–538 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-007-9080-0

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