What is embodied about cognition?

Abstract

It is currently debated whether the meanings of words and objects are represented, in whole or in part, in a modality-specific format-the embodied cognition hypothesis. I argue that the embodied/disembodied cognition debate is either largely resolved in favor of the view that concepts are represented in an amodal format, or at a point where the embodied and disembodied approaches are no longer coherently distinct theories. This merits reconsideration of what the available evidence can tell us about the structure of the conceptual system. We know that the conceptual system engages, online, with sensory and motor content. This frames a new question: How is it that the human conceptual system is able to disengage from the sensorimotor system? Answering this question would say something about how the human mind is able to detach from the present and extrapolate from finite experience to hypothetical states of how the world could be. It is the independence of thought from perception and action that makes human cognition special-and that independence is guaranteed by the representational distinction between concepts and sensorimotor representations.

Figure 1

The histogram plots the number of articles with ‘embodied’ or ‘embodied cognition’ in the title or keywords, published by year since 1980 (PubMed Search). The figure is a graphical representation of the accelerating interest in embodied cognition.