Cognitive Linguistics Research Body, Language and Mind Vol. 1: Embodiment Tom Ziemke Jordan Zlatev Roslyn M. Frank (Sel ixeya)) W DE G MOUTON DE GRUYTERCognitive Linguistics Research 35.1 Editors Dirk Geeraerts René Dirven John R. Taylor Honorary editor Ronald W. Langacker Mouton de Gruyter Berlin - New YorkMouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Body, language, and mind, Volume 1, Embodiment / edited by Tom Ziemke, Jordan Zlatev, Roslyn M. Frank. p. cm. ~ (Cognitive linguistics research ; 35.1) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-3-11-019327-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) I. Language and languages — Philosophy. 2. Mind and body. 3. Semiotics. 1. Ziemke, T. (Tom), 1969 IL. Zlatev, Jordan, IIL, Frank, Roslyn M. P107.B63. 2007 401—de22 2007028708 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de, ISBN 978-3-11-019327-5 ISSN 1861-4132 © Copyright 2007 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in GermanyTable of contents List of contributors Introduction: The body eclectic Tom Ziemke and Roslyn M. Frank Section A: Historical roots Weare live creatures: Embodiment, American Pragmatism and the cognitive organism Mark Johnson and Tim Rohrer Bringing the body back to life: James Gibson’s ecology of embodied agency Alan Costall From the meaning of embodiment to the embodiment of meaning: A study in phenomenological semiotics Géran Sonesson Embodiment and social interaction: A cognitive science perspective Jessica Lindblom and Tom Ziemke Section B: Body and mind Representing actions and functional properties in conceptual spaces Peter Gérdenfors From pre-representational cognition to language Takashi Ikegami and Jordan Zlatev vii 17 55 85 129 167 197vi Table of contents Making sense of embodied cognition: Simulation theories of shared neural mechanisms for sensorimotor and cognitive processes Henrik Svensson, Jessica Lindblom and Tom Ziemke Phenomenological and experimental contributions to understanding embodied experience Shaun Gallagher Section C: Body, language and culture Embodiment, language, and mimesis Jordan Zlatev The body in space: Dimensions of embodiment Tim Rohrer On the biosemiotics of embodiment and our human cyborg nature Claus Emmeche Embodiment and self-organization of human categories: A case study of speech Luc Steels and Bart de Boer Communication as situated, embodied practice Wolff-Michael Roth Index 271 297 339 379 411 457List of contributors Bart de Boer did a Master’s degree in computer science at the Rijksuni- versiteit Leiden (1994) and a PhD in artificial intelligence at the AI lab of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (1999) under professor Luc Steels. He has worked as a postdoc in Brussels and at the University of Washington under professor Patricia Kuhl. He has also performed linguistic fieldwork in Ne- pal. His main research interest is in computer modeling the evolution of speech. He is currently working as an assistant professor in cognitive ro- boties at the Rijksuniversiteit Leiden. e-mail: b.de.boer@ai.rug.nl Alan Costall is Professor of Theoretical Psychology at the University of Portsmouth, England. His research interests are wide, but are held together by a commitment to interdisciplinarity, and a broadly ecological or mutu- alist perspective. He has been increasingly involved in work on the history of modern psychology and its relations (or lack of them) to other disci- plines. Recent publications include: A. Costall and O. Dreier, (eds.), Doing Things with Things. (London: Ashgate, 2006); A. Costall, I. Leudar, and V. Reddy. (2006) “Failing to see the irony in ‘mind-reading.’”” Theory & Psy- chology 16(2): 163-167; Bard, K.A., M. Myowa-Yamakoshi, M. To- monaga, M. Tanaka, A. Costall, A., and T. Matsuzawa. (2005) “Group differences in the mutual gaze of chimpanzees (Pan Troglodytes).” Devel- opmental Psychology 41: 616-624; Rogers, S. D., E. E. Kadar and A. Costall, A. (2005) “Gaze patterns in the visual control of straight road driving and braking as a function of speed and expertise.” Ecological Psy- chology 17: 19-38; Costall, A., and I. Leudar. (2004). “Where is the ‘the- ory’ in theory of mind?” Theory and Psychology 14: 625-648; Costall, A., M. Sinico and G. Parovel. (2003) “The concept of ‘invariants’ and the problem of perceptual constancy.” Rivista di Estetica, n.s. 24(3), 49-53; Ost, J., and A. Costall. (2002) “Misremembering Bartlett: A study in serial reproduction.” British Journal of Psychology 93: 243-255. e-mail: alan.costall@port.ac.uk Claus Emmeche is a theoretical biologist, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Head of the Center for the Philosophy of Nature and Science Studies, lo-viii List of contributors cated at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen. The Faculty of Science founded the center in 1994 to explore a new and more science- related way to do philosophy of nature, yet keeping a notion of science as more than natural science. Emmeche has taught courses in philosophy of biology and philosophy of science and his current research interests in- clude biosemiotics, artificial life, ontology, organism/body/cyborg rela- tions, and philosophy of nature. He is active in the Copenhagen biosemi- otics school (cf. Reading Hoffmeyer: Rethinking Biology, with Kalevi Kull and Frederik Stjernfelt) and in developing a cluster of mandatory science studies courses for the bachelor programmes in Denmark. e-mail: emmeche@nbi.dk Roslyn M. Frank is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa. She is co-editor of Cognitive Models in Language and Thought: Ideology, Metaphors and Meaning (2003); Language and Ideology, Vol. 2. Cognitive Description Approaches (2001) and has published extensively in the field of cognitive linguistics as well as in ethnoscience, most particularly in ethnomathematics and ethnoastro- nomy. Her research on the Basque language has taken her to Euskal Herria, the Basque Country, where she has done extensive fieldwork and given numerous seminars. In addition she has given presentations on these re- search topics throughout Europe. e-mail: roz-frank@uiowa.edu Shaun Gallagher is Professor and Chair of Philosophy and Cognitive Sci- ences at the University of Central Florida; he has been occasional Visiting Professor at the University of Copenhagen (2004-2006) and Visiting Sci- entist at the Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge University (1994). He is co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. His research interests include phenomenology and philosophy of mind, cognitive sciences, her- meneutics, theories of the self and personal identity. His most recent book, How the Body Shapes the Mind, is published by Oxford University Press (2005). He is co-editor of the forthcoming Does Consciousness Cause Be- havior? An Investigation of the Nature of Volition (MIT Press, 2006). He is currently working on several projects, including a co-authored book, The Phenomenological Mind: Contemporary Issues in Philosophy of Mind and the Cognitive Sciences (Routledge, 2007). His previous books include: Hermeneutics and Education (1992) and The Inordinance of Time (1998).List of contributors ix He has edited or co-edited volumes including: Ipseity and Alterity: Inter- disciplinary Approaches to Intersubjectivity (2004); Models of the Self (1999); Hegel, History, and Interpretation (1997). Home page: http:// pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~gallaghr e-mail: gallaghr@mail.ucf.edu Peter Girdenfors is professor of cognitive science at Lund University (Sweden). He leads the Ph.D. program in Cognitive Science there (LUCS). He has published numerous books and articles on decision theory, episte- mology, belief revision, concept formation and the evolution of cognition (see http://www. lucs.lu.se/People/Peter.Gardenfors/biblio2000.html). The most important books are Knowledge in Flux: Modeling the Dynamics of Epistemic States (Bradford Books, MIT Press, 1988); Conceptual Spaces (Bradford Books, MIT Press, 2000); How Homo Became Sapiens: On the Evolution of Thinking (Oxford University Press, 2003); and The Dynamics of Thought (Springer, 2005). e-mail: peter.gardenfors@lucs.lu.se Takashi Ikegami earned his Ph.D in Physics (1989). He works on Artifi- cial Life and Complex Systems by simulating computational models. His publications range from self-reproduction, ecological systems, embodied cognition to cognitive linguistics. Some of his recent articles are: Ikegami, T. (2005). “Neutral phenotypes as network keystone species.” Population Ecology 47: 21-29; lizuka, H. and T. Ikegami. (2004) “Adaptability and diversity in simulated turn-taking behavior.” Artificial Life 10: 361-378; Ikegami, T., and G. Morimoto. (2003) “Chaotic itinerancy in coupled dy- namical recognizers.” CHAOS 13: 1133-1147; Ikegami, T. (1999). “Evolv- ability of machines and tapes.” J. Artificial Life and Robotics 3( 4): 242— 245; Ikegami, T. and M. Taiji. (1998). “Structures of possible worlds in a game of players with internal models.” Acta Polytechnica Scandinavica 91: 283-292. e-mail: ikeg@sacral.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp Mark Johnson is Professor of Philosophy and Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon. His research has focused on the philosophical implications of the role of human embodiment in mean- ing, conceptualization, and reasoning. He is co-author, with George Lakoff, of Metaphors We Live By (1980) and Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) and author of The Body in the Mind (1987) and Moral Imagination (1993). HeList of contributors xi Wolff-Michael Roth is Lansdowne Professor of Applied Cognitive Sci- ence at the University of Victoria, Canada. His research focuses on cul- tural-historical, linguistic, and embodied aspects of scientific and mathe- matical cognition and communication from elementary school to professional practice, including, among others, studies of scientists, techni- cians, and environmentalists at their work sites. The work is published in leading journals of linguistics, social studies of science, sociology, learning sciences, and education and various subfields of education (curriculum, mathematics education, science education). His recent books include To- ward an Anthropology of Science (Kluwer, 2003), Rethinking Scientific Literacy (Routledge, 2004, with A. C. Barton), Talking Science (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), and Doing Qualitative Research: Praxis of Method (SensePublishers, 2005). e-mail: mroth@uvic.ca Géran Sonesson is Professor of semiotics and Director of the Department of Semiotics at Lund University. He holds a doctorate in general linguistics from Lund University, as well as a doctorate in semiotics from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Between 1978 and 1983, he was involved in Paris with the semiotics of gesture, and then worked on Mayan language and culture in Mexico, after which he has occupied dif- ferent research positions in semiotics in Lund. Sonesson’s main work is the monograph Pictorial Concepts (Lund: Lund University Press 1989), which is a critical survey of different contributions to pictorial semiotics, re- viewed in the context of findings in perceptual psychology and cognitive science. An important part of the book is devoted to a critical assessment of the theories of iconicity presented by, among others, Goodman and Eco. This work has subsequently been extended in numerous articles, published in Semiotica, RSSI, Zeitschrift fiir Semiotik, VISIO, Degrés, Sign System Studies, Current Anthropology, etc. His most recent publications are con- cemed with bringing a semiotic perspective to the study of evolution. e-mail: goran.sonesson@semiotik.lu.se Luc Steels is a professor of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). He graduated in linguistics at the University of Antwerp and in computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working in the MIT AI Laboratory. After that he worked in the domain of geophysical measurement interpretation as a project leader for geological expert systems at Schlumberger. In 1983 he founded the VUB Artificialxii List of contributors Intelligence Laboratory, which he still directs this day. He was cofounder and chairman (from 1990 until 1995) of the VUB Computer Science De- partment (Faculty of Sciences) and also founder and director of the Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Paris. His scientific research interests cover the whole field of artificial intelligence, including natural language, vision, robot behavior, learning, cognitive architecture, and knowledge representation. His publications can be found in major AV/cogsci journals such as Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Trends in Cognitive Science, Arti- ficial Intelligence Journal, etc. He also has edited a dozen books. At the moment his research focus in on fundamental research into the origins of language and meaning. e-mail: steels@arti-vub.ac.be Henrik Svensson is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in cognitive science at the School of Humanities and Informatics, University of Skévde, supervised by professor Tom Ziemke. He received his B.S. degree (2001) and M.Sc. degree (2002) from the University of Skévde. His main research interest concerns the relation between agent-environment interaction and higher- level cognition. Some of his recent publications are: Svensson, H. and T. Ziemke (2005) “Embodied representation: What are the issues”, in: B Bara, L. Barsalou, and M. Buccarelli (eds.), Proceedings of the 27" Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2116-2121. Mahwah, NJ: Law- rence Erlbaum; and Svensson and Ziemke (2004) “Making sense of em- bodiment”, In: K. Forbus, D. Gentner and T. Regier (eds.), Proceedings of the 26" Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 1309-1314. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. e-mail: henrik.svensson@his.se Tom Ziemke is Professor of Cognitive Science in the School of Humani- ties and Informatics at the University of Skévde, Sweden. His research is mainly concerned with embodied and distributed cognition, i.e. theories and models of how cognition is shaped by the living body and its interac- tion with the material and social environment. He is coordinator of a large- scale European project on robotic models of embodied cognition, called “Integrating Cognition, Emotion and Autonomy” (www.his.se/icea), and member of the executive committee of ewCognition — The European Net- work for the Advancement of Artificial Cognitive Systems. He is also asso-List of contributors — xiii ciate editor of the journals New Ideas in Psychology and Connection Sci- ence. e-mail: tom.ziemke@his.se Jordan Zlatey is Associate Professor at the Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Sweden. His PhD thesis (Stockholm Univer- sity, 1997) is the monograph Situated Embodiment: Studies in the Emer- gence of Spatial Meaning, in which he formulates a synthetic social- cognitive framework for the study of language, and applies this to the ty- pology and acquisition of spatial semantics. He is the co-founder of the annual international workshop series Epigenetic Robotics: Modelling Cog- nitive Development on Robotic Systems, first held in Lund, 2001 and the bi-annual conference Language, Culture and Mind, first held in Ports- mouth 2004. Zlatev collaborates extensively with semioticians, cognitive scientists and philosophers within the project Language, Gestures and Pictures in Semiotic Development and more recently within the highly interdisciplinary EU-project Stages in the Evolution and Development of Sign Use (SEDSU) (www.sol.lu.se/sedsu). His own work concentrates on differences in primary intersubjectivity between great apes and humans, and on a cross-cultural study of the ontogeny of gestural communication. The key theoretical concept for his current work is that of bodily mimesis, understood (following Donald 1991) as the conscious use of the body for representational means. Zlatev has published on these topics extensively over the past years in refereed journals and books, and is currently working on the monograph Bodily Mimesis and the Grounding of Language and co- editing the book The Shared Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity. e-mail: jordan.zlatev@ling.lu.seIntroduction: The body eclectic Tom Ziemke and Roslyn M. Frank 1. Background This is the first volume of a two-volume set with the title Body, Language and Mind. While this volume focuses on the concept of embodiment, i.e. the bodily and sensorimotor basis of phenomena such as meaning, mind, cognition and language, the second volume addresses social situatedness, ite. the ways in which individual minds and cognitive processes are shaped by their interaction with sociocultural structures and practices. Naturally, the volumes overlap significantly, and in fact they have both to some de- gree emerged out of a one-day theme session on embodiment held at the &” International Cognitive Linguistics Conference in Logrofio, Spain, in the summer of 2003. Some of the contributors to these volumes also partici- pated in the original theme session, whereas others have been invited later to complement the range of perspectives represented. The concept of embodiment has received a great deal of attention in the cognitive sciences during the last twenty years, and as a result terms like embodied mind, embodied action, embodied cognition are now commonly used, often in juxtaposition to concepts like situated action (Suchman 1987), situated cognition (e.g. Clancey 1997), distributed cognition (Hutchins 1995) or the extended mind hypothesis (Clark and Chalmers 1998). In fact, by the 1990s several authors had already declared embodied cognitive science, which is often taken to more or less include all of these concepts, to be a new paradigm in cognitive science (e.g. Varela, Thomp- son and Rosch 1991; Clark 1997, 1999; Pfeifer and Scheier 1999). All of this might give you the impression: (a) that there is a clear notion of what embodiment is, and subsequently, a consensus concerning in what sense cognitive processes (or perhaps certain types of cognition) are embodied, and (b) that embodied cognitive science in fact is a theoretical framework that is more or less established and agreed upon by researchers working in the field. Somewhat surprisingly, however, neither (a) nor (b) are actually true.2 Tom Ziemke and Roslyn M. Frank Although it is by now widely agreed that cognition is embodied, in the sense that it is shaped by the body and sensorimotor interaction with the environment, it is less clear exactly what this means (cf. e.g., Chrisley and Ziemke 2003; Clark 1999; Wilson 2002; Ziemke 2001a, 2003, 2007). Is it the physical, the biological, the animate, the phenomenal (experienced), or the social body that shapes cognition, or perhaps all of these? And, exactly how does the body shape cognition; is it, for example, only involved in actual sensorimotor interaction with the environment, i.e. in the grounding of mental representations in the traditional sense (cf. e.g. Harnad 1990; Ziemke 1999), or does its influence go further, i.e. is the body also cru- cially involved in thought, language, and other supposedly abstract activi- ties, such as mathematics (cf. e.g. Lakoff and Nufiez 1999)? The following brief overview provides several useful distinctions in conceptions of embodiment that might help to clarify differences in theo- retical frameworks and commitments in the field that sometimes remain hidden under a superficial agreement on ‘embodiment’. First, we have Nufiez (1999) who distinguished between trivial, material, and full em- bodiment. Trivial embodiment simply is the view that “cognition and the mind are directly related to the biological structures and processes that sustain them”. Obviously, this is not a particularly radical claim, and con- sequently few cognitive scientists would reject it (dualist philosophers of consciousness, on the other hand, might). According to Nufiez, this view further “holds not only that in order to think, speak, perceive, and feel, we need a brain — a properly functioning brain in a body — but also that in or- der to genuinely understand cognition and the mind, one can’t ignore how the nervous system works”. Material embodiment makes a stronger claim, but it only concerns the interaction of internal cognitive processes with the environment, i.e. the issue of grounding, and thus considers reference to the body to be required solely for accounts of low-level sensorimotor proc- esses. In Nufiez’s terms: “First, it sees cognition as a decentralized phe- nomenon, and second it takes into account the constraints imposed by the complexity of real-time bodily interactions performed by an agent in a real environment”. Full embodiment, finally, is the view that the body is in- volved in all forms of human cognition, including seemingly abstract ac- tivities, such as language or mathematical cognition (e.g. Lakoff and Nufiez 1999). In Nufiez’s own words: Full embodiment explicitly develops a paradigm to explain the objects cre- ated by the human mind themselves (i.e., concepts, ideas, explanations, forms of logic, theories) in terms of the non-arbitrary bodily-experiencesIntroduction: The body eclectic 3 sustained by the peculiarities of brains and bodies. An important feature of this view is that the very objects created by human conceptual structures and understanding (including scientific understanding) are not seen as existing in an transcendental realm, but as being brought forth through specific human bodily grounded processes. Ina similar vein, Clark (1999) distinguished between the positions of weak embodiment and radical embodiment. According to the former, traditional cognitive science can roughly remain the same; i.e. theories are merely constrained, but not essentially changed by embodiment. This is similar to Nufiez’s view of material embodiment. The position of radical embodi- ment, on the other hand, largely compatible with Nufiez’s notion of full embodiment, is, as Clark formulated it, “radically altering the subject mat- ter and theoretical framework of cognitive science”. More recently, Wilson (2002) distinguished between six views of em- bodied cognition, of which only the last one requires full or radical em- bodiment whereas the first five might be considered variations or aspects of material embodiment: (1) cognition is situated, ie. it occurs “in the context of task-relevant inputs and outputs”, (2) cognition is time- pressured, (3) cognition is for the control of action, (4) we off-load cogni- tive work onto the environment, e.g. through epistemic actions (Kirsh and Maglio, 1994), i.e. manipulation of the environment ‘in the world’, rather than ‘in the head’, (5) the environment is actually part of the cognitive system, e.g. according to Clark and Chalmers’ (1998) notion of the ‘ex- tended mind’, and (6) ‘off-line’ cognition is body-based, which according to Wilson is the “most powerful claim” (cf. Svensson, Lindblom and Ziemke this volume). Complementary distinctions and classifications are proposed in several of the contributions to this volume. Emmeche (this volume), for example, points out that different disciplines have different perspectives on the body. He therefore distinguishes between physical embodiment (physics), or- ganismic embodiment (biology), animate embodiment (zoology), and an- thropic embodiment (anthropology, sociology). However, Emmeche also points out: “The point is not the exact number of levels (these are contin- gent upon a historically relative state of science) but the fact that irreduci- ble levels do exist”. Rohrer (this volume) takes a different approach and catalogues what he considers twelve important senses or dimensions of embodiment in current research on the topic: philosophy, socio-cultural situation, phenomenology, perspective, development, evolution, the cogni-4 Tom Ziemke and Roslyn M. Frank tive unconscious, neurophysiology, neurocomputational modelling, mor- phology, directionality of metaphor, and grounding. It should be noted that, naturally, not all of these views, types or dimen- sions of embodiment are equally relevant for all disciplines and perspec- tives. For example, the question of whether or not an embodied mind actu- ally needs to be physical or biological might not be a meaningful question to a neuroscientist, given that real brains and bodies obviously are both physical and biological. However, for the philosopher wrestling with dual- ist or functionalist conceptions of mind, or for the artificial intelligence researcher trying to build, or at least model, minds, these are still burning questions (cf. e.g. Ziemke 2001a, 2007; Zlatev 2001, 2003; Johnson and Rohrer this volume; Lindblom and Ziemke this volume). Similarly, the phenomenal experience of the lived body is perhaps not the primary inter- est for the cognitive linguist interested in syntax or metaphor, but it cer- tainly is relevant to many other aspects of language and mind (cf. e.g. Son- esson this volume; Gallagher this volume; Zlatev this volume; Roth this volume). To some degree the diversity of perspectives on embodied cognition can of course be attributed to the inter- or multidisciplinary nature of cognitive science as such. Afier all, it is not surprising that, for example, linguists, neuroscientists and artificial intelligence (AI) researchers would be inter- ested in different aspects of embodiment, for the same reasons that they offer different, but hopefully complementary perspectives on the study of mind and language. True complementarity, however, rather than mere co- existence of different disciplines and perspectives, would seem to require some kind of common framework and terminology. For traditional cogni- tive science, the common ground was provided by theories of functional- ism, computationalism and representationalism, the basic assumptions of which were summarized by Gardner (1987: 6) as follows: First of all, there is the belief that, in talking about human cognitive activi- ties, it is necessary to speak about mental representations and to posit a level of analysis wholly separate from the biological or neurological, on the one hand, and the sociological or cultural, on the other. Consequently, the complementarity and division of labor between different disciplines was, perhaps, relatively clear in the old, pre-embodiment days when everybody agreed that thought was the operation of computational processes on mental, presumably symbolic representations. Linguists were mostly concerned with language as a symbol system, without much interest in its biological implementation, while neuroscientists tended to be inter-Introduction: The body eclectic 5 ested in how and where in the brain the relevant computations and repre- sentations were implemented, and AI researchers were striving to synthe- size the very same computations and representations in artificial imple- mentations. Apart from the fact that the above picture of traditional, computational- ist cognitive science is of course a bit too rosy (the exact nature of those mental representations, for example, caused, and still causes, considerable debate), we have to admit that there is no equivalent consensus yet in em- bodied cognitive science. We could say that is because, as a discipline or paradigm, embodied cognitive science is still relatively young, but then again it is 20-30 years old by now, depending on exactly how you situate its origins in time. Moreover, one could rightly point out that this diversity of perspectives is due to the expanding nature of the community of re- searchers concerned with this approach. In short, since the embodied cog- nition perspective is still growing and gaining ground, it might be too early to hope for a convergence of perspectives, indeed, at this stage such a con- vergence of opinions might be premature. However, the current situation might also provoke comparisons with soap bubbles that are destined to burst sooner or later if there is nothing under the surface to hold them to- gether. One could also say that things were simpler for traditional cognitive science, because that approach was able to define itself from the start both with respect to what it rejected, behaviorism, and with respect to a common vision, the computer metaphor for mind. But this, in turn, raises the ques- tion of exactly what the common vision might be in the case of embodied cognitive science (as well as its common unifying metaphor). Some people would say that simulation theories (cf. Svensson, Lindblom and Ziemke this volume) are what constitute the common vision or framework in em- bodied cognitive science — very roughly speaking, the idea that the same neural mechanisms are used for both sensorimotor interaction and abstract thought. Nonetheless these ideas certainly still need to be worked out in much more detail. . Whichever way you look at it, although embodied cognitive science un- deniably is an exciting and vibrant area of research, it is hard not to agree with Wilson’s (2002: 625) assessment of what might be perceived as a conceptual muddle: While this general approach is enjoying increasingly broad support, there is in fact a great deal of diversity in the claims involved and the degree of6 Tom Ziemke and Roslyn M. Frank controversy they attract. If the term “embodied cognition” is to retain meaningful use, we need to disentangle and evaluate these diverse claims. In fact, that is exactly, what we hope to offer readers with the collection of chapters making up this volume, namely, a means to disentangle and evalu- ate the different perspectives, and not least to understand which of them are actually competing or rather complementary. The papers selected for inclusion in this first volume have been written by some of the leading cognitive scientists, cognitive linguists, psychologists, philosophers, AI researchers, semioticians, and phenomenologists working on embodied cognition today. That means, the perspective of cognitive linguistics is here put into the context of a number of related disciplines. The abovemen- tioned second volume, on the other hand, focuses on social situatedness and contains more directly linguistically oriented contributions. Admittedly, we cannot promise that after reading all of the contribu- tions to this volume you will feel much wiser in terms of exactly which notion of embodiment is the “correct” one. But you will have learned a great deal about the most important current perspectives on embodiment and their historical backgrounds as well as the overlaps and controversies existing between them. That, we believe, is the best deal anybody can offer at the moment when it comes to understanding the multidisciplinarity of modern embodiment research. In that sense, this book can be read as an update to some of the “classical”, highly influential books on embodiment that appeared in the 1990s, such as Varela, Thompson and Rosch’s (1991) The Embodied Mind, Clark’s (1997) Being There, or Lakoff and Johnson’s (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh, as well as other multi-author collections on the topic (e.g. Nunez and Freeman 1999; Ziemke 2002; Robbins and Aydede in press). Other books provide more detailed accounts on specific topics, such as Damasio’s (1994, 1999, 2003) books on the role of the body in emotion and consciousness, Goldin-Meadow’s (2003) book on gesture as embodied thought, Pfeifer’s books on embodied AI (Pfeifer and Scheier 1999; Pfeifer and Bongard 2006), or Maturana and Varela’s (1980, 1987) classical books on the biology of cognition. There are also several recent books that do a very good job at integrating some of the perspectives, such as Gallagher’s (2005) How the Body Shapes the Mind, Gibbs’ (2006) Em- bodiment and Cognitive Science, and Thompson's (2007) Mind in Life. However, we believe that these works need to be complemented with a broad spectrum of perspectives, from different disciplinary and historical backgrounds, as collected in this multi-author volume.Introduction: The body eclectic 7 2. Overview of the contributions to this volume This volume is divided into three parts or sections, each of which consists of four or five chapters. The first section consists of four chapters that ex- plore in detail the historical roots underlying current discussions of em- bodiment in cognitive science and linguistics. First, Johnson and Rohrer contrast the dualistic view of mind and body as two ontologically different entities, connected through internal repre- sentations of external reality, with what they call embodied realism, ac- cording to which cognition and language must be understood as arising from organic processes. They trace the rejection of mind-body dualism from early American Pragmatists, such as James and Dewey, forward to recent embodied cognitive science, which they argue needs to be pragmati- cally-centered. Costall’s chapter points out that the move from mechanistic behavior- ism to cognitive psychology and the computer metaphor for mind, through its focus on internal information processing, in fact simply maintained the view of the mechanical body as a mere shell or container for cognitive processes. As an alternative, he elaborates on the contributions that Gib- son’s “ecology of embodied agency” and his concept of affordances can make to our understanding of embodiment and “being in the world”. Sonesson’s chapter addresses the contributions that phenomenology and semiotics, with their focus on consciousness and meaning, can provide to current discussions of embodiment in cognitive linguistics, biosemiotics, and other disciplines, discussions which, in his view, tend to ignore rele- vant distinctions between different types and forms of meaning. Further- more, building on Piaget’s concept of differentiation, he suggests a devel- opmental sequence going from schemas to signs and external Tepresentations. Lindblom and Ziemke, in the last chapter of the “historical roots” sec- tion, point out that, despite much recent emphasis on the bodily and social basis of cognition, the role of embodiment in social interaction is still relatively poorly understood. They therefore trace the role of biological and sociocultural factors in explanations of cognition from Darwin to modern cognitive science, and discuss further steps and conceptual clarifi- cations that will be required in the development of a science of embodied cognition and social interaction.Introduction: The body eclectic 9 Zlatev argues that much recent work on embodiment tends to under- value concepts such as representation, consciousness and conven- tion/normativity, which he claims makes it difficult for current “embodi- ment theories” to account for human language and cognition. To illustrate these difficulties, he critically examines the approach presented in Lakoff and Johnson’s (1999) highly influential book Philosophy in the Flesh, and develops his own alternative notion of mimetic schema as a mediator be- tween the individual human body and collective language. Rohrer reviews the variety of standard usages that the term “embodi- ment” currently has in cognitive science and contrasts notions of embodi- ment and experientialism at different levels of investigation. With the goal of developing a broad-based theoretical framework for embodiment he examines examples of these usages and in the process brings into view related research issues such as mental imagery, mental rotation, spatial language and conceptual metaphor across several levels of investigation, with a focus on whether and how different conceptualizations can form a cohesive research program. Emmeche presents biosemiotics as a new perspective on living systems inspired by von Uexkiill and Peirce. He suggests necessary distinctions between physical, biological, animate, phenomenal and social body, and develops a Neo-Aristotelian evolutionary emergentist perspective which he argues to be necessary in order to coherently account for these dimensions of embodiment. Furthermore, he characterizes humans as techno-culturally embedded beings within a space of meanings that are not only symbolic, but also socially empowered by different kinds of sociocultural systems. From the perspective of artificial intelligence, Steels and de Boer con- sider the kinds of categories that have been found to be involved in human behavior, and how they are shaped by embodiment as well as the collective dynamics generated by social interactions. Using a computational case study developed for speech sounds, they show how a group of autonomous agents equipped with a sufficiently realistic perceptual and auditory appa- ratus can arrive at a shared repertoire of vowels that exhibits the same uni- versal trends as found in human vowel systems, although not biased by innate a priori categories. Roth, finally, in the last chapter of the volume, argues that many re- searchers are pre-occupied with written language as the main paradigm of communication. A large part of human communication, however, involves participants in face-to-face conversation, attending to semiotic resources such as gestures, body positions, and material structures in the environ-10 Tom Ziemke and Roslyn M. Frank ment. He provides a dialectical account of human activity and analyses an episode from a science classroom to exemplify the central role of the body in communication and to illustrate his view of communication as materi- ally and socially situated and embodied practice. 3. Conclusion Embodied cognitive science is still a relatively young approach to the study of mind and language. Critics of the approach might argue that it has so far failed to produce a coherent theoretical framework that integrates and uni- fies different approaches and disciplines. However, one could also argue that it was in fact the premature convergence of traditional cognitive sci- ence on functionalist/computationalist and representationalist/symbolic theories of mind that for a long time disconnected cognitive science from many of its historical roots which are now being rediscovered (cf. e.g. Lindblom and Ziemke this volume; Johnson and Rohrer this volume). Hence, we are convinced that a fuller understanding of embodied cognition will emerge from the type of broad multidisciplinary interaction that has led to the production of this multi-author volume, rather than from the more narrow insights that any single discipline or approach could produce on its own. At the same time we are also convinced that the road towards a unified theoretical framework in embodied cognitive science is neither short nor straightforward. Indeed, there still is much work ahead for theo- rists and modelers of embodied cognition. But, as they say, even the long- est journey starts with the first steps. And one of the most important steps in the development of a truly interdisciplinary science of embodied cogni- tion certainly is to acquire a clear comprehensive understanding of the different perspectives that characterize this field today. References Chrisley, Ron and Tom Ziemke 2003 Embodiment, In: Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, 1102-1108. London: Macmillan. Clancey, William J. 1997 Situated Cognition: On Human Knowledge and Computer Repre- sentations. New York: Cambridge University Press.Introduction: The body eclectic 11 Clark, Andy 1997 Being There — Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1999 An embodied cognitive science? Trends in Cognitive Sciences 3 (9): 345-351. Clark, Andy and David Chalmers 1998 The extended mind, Analysis 58 (1): 7-19. Damasio, Antonio R. 1994 Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Avon Books. 1999 The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Inc. 2003 Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain. New York: Harcourt Inc. Gallagher, Shaun 2005 How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gardner, Howard 1987 ‘The Mind's New Science. New York: Basic Books. Gibbs, Ray 2006 Embodiment and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press. Goldin-Meadow, Susan 2003 Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us Think. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hamad, Stevan 1990 The Symbol Grounding Problem. Physica D, 42: 335-346. Hutchins, Edwin 1995 Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kirsh, David and Paul Maglio 1994 On Distinguishing Epistemic from Pragmatic Action. Cognitive Sci- ence, 18 (4): 513-549. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson 1999 Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenges to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. Lakoff, George and Rafael Nuiiez 1999 Where Mathematics Comes From. New York: Basic Books. Maturana, Humberto and Francisco J. Varela 1980 Autopoesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: D. Reidel Publishing. 1987 The Tree of Knowledge — The Biological Roots of Human Under- standing. Boston: Shambalaya.12 Tom Ziemke and Roslyn M. Frank Niiiez, Rafael 1999 Could the Future Taste Purple? Reclaiming Mind, Body and Cogni- tion. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6 (11-12): 41-60. Nujiez, Rafael and Walter J. Freeman (eds.) 1999 Reclaiming Cognition — the Primacy of Action, Intention and Emo- tion. Exeter: Imprint Academic. Pfeifer, Rolf and Christian Scheier 1999 Understanding Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Pfeifer, Rolf and Josh Bongard 2006 How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Intelli- gence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Robbins, Philip and Murat Aydede inpress Cambridge Handbook on Situated Cognition. Cambridge, U.K.: University of Cambridge Press. Suchman, Lucy 1987 Situated Action, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Svensson, Henrik, Jessica Lindblom and Tom Ziemke this vol. Making sense of embodied cognition: simulation theories of shared neural mechanisms for sensorimotor and cognitive processes. Thompson, Evan 2007 Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch 1991 The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wilson, Margaret 2002 Six views of embodied cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 9 (4): 625-636. Ziemke, Tom 1999 Rethinking Grounding. In: Alexander Riegler, Markus Peschl and Astridvon Stein (eds.), Understanding Representation in the Cogni- tive Sciences: 177-190. Plenum Press: New York. 2001a — Are robots embodied? In: Christian Balkenius et al. (eds), Proceed- ings of the First International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics, 75— 83. Lund, Sweden: Lund University Cognitive Studies, vol. 85. 2001b The construction of ‘reality’ in the robot. Foundations of Science 6 (1): 163-233. 2003 What’s that thing called embodiment? In: Richard Alterman and David Kirsh (eds.), Proceedings of the 25" Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 1305-1310. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erl- baum.Introduction: The body eclectic 13 2007 What's life got to do with it? In: Antonio Chella and Riccardo Manzotti (eds.), Artificial Consciousness: 48-66. Exeter: Imprint Academic. Ziemke, Tom (ed.) 2002 Special issue on situated and embodied cognition. Journal of Cogni- tive Systems Research 3 (3) Ziatev, Jordan 1997 Situated Embodiment. Studies in the Emergence of Spatial Meaning. Stockholm: Gotab Press. 2001 The epigenesis of meaning in human beings, and possibly in robots. Minds and Machines, 11 (2): 155-195. 2003 Meaning = Life (+ Culture). An outline of a unified biocultural the- ory of meaning. Evolution of Communication 4 (2): 253-296.Copyrights materialSection A Historical rootsCopyrights materialWe are live creatures: Embodiment, American Pragmatism and the cognitive organism Mark Johnson and Tim Rohrer Abstract ‘The philosophical tradition mistakenly asks how the inside (i.e., thoughts, ideas, concepts) can represent the outside (ie., the world). This trap is a consequence of the view that mind and body must be two ontologically different entities. On this view the problem of meaning is to explain how disembodied “internal” ideas can represent “external” physical objects and events. Several centuries have shown that given a radical mind-body dichotomy, there is no way to bridge the gap between the inner and the outer. When “mind” and “body” are regarded as two fundamen- tally different kinds, no third mediating thing can exist that possesses both the metaphysical character of inner, mental things and simultaneously possesses the character of the outer, physical things. Embodied Realism, in contrast to Representationalist theories, rejects the notion that mind and body are two ontologically distinct kinds, and it therefore rejects the attendant view that cognition and language are based on symbolic representations inside the mind of an organism that refer to some physical thing in an outside world. Instead, the terms “body” and “mind” are simply convenient shorthand ways of identifying aspects of ongoing organism-environment interactions — and so cog- nition and language must be understood as arising from organic processes. We trace the rejection of this mind-body dualism from the philosopher-psychologists known as the early American Pragmatists (James and Dewey) forward through recent cognitive science (such as Varela, Maturana, Edelman, Hutchins, Lakoff, Johnson, Brooks). We argue that embodied realism requires a radical reevaluation of the classical dualistic metaphysics and epistemology — especially the classical Representationalist theory of mind — and we conclude by investigating the implica- tions for future investigations for a new, pragmatically-centered cognitive science. Keywords: cognitive linguistics, cognitive science, embodiment, image schema, metaphor, neurobiology, pragmatism, Representationalism, semantics.We are live creatures 19 (1) Embodied cognition is the result of the evolutionary processes of variation, change and selection. (2) Embodied cognition is situated within a dynamic ongoing organism- environment relationship. (3) Embodied cognition is problem-centered, and it operates relative to the needs, interests, and values of organisms. (4) Embodied cognition is not concerned with finding some allegedly perfect solution to a problem, but one that works well enough rela- tive to the current situation. (5) Embodied cognition is often social and carried out cooperatively by more than one individual organism. Note that the Pragmatists advance a radically different view of cognition than the one we are most familiar with from “classical” cognitive science, where it is assumed that cognition consists of the application of universal logical rules that govern the manipulation of “internal” mental symbols, symbols that are supposedly capable of representing states of affairs in the “external” world, Fodor summarizes this theory as follows: ‘What I am selling is the Representational Theory of Mind .. . At the heart of the theory is the postulation of a language of thought: an infinite set of ‘mental representations’ which function both as the immediate objects of propositional attitudes and as the domains of mental processes. (Fodor 1987: 16-17) These internal representations in the “language of thought” acquire their meaning by being “about” ~ or referring to — states of affairs in the external world. Fodor acknowledges that his Representationalist theory of meaning requires “a theory that articulates, in nonsemantic and nonintentional terms, sufficient conditions for one bit of the world to be about (to express, represent, or be true of) another bit” (Fodor 1987: 98). Typically the first “bit” would be a symbol in the internal language of thought while the sec- ond “bit” that it represents might be either some thing or event in the ex- ternal world or else a brain state underlying a conception of some fictive entity or scene. The internal/external split that underlies this view presupposes that cognition could be detached from the nature and functioning of specific bodily organisms, from the environments they inhabit and from the prob- lems that provoke cognition. Given this view, it would follow that cogni- tion could take place in any number of suitable media, such as a human brain or a machine. This theoretical viewpoint, functionalism, was instru-20 = Mark Johnson and Tim Rohrer mental in the developing the first electronic calculating machines and gen- eral-purpose computers. In fact, these machines were originally developed by the British military to reduce the tedious workload of military mathe- maticians (or human “computers” — in the sense of humans who compute). But this thought experiment did not end merely with offloading the tedium of calculation onto electronic machines. From its original conception in the work of Alan Turing (1937), the idea of a universal computing machine became the metaphor of choice for future models of the brain. For example in Newell and Simon’s (1976) conception of the brain as a physical symbol system, they consider the human brain to be just a specific instance of a Turing-style universal machine. In short, for classical cognitive science cognition is defined narrowly as mathematical and logical computation with intrinsically meaningless internal symbols that can supposedly be placed in relation to aspects of the external world. The Pragmatist challenge to classical cognitive science should come as no surprise, since one of the Pragmatists’ chief targets was the tendency within the philosophical tradition to assume that what demarcates “ra- tional” humans from “lower” animals is the supposedly unique ability of humans to engage in symbolic representation between internal thoughts/ language and the external world. The remedy offered by the Pragmatists is based on their view that cognition is action, rather than mental mirroring of an external reality. Moreover, cognition is a particular kind of action — a response strategy that applies some measure of forethought in order to solve some practical real-world problem. During World War II the practi- cal problem of breaking the German codes was of utmost importance to the British war effort, and this led to the development of a series of machines (the Bombes) which could try a vast number of possible cipher keys against intercepted German communications. These decoding machines were among the predecessors of the modern computer. Early computers were designed to model human action — computing possible cipher keys — so that machines would replace human labour (Hodges 1983: 160-241). However, this success in the modelling of a very specific intellectual operation was soon mistakenly regarded as the key to understanding cog- nition in general. If one thinks that mathematical and logical reasoning is what distinguishes human beings from other animals, one might errone- ously assume that any computational machine that could model aspects of this peculiarly human trait could also be used to model cognition in gen- eral. Hence the MIND AS COMPUTER metaphor swept early (first- generation) cognitive science. This is a disembodied view of rationality. ByWe are live creatures 21 contrast, on the Pragmatist view, our rationality emerges from, and is shaped by, our embodied nature. Thus, Dewey famously asserted that “to see the organism in nature, the nervous system in the organism, the brain in the nervous system, the cortex in the brain is the answer to the problems which haunt philosophy” (Dewey 1925: 198). In the following sections we show how the Pragmatist view of cognition as action provides an appropriate philosophical framework for the cogni- tive science of the embodied mind. We begin by describing the non- dualistic, non-Representationalist view of mind developed by James and Dewey. Their understanding of situated cognition is reinforced by recent empirical research and developments within the cognitive sciences. We cite evidence from comparative neurobiology of organism-environment cou- pling ranging from the amoeba all the way up to humans, and we argue that in humans this coupling process becomes the basis of meaning and thought. We describe the patterns of these ongoing interactions as image schemas that ground meaning in our embodiment and yet are not internal representations of an external reality. This leads to an account of an emer- gent rationality that is embodied, social and creative. 2. James and Dewey: The continuity of embodied experience and thought In many ways the American Pragmatist philosophers James and Dewey provide us today with exemplary non-reductionist and non-Representat- ionalist models of embodied mind. Their models combined the best biol- ogy, psychology and neuroscience of their day with nuanced phenomenol- ogical description and a commitment that philosophy should address the pressing human problems of our lives. James and Dewey understood something taken for granted in contemporary biological science: cognition emerges from the embodied processes of an organism that is constantly adapting to better utilize relatively stable pattems within a changing envi- ronment. One problem for such a naturalistic account of mind is to explain how meaning, abstract thinking, and formal reasoning could emerge from the basic sensorimotor capacities of organisms as they interact with the environment and each other. The fundamental assumption of the Pragmatists’ naturalistic approach is that everything we attribute to “mind” — perceiving, conceptualizing, imagining, reasoning, desiring, willing, dreaming — has emerged (and con-22 =~ Mark Johnson and Tim Rohrer tinues to develop) as part of a process in which an organism seeks to sur- vive, grow and flourish within different kinds of situations. As James puts itt Mental facts cannot be properly studied apart from the physical environment of which they take cognizance. The great fault of the older rational psychol- ogy was to set up the soul as an absolute spiritual being with certain faculties of its own by which the several activities of remembering, imagining, rea~ soning and willing, etc. were explained, almost without reference to the pe- culiarities of the world with which these activities deal. But the richer in- sight of modern days perceives that our inner faculties are adapted in advance to the features of the world in which we dwell, adapted, I mean, so as to secure our safety and prosperity in its midst. (James 1900: 3) This evolutionary embeddedness of the organism within its changing envi- ronments, and the development of thought in response to such changes, ties mind inextricably to body and environment. The changes entailed by such a view are revolutionary. From the very beginning of life, the problem of knowledge is not how so-called internal ideas can re-present external reali- ties. Instead, the problem of knowledge is to explain how structures and patterns of organism-environment interaction can be adapted and trans- formed to help deal constructively with changing circumstances that pose new problems, challenges and opportunities for the organism. On this view, mind is never separate from body, for it is always a series of bodily activi- ties immersed in the ongoing flow of organism-environment interactions that constitutes experience. In Dewey’s words: Since both the inanimate and the human environment are involved in the functions of life, it is inevitable, if these functions evolve to the point of thinking and if thinking is naturally serial with biological functions, that it will have as the material of thought, even of its erratic imaginings, the events and connections of this environment. (Dewey 1925: 212-213) Another way of expressing this rootedness of thinking in bodily experience and its connection with the environment is to say that there is no rupture in experience between perceiving, feeling and thinking. In explaining ever more complex “higher” functions, such as consciousness, self-reflection and language use, we do not postulate new ontological kinds of entities, events, or processes that are non-natural or super-natural. More complex levels of organic functioning are just that — levels — and nothing more, although there are emergent properties of “higher” levels of functioning. Dewey names this connectedness of all cognition the principle of continu-