Body, Language and Mind: Volume 2 Sociocultural Situatedness 9783110199116, 9783110196184

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Body, Language and Mind Volume 2: Sociocultural Situatedness

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Cognitive Linguistics Research 35.2

Editors Dirk Geeraerts Rene´ Dirven John R. Taylor Honorary editor Ronald W. Langacker

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

Body, Language and Mind Volume 2: Sociocultural Situatedness Edited by Roslyn M. Frank Rene´ Dirven Tom Ziemke Enrique Berna´rdez

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin

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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) 1. Language and languages ⫺ Philosophy. 2. Mind and body. 3. Semiotics. I. Ziemke, T. (Tom), 1969⫺ II. Zlatev, Jordan. III. Frank, Roslyn M. P107.B63 2007 401⫺dc22 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 978-3-11-019618-4 ISSN 1861-4132 쑔 Copyright 2008 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: Sociocultural situatedness Roslyn M. Frank

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Section A: The dynamics of cultural categorization An interview with Mark Johnson and Tim Rohrer: From neurons to sociocultural situatedness Roberta Pires de Oliveira and Robson de Souza Bittencourt

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Beyond the body: Towards a full embodied semiosis Patrizia Violi

53

Properties of cultural embodiment: Lessons from the anthropology of the body Michael Kimmel

77

Distributed, emergent cultural cognition, conceptualisation and language Farzad Sharifian

109

Collective cognition and individual activity: Variation, language and culture Enrique Bernárdez

137

Section B: The sociocultural situatedness of scientific discourse Entangled biological, cultural and linguistic origins of the war on invasive species Brendon M. H. Larson

169

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In search of development Joseph Hilferty and Óscar Vilarroya

197

The language-organism-species analogy: A complex adaptive systems approach to shifting perspectives on “language” Roslyn M. Frank

215

Section C: Sociocultural situatedness in lexical and usage-based approaches to metaphor Toward a socially situated, functionally embodied lexical semantics: The case of (all) over Kurt Queller

265

The embodiment of Europe: How do metaphors evolve? Andreas Musolff

301

Sociocultural situatedness of terminology in the life sciences: The history of splicing Rita Temmerman

327

Section D: Exploring the sociocultural situatedness of language and cognition Discourse metaphors Jörg Zinken, Iina Hellsten and Brigitte Nerlich

363

The relationship between metaphor, body and culture Ning Yu

387

Idealized cultural models: The group as a variable in the development of cognitive schemata Gitte Kristiansen

409

Index

433

List of contributors

Enrique Bernárdez is Professor of English linguistics at the Complutense University, Madrid (Spain). He studied German Philology at the same University and Dutch Linguistics at Groningen University, The Netherlands. He specialises in the history of English and other Germanic languages, as well as Old and Modern Icelandic. He has been working on Textlinguistics and in a Cognitive Linguistics framework for many years. Among his most significant books on linguistics are: Qué son las lenguas? published in 1999, and reprinted six times, new edition 2004; Teoría y epistemología del texto, 1995; Introducción a la lingüística del texto, 1982, as well as many scholarly papers published in collective books and journals in many countries. A new book, provisionally titled El lenguaje como cultura, is currently under preparation. He has also been active for years in literary translation, especially from Old and Modern Icelandic. e-mail: [email protected] Robson de Souza Bittencourt is a PhD student in Linguistics at the English Graduate Program, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC), Brazil. Using a framework drawn from Cognitive Linguistics, he is currently writing his dissertation on the role of metaphors in economic discourse, an analysis which will bring into focus ideological aspects of the data. e-mail: [email protected] 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 ethnoastronomy. 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 research topics throughout Europe. e-mail: [email protected]

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Iina Hellsten is a Research Fellow at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in the research group Virtual Knowledge Studio (www.virtualknowledegstudio.nl). Her background is in science communication and the social studies of science and technology. Her current research deals with the anatomy of scientific and public controversies on the Web. Her areas of expertise include metaphor theory, science communication, public understanding of science, media and communication sciences. She has published articles on the role of metaphors in public controversies on science in Metaphor and Symbol, Science Communication, Science as Culture and New Genetics and Society, for example. e-mail: [email protected] Joseph Hilferty, a San Francisco Peninsula native, graduated from San Francisco State University in 1987. He became involved with the cognitive linguistics movement in the early 1990s. In 2004, he obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Barcelona with the thesis “In Defense of Grammatical Constructions”. He is the coauthor of Introducción a la lingüística cognitiva (Ariel, 1999) with Maria Josep Cuenca. Currently, he teaches English linguistics at the University of Barcelona. e-mail: [email protected] Michael Kimmel (PhD Vienna University 2002, MA 1995) is a researcher based at the University of Vienna, Austria. His interests span cognitive linguistic methods of metaphor and image schema analysis, socio-cultural embodiment, cognitive narratology, as well as qualitative and mixed methods. He has conducted research on metaphor interaction in political discourse and literature with software-based analytical tools, and has been working psycholinguistically on sensorimotor resonance in reading and plot comprehension. From 2007–2010 Kimmel will be the principal researcher of two research projects, one being a text-linguistic approach to imagery in literary cognition (2007–2008), and the other an ethnographic fieldwork approach to embodied imagery in dance apprenticeship (2008– 2010). The latter project will combine cognitive linguistic and phenomenological methods with motion analysis to explore dance class interactions and embodied learning. In the past, Kimmel has been a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Advanced Studies, Vienna and the University of Economics, Vienna, as well as a freelance researcher in Vienna, Budapest, and Berlin. e-mail: [email protected]

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Gitte Kristiansen is Assistant Professor in linguistics at the Department of English Language and Linguistics, Universidad Complutense, Madrid (Spain). Her main research interests include diachronic linguistics, cognitive sociolinguistics and cognitive phonology. She has taught courses on Historical Sociolinguistics, Cognitive Semantics, Linguistic Change in Contemporary English, Registers and Varieties of English, amongst others, and is currently co-editing a volume entitled Cognitive Sociolinguistics: Language Variation, Cultural Models, Social Systems (Mouton) with René Dirven. e-mail: [email protected] Brendon Larson received an M.Sc. in evolutionary ecology from the University of Toronto (Canada) in 1997 and an Interdisciplinary PhD in Science and Society from the University of California, Santa Barbara (USA) in 2004. His dissertation, entitled “The Metaphoric Web of Science and Society: Case Studies from Evolutionary Biology and Invasion Biology”, emphasized the social resonance of competitive and progressive metaphors in evolutionary biology and militaristic ones in invasion biology. In 20052006, he continued his research and teaching on the linguistic and social dimensions of invasion biology as an interdisciplinary post-doctoral fellow in the Center for Population Biology, University of California, Davis (USA). He is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies, University of Waterloo (Canada). e-mail: [email protected] Andreas Musolff is Professor of German Language at Durham University (UK). He has published widely in the fields of metaphor analysis, the study of public discourse in Britain and Germany, and on the history of functional linguistics, including the monograph Metaphor and Political Discourse. Analogical Reasoning in Debates about Europe (2004). He is currently researching the history of corporeal metaphors in political thought and discourse in Germany as well as popular conceptualisations of evolution in the 19th and 20th centuries. e-mail: [email protected] Brigitte Nerlich is a Principal Research Officer at the Institute for the Study of Genetics, Biorisks and Society (IGBiS) at the University of Nottingham (UK). She has published numerous books and articles on the his-

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tory of semantics and pragmatics, cognitive semantics, figurative language, polysemy and semantic change. She currently studies the uses of metaphorical models in the discourses about cloning, designer babies, GM food, stem cells and genomics. She has recently concluded a project on the social and cultural impact of foot and mouth disease in the UK and will shortly start working on a new project “Talking cleanliness in health and agriculture” which deals with MRSA and avian flu from a sociological and applied linguistics perspective. Like the foot and mouth one, this project is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. e-mail: [email protected] Roberta Pires de Oliveira is a professor of semantics at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC), Brazil, and a researcher at the Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa (CNPq). Her MA dissertation and PhD thesis deal with metaphor from the perspective of Max Black’s Interactionism, and the more recent approach of cognitive linguistics. Since the beginnings of the 90’s, however, her research has moved away from metaphor and the cognitive paradigm towards formal approaches to the semantics of natural language. She has published an introduction to semantics, papers analyzing several aspects of Brazilian Portuguese (in particular, the semantics and pragmatics of quantification, free choiceness, tense and aspect), and also articles on the epistemology of linguistics (comparisons between the formal and the cognitive paradigms in linguistics). e-mail: [email protected] Kurt Queller (PhD, Stanford, 1994) teaches linguistics and languages (German, Italian, Spanish, Mandarin) at the University of Idaho (USA) and elsewhere. His primary research field is cognitive semantics. Grounded in a usage-based re-analysis of the English over network, his current work argues that most significant polysemy originates non-teleologically, resulting not from intentional speaker innovation, but rather (as in Croft’s 2000 model of change) from hearers’ abductive inferences about the contextual meanings of usage events. (See Queller’s contribution to the present volume, and references cited therein). The overall argument is presented in Polysemy: A Usage-based Approach (in preparation). Other work includes historical analysis of gendered language, e.g. “‘Whether man or woman’:

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Gender-inclusivity in the town ordinances of medieval Douai”, with Ellen E. Kittell, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30 (2000): 63– 100. e-mail: [email protected] Farzad Sharifian, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Languages, Cultures, and Linguistics at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He has carried out research in the areas of psycholinguistics, language and memory, cognitive anthropology, cognitive linguistics, cultural linguistics and applied linguistics. He has published widely in international journals such as Journal of Cognition and Culture, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Anthropological Linguistics, Discourse Studies, Pragmatics and Cognition, World Englishes, Language and Intercultural Communication, Journal of Multicultural and Multilingual Development, and Language and Education. He is the editor (with Gary B. Palmer) of a volume of essays on Applied Cultural Linguistics (John Benjamins, 2007). e-mail: [email protected] Rita Temmerman is the coordinator of Centrum voor Vaktaal en Communicatie (CVC) (Centre for Special Language and Communication) at Erasmushogeschool Brussels and teaches translation, terminology and knowledge representation. She obtained her degree in Germanic Philology from The University of Antwerp (Belgium), her Masters in Translation from the State University of New York (USA) and her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Leuven (Belgium). Based on case studies on categorisation and naming in the life sciences (DNA technology) she developed the sociocognitive terminology theory. In 2000, she published Toward New Ways of Terminology Description. The Sociocognitive Approach (John Benjamins). Her latest research interest concerns the impact of changing perspectives on knowledge representation. She has been involved in several projects concerning the development of a methodology and software for the creation of ontologically underpinned multilingual terminological resources. e-mail: [email protected] Óscar Vilarroya earned his first degree in Medicine (1987) and his PhD in Cognitive Science (1998). He currently heads a neuroimaging team in Barcelona and teaches Brain and Consciousness at the Universitat Pompeu

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Fabra. He is the author of The Dissolution of Mind (Rodopi, 2002). Some of his most recent articles are: Carmona et al. (2005) “Global and regional gray matter reductions in ADHD: A voxel-based morphometric study”, Neuroscience Letters; Vilarroya (2005) “A Categorial Mutation”, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28, 508–509; and Vilarroya (2005) “In Search of Radical Similarity”, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28: 35–35. e-mail: [email protected] Patrizia Violi is Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna and Director of the International Center for Cognitive and Semiotic Studies at the University of San Marino. She is currently Coordinator of the Advanced PhD program in Semiotics, run by the University of Bologna and the Higher Institute of Human Sciences. She has published numerous books and articles on theoretical and applied semiotics. In particular she has worked on semantic theory (Meaning and Experience, Indiana University Press, 2001); text and discourse analysis; the relationship between Semiotics and Cognitive Science; language and gender; semiotics, psychoanalysis and dreaming. At the present she is engaged in an interdisciplinary research project on early acquisition of semiotic competence in preverbal children, and the role of embodiment in meaning development. Other current research is on the semiotic construction of space in the Mediterranean area; and on women’s identity in conflict and post-conflict situations (Balkans and Palestine). e-mail: [email protected] Ning Yu is an Associate Professor at the University of Oklahoma (USA). His publications include the book The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor: A Perspective from Chinese (John Benjamins, 1998) and numerous articles in Cognitive Linguistics, Journal of Pragmatics, Pragmatics and Cognition, Journal of Literary Semantics, and Metaphor and Symbol. He is interested in embodied cognition and how it is manifested in language. His research, focused on the relationship between language, culture, body and cognition, attempts to reveal, via systematic study of language, how bodily experiences contribute to human meaning, understanding and reasoning in cultural contexts. e-mail: [email protected]

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Tom Ziemke is Professor of Cognitive Science in the School of Humanities and Informatics at the University of Skövde, 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 interaction with the material and social environment. He is coordinator of a largescale European project on robotic models of embodied cognition, called Integrating Cognition, Emotion and Autonomy (www.his.se/icea), and a member of the executive committee of euCognition – The European Network for the Advancement of Artificial Cognitive Systems. He is also associate editor of the journals New Ideas in Psychology and Connection Science. e-mail: [email protected] Jörg Zinken is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Portsmouth, UK. His main research interests are in semantic universality and diversity, discourse processes, relations between subjective state and verbal expression, and theoretical issues in cognitive linguistics. His current projects include the spatial conceptualisation of time in the Amazonian language Amondawa. e-mail: [email protected]

Introduction: Sociocultural situatedness Roslyn M. Frank

1.

Background

This work constitutes the second volume of a two-volume set with the title Body, Language and Mind. While the first 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 sociocultural situatedness, i.e. the ways in which individual minds and cognitive processes are shaped by their interaction with sociocultural structures and practices. Naturally, the domain covered by the two volumes overlaps significantly. In fact both of them have their genesis in a one-day theme session entitled “Situated Embodiment: The Social and Biological Grounding of Metaphorical and Symbolic Thought on ‘Embodiment’”, organized for the 8th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, held July 20–25, 2003, at the University of La Rioja, Spain. Many of the contributors to this volume participated in the original theme session, while, subsequently, several additional authors were invited to take part in the project in order to further expand the range of perspectives represented. 2.

Sociocultural situatedness

Whereas Volume 1 concentrates on the concept of embodiment, understood as “the material or bodily basis for mind, meaning and cognition”, Volume 2 explores the concept of sociocultural situatedness. Briefly stated, sociocultural situatedness denotes the way(s) in which individual minds and cognitive processes are shaped by their being together with other embodied minds, i.e., their interaction with social and cultural structures, such as other agents, artifacts, conventions, etc. and, more particularly, for the purposes of this book, with language itself, as its central position in the book title Body, Language and Mind suggests. In this sense the approaches discussed in Volume 1 and Volume 2 might be compared to two sides of a coin since their perspectives are complementary. The difference is that

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Volume 1 looks more at the “bodily” aspects of mind, perception and cognition, while Volume 2 concentrates more on exploring the “social” side of cognition and language. This second volume offers a representative collection of new papers on sociocultural situatedness and displays a variety of perspectives with respect to the way that language can be understood to be socioculturally situated. While the concepts of embodiment and sociocultural situatedness are closely linked, they are still evolving: they have overlapping areas of consensus as well as aspects that are still being debated and elaborated by researchers. In order to address this evolving set of perspectives, the present volume brings together the work of well recognized authorities in the field along with significant contributions by younger scholars, all of whom are currently working in the field of Cognitive Linguistics and/or closely related disciplines. Seen from this wider interdisciplinary perspective, Volume 2 is a cognitive linguistic contribution to the current theoretical and empirical research being conducted in relationship to the concept of embodiment, sociocultural situatedness and situated cognition. In four main sections, the papers explore various dimensions of these notions as they apply to cognition and language such as: a) cultural categorization; b) scientific discourse; c) lexical usage-based approaches to metaphor; and d) the interaction of culture and cognition. In the past, different aspects of the notion of sociocultural situatedness have been addressed (Dirven, Frank and Ilie 2001; Dirven, Frank and Pütz 2003; Ziemke 2001, 2002), however, without systematically exploring the concept within a wider theoretical framework, e.g. accessing metaphor not in the mind but in the cultural world (Gibbs 1999); the sociocultural role of metaphors, frames and narratives (Nerlich, Hamilton and Rowe 2002); the relation between culture and the embodiment of spatial cognition (Sinha and Jensen de López 2000); and the cultural context needed to understand the history of Dutch causal verbs (Verhagen 2000). Certainly the debate over the role of culture in language is not a recent phenomenon but rather one with a long and complex history (cf. Döring and Nerlich (2005) for a recent review of the literature as well as the earlier discussions by Geeraerts (1988, 2002) and Jäkel (1999)). This much earlier debate about culture and language began heating up again in the 1980s when the theoretical framework was beginning to be reoriented towards a more situated view of language. Over the past decade this reorientation has been particularly evident in numerous investigations aimed at

Introduction: Sociocultural situatedness

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exploring the complex relationship and influence of language on culture, cognition and conceptualization, and vice-versa, e.g., the rekindling of the Sapir-Whorf debate in cognitive linguistics and cognitive anthropology (Lee 1996; Lucy 1992, 1996 a, 1996 b; Palmer 1996; 2006 a). Indeed, as Palmer (2006 a: 265) has observed, we need to keep in mind that “[t]he importance of the culture concept to the common enterprise of cognitive linguistics and cognitive anthropology has been explicitly recognized at least since 1987 (Lakoff and Kövecses 1987), and since emphasized by Geeraerts and Grondelaers (1995), Langacker (1994), D’Andrade (1995) and Palmer (1996)”. And while an increasing number of studies have started to focus on the role of cultural schemata (Palmer 2006b; Sharifian and Palmer 2007), the goal of the present volume of essays has been to explore the concepts of socioculturally situatedness and situated cognition, specifically with respect to the broader implications of these concepts and their application to language. In particular the volume demonstrates the diverse ways in which these relatively new insights into the unity of body, language and mind can be brought to play with respect to investigations of language, culture and cognition. 3.

Historical overview

The historical roots of the concept that we refer to as sociocultural situatedness can be traced back to at least the first half of the 20th century where it played, although not under that name, a major role in the theoretical work of various researchers in philosophy and psychology, who laid the groundwork for the phenomenological turn in the history of scientific thought. The philosophical foundation was laid in Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927 [1962]) and Merleau–Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945 [1962]), while the psychological foundation was set forth by Vygotsky (1930 [1978]). Within Cognitive Linguistics, some twenty years ago Johnson (1987) and Lakoff (1987) introduced the notion of “image schema” as the bodily basis of language and metaphorical reasoning. In their book Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) Lakoff and Johnson (1999) elaborated further upon the notion of embodiment as isolated from any contextual situation.1 This perspective on embodiment was brought into 1. For a more detailed discussion of the evolution of the concept of “image schemas” and “embodiment”, cf. Kimmel (2005, this volume); Johnson and Rohrer

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question by Zlatev (1997) and criticized for portraying the “embodied mind” as separated from situational contexts, as if it were an entity floating in the air. Countering what he perceived to be the drawbacks inherent in a decontextualized approach to embodiment, in his 1997 work, Zlatev introduced the notion of “situated embodiment” by bringing forward a different theoretical framework based on the idea that our mastery and use of language is crucially dependent on the fact that we are beings which are embodied as well as situated within a culture of shared practices. […] [T]he key to understanding the nature of linguistic competence and its acquisition […] lies in the dialectical relationship between bodily dispositions and activities on the one hand, and sociocultural practices on the other. (Zlatev 1997: 1–2)

Following Lindblom and Ziemke (2002, 2007), the term “social situatedness” denotes the way(s) in which individual minds (cognitive processes) are shaped by their interaction with social and cultural structures, including language itself. Also, the notion of sociocultural situatedness dovetails with Langacker’s description of language as “an essential instrument and component of culture, whose reflection in linguistic structures is pervasive and quite significant” (Langacker 1999: 16). While Zlatev’s term “situated embodiment” served to focus attention on the situated nature of language, the origins of this more culturally informed debate along with the notions of “cultural models”, “schemas” and “categorizations” go back to the late 1980s. For example, discussions of the role of culture in language have been a central component in several somewhat more narrowly focused debates concerning metaphor, e.g., on the “humoral” and hence “cultural” background of Lakoffian “anger” metaphors. In this literature, too, the culturally situated view has consistently gained ground. For example, while the discussion involving Geeraerts and Grondelaers versus Kövecses started in the first half of the 1990s (cf. Geeraerts and Grondelaers 1995; Lakoff and Kövecses 1987) it has continued to gather steam, so to speak, with the growing recognition on the part of researchers, such as Kövecses and others, of the role of culture in language, cognition, and conceptualization (cf. Kövecses 2005; Palmer 2006a; Sharifian et al. in press). Until quite recently, the various fields of cognitive science, psychology, phenomenology, semiotics and linguistics, where the concepts of situated (2007); Rohrer (2005, 2007); Pires and Souza Bittencourt (this volume); Violi (2004, this volume); Zlatev (2005, 2007).

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embodiment, situated cognition and sociocultural situatedness have been developed, were relatively isolated from each other. Moreover, until quite recently, while discussions concerning the relationship between the individual mind (agent) and its sociocultural environment were taking place in one subfield, e.g., artificial intelligence (AI), the discussants themselves were often unaware of the fact that similar discussions were being undertaken in a different, but theoretically allied, discipline, namely, in Cognitive Linguistics. Similarly, linguists have been relatively unaware of the significance of their own research to work being done in the area of situated cognition and situated embodiment in the fields of AI, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology and cognitive anthropology. This twovolume set of essays attempts to break down these disciplinary walls and initiate a cross-disciplinary dialogue concerning notions of embodiment and sociocultural situateness. At this juncture in the development of the field of Cognitive Linguistics, we believe it is important to open things up by bringing into focus these meta-theoretical concerns, that is, the way that Cognitive Linguistics is redefining the field of linguistics and constituting the “limits” or “boundaries” of linguistics as a discipline. Those working in Cognitive Linguistics regularly traverse the borders of different disciplines and scientific methods and therefore have supported the development of interdisciplinary approaches and views. Yet, CL researchers may not fully recognize the strategic importance of their field, the key location that their field occupies within the expanding network of disciplines composing Cognitive Science well as the field’s interdependence on ideological, scientific and social trends which structure research in these adjoining fields (cf. Robbins and Aydede in press). As an emerging field of research, Cognitive Linguistics is not just growing out of itself, but is interwoven with several other areas and disciplines. In this sense, the research initiatives and theoretical frameworks discussed in Volume 2 form part of and contribute to wider discussions of situated cognition that have been taking place in Cognitive Science for some time. As Clark stated, nearly ten years ago, “[t]alk of embodiment and situatedness has become increasingly frequent in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, robotics, education, cognitive anthropology, linguistics, and in dynamical systems approaches to behavior and thought. There is clearly a shift in thinking but the nature and importance of the shift is surprisingly hard to pin down” (1999: 345). The incipient situated cognition movement in Cognitive Linguistics, like the cognitive sciences themselves,

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represents a loose-knit family of approaches to understanding the mind, perception and cognition. And in consonance with the larger debates currently taking place with respect to the concept of situated cognition and the extended mind thesis in the cognitive sciences (cf. Clark 1997; Clark and Chalmers 1998), the chapters in this volume bring together diverse approaches and explore a variety of theoretical perspectives. Nonetheless, they share a common framework in that they are characterized by a conscious move away from individualistic and essentialist views of “language”; the focus on the individual (ideal) speaker has given way to approaches that emphasize the role of collective, group and distributed cognition and, hence, the sociocultural embeddedness of “language”, human subjectivity and intersubjectivity. To paraphrase Clark and Chalmers (1998: 7) the contributions ask: “Where does language stop and the rest of the world begin?2” The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the boundaries of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words ‘just ain't in our head’ […]. (Clark and Chalmers 1998: 7)

In this way the contributions to this volume reflect the increased attention that is being paid to the sociocultural embeddedness of cognition and language in general. More specifically, they elaborate upon the growing concern with developing, articulating and applying research frameworks that are in consonance with situated approaches. Additionally, the contributions demonstrate how a situated perspective on language that moves away from individualistic approaches to emphasize the role of collective, distributed and group cognition can lead to substantive insights into broader questions of concern to cognitive linguists. Most particularly, while operating within the broad framework of situated cognition, the research opens up questions of methodology and practice, the kind of questions that any scientific community has to ask itself, e.g. concerning what defines and sustains the field as such, as well as the need for shared conceptions and agreed-upon terminology (Ziemke 2003). Finally, we hope that this volume will contribute to a kind of increased creativity within Cognitive Linguistics, a synergetic energy flow that is important for the development of all new disciplines. In summary, the pre2. The question Clark and Chalmers (1998: 7) asked at the beginning of their seminal article on the extended mind was: “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?”

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sent volume brings together valuable contributions from a crossdisciplinary perspective on a new and vitally important concept in Cognitive Science and related disciplines: sociocultural situatedness. 4.

Overview of the various sociocultural perspectives in this volume

In the present volume, the concept of sociocultural situatedness is approached from four perspectives. Contributions making up the first section focus broadly on the dynamic nature of cultural categorization, providing a variety of theoretical viewpoints. Of particular note is the call for greater cross-disciplinary research approaches as well as greater attention to the “collective” and “distributed” nature of cognition, language and knowledge. In the second section the authors undertake an examination of the socioculturally situated nature of scientific discourse, bringing into view three case studies where the interface between cultural domains and language is particularly salient. In the third section, the contributors allow us to appreciate the application of the notion of sociocultural situatedness as a tool of analysis in lexical and usage-based approaches to metaphor. The papers in the fourth section investigate the role played by culture-specific knowledge in discourse, exploring the situatedness of metaphor, the interrelationship between bodily grounded experience and cultural models as well as the contributions of group-specific cultural and social mechanisms in the development of cognitive schemata. 4.1.

The dynamics of cultural categorization

The volume opens with an examination of the dynamics of cultural categorizations, specifically, taking the position that the notions of categories and categorization are in constant evolution since both bodily-based and socioculturally-based experiences are operative as sources of categorization. The chapters in this section also provide the reader with a broad historical overview of the development and application of the concepts of embodiment and situatedness to human cognition and language, along with an examination of some of the complexities governing current debates on situated cognition itself.

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The contribution of Roberta Pires de Oliveira and Robson de Souza Bittencourt offers a critical survey of the various trends in “embodiment” research by interviewing Tim Rohrer and Mark Johnson about Lakoff’s and Lakoff and Johnson’s conception of embodiment, its interpretation in various other sciences ranging from philosophy to AI and biology, and its place and relevance in Lakoff’s new research orientation on the Neural Theory of Language (NTL). In the interview human embodiment is portrayed not as “the fleshy boundary of the skin”, rather our body and brain are viewed as extending out to the world beyond us, engaging in all sorts of bodily and socio-cultural interactions, in experiences of meaning which are not objectively out there. Patrizia Violi begins her analysis by setting forth a wider semiotic viewpoint. On the basis of the work of Eleanor Rosch (1999), she first radically revises the traditional view of categorization as static, fixed entities and re-defines categories as flexible instruments that are actualized according to the changing discourse context. Whereas many categories are image-schematically based, and hence necessarily bodily-based, many other categories are not bodily-based at all, but arise from and in social interaction between care-takers and children, a process which implies the transfer of cultural knowledge. In his paper Michael Kimmel focuses on the very basis of embodiment, image schemas and related problem areas, offering a sociocultural perspective on these concepts. He confronts the CL use and understanding of the notion of image schemas, especially by Lakoff and Johnson, with viewpoints drawn from other disciplines such as cognitive and phenomenological anthropology and developmental psychology. If CL is to handle a more up-to-date understanding of the nature of image schemas, it must take into account how this notion has been further developed in interdisciplinary research, the latter being a topic reviewed at some length by Kimmel. Farzad Sharifian concentrates on the other side of the coin, i.e. sociocultural situatedness, more specifically on cultural categorization and cultural models. Unlike bodily-based categories and their semantic extensions through metaphor and metonymy into more abstract domains, culture-based categories and models grow through social interaction and are not necessarily represented equally in the minds of each and every member of the community in question. Rather they are socially distributed to different degrees among the various members of a cultural community. While it is the cultural community as a whole that possesses this cultural knowl-

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edge, it is not necessary for every single member of the community to know all of the cultural categories existing in it. In his chapter Enrique Bernárdez focuses on the question of how to bridge the gap between an individual’s cognitive system and, consequently, language, and linguistic diversity, namely, the problem of the relationship between the individual and the collectivity. He introduces the concept of synergic cognition, related to the study of similar problems in biology and complex systems theory, and emphasizes the importance of understanding language as “collective” knowledge This type of knowledge is a collective possession, even though unequally distributed over individual members. The patterns of individual activity may, or even must, show variation because of this unevenly distributed knowledge. Yet, ultimately, collective cognition and culture are the main determinants of each single individual’s activities. 4.2.

Sociocultural situatedness of scientific discourse

The themes of Section 2 are grounded in the very strong traditional tendency of scientific thought and discourse to appropriate categories of a totally different branch of science for its own heuristic purposes, selfunderstanding and self-definition. The fact that perhaps two of the most notorious cases of such scientific heuristic exchanges are biology and linguistics cannot be a coincidence. Whereas (evolutionary) biology often tries to understand its field of research in terms of a given, hidden code, referred to metaphorically as “the book of nature” or more generally as “the language of nature”, linguistics has often approached its own object of research in terms of biological categories such as “language as an organism” without necessarily analyzing the socioculturally entrenched metaphorical processes in question. In short, the projection of linguistic categories onto biological categories, as well as the projection of biological categories onto linguistic and non-linguistic categories as instantiations of cultural situatedness is explored in this section. In his paper Brendon Larson picks up the cultural categorization of ecologically non-default species as “invasive species”, projecting the metaphor of human army invasions onto the biological world of ecosystems, thereby loading the newly incoming species with all the negative associations of human invasions. This contribution reflects the increasing sensitivity on the part of biologists and others to the role of metaphor in the

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discourse of science, most particularly, the uncritical use of the metaphorics of invasion, competition and warfare. Larson argues that these textual megametaphors promote an antagonistic stance toward the natural world and, in fact, may be counterproductive to the very goals espoused by conservation biologists. The contribution by Joseph Hilferty and Óscar Villarroya concentrates not so much on biology itself, but on a linguistic theory (TGG) that has proclaimed itself as strongly biologically grounded and oriented. They analyze the various reductionist metaphors and metonymies adopted by the Chomskyan paradigm. These metaphors of “development” instantiate the same logic that is found in biological pre-transformationalist thought. By adducing a series of concrete examples, e.g. the case of the KE family and the FOXP2 gene, the authors show that such nativist arguments are either misleading or are based on a misunderstanding of what genes do. The authors conclude that nativist hypotheses of language acquisition and development are unhelpful because they invite inferences that are not supported by the results of current molecular biology and genetics, e.g. that genes do not code (in the sense of information theory) for phenotypical traits. The chapter by Roslyn Frank addresses another aspect of the interactive and dynamic role of sociocultural situatedness by bringing forward a new conceptual frame of analysis, one that emphasizes the importance of reflexivity when examining the way that “language” itself has been “imagined”, and its metaphoric instantiations. Using an approach informed by complex adaptive systems thinking, she introduces the concept of discourse metaphor formations and then moves on to examine the historically conditioned evolution of the “language-organism-species” metaphor. The contribution highlights the continuously shifting definitions of “language” over time, the sociocultural situatedness of discourse metaphor formations and the fact that the way that we view this entity called “language” has been influenced, repeatedly, by extensive discursive interactions between the fields of biology and linguistics. 4.3.

Sociocultural situatedness in lexical and usage-based approaches to metaphor

The contributions composing Section 3 deal with sociocultural situatedness in lexical and usage-based approaches to metaphor. Sociocultural situated-

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ness and particularly actual usage as the source of people’s automatic functioning in interaction provide the basis for social and cultural patterns and their conceptualizations. Another aspect of this type of situated cognition is the ease with which we make cross-domain mappings in metaphorical thought, whereby domains are interpreted as largely culturally defined units of experience. Concentrating fully on the link between embodiment and cultural situatedness in language, Kurt Queller maintains that certain issues in lexical semantic analysis can be resolved only by attending to the notion of “functional embodiment”, i.e. the grounding of lexical meaning in usage and discourse. Attention is paid especially to the lexical entrenchment of particular idiomatic, collocational and constructional routines in which a word figures. These constitute an indispensable rather than an ancillary part of lexical semantic description. Concretely, he proposes extending the Lakoff (1987) notion of “functional embodiment” to comprise not only lexical entrenchment of particular usages, but also the embedding of usage events within recurring sorts of communicative context. In his contribution Andreas Musolff looks at the ways the concept of “cultural evolution”, developed in “naturalistic” approaches to cultural studies, can be applied to metaphor with reference to mappings from the source domain of the HUMAN BODY to the target domain of POLITICAL ENTITIES. The study focuses on micro-historical changes in the use of the HEART-OF-EUROPE concept in British and German Euro-debates during the 1990s, as documented in a special corpus drawn from large general corpora. These historical data are applied to models of concept evolution, concretely in order to propose a perspective on metaphor development as an adaptation to argumentative trends in the respective discourse communities. In her chapter Rita Temmerman begins by discussing the importance of diachronic approaches to the study of scientific discourse and then goes on to develop a detailed analysis of the term splicing. Specifically she concentrates the extension of reference of the English lexeme splicing from its origins in Dutch to its current use in biotechnology. Focusing on the extensions of its frames of reference as the term becomes part of the specialized terminology of genetics, she argues that a scientific discipline can be understood as an interpersonal intelligent system; that it is also possible to study the sociocultural embeddedness of language and thought through an analysis of metaphor and analogy in scientific terminology.

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4.4.

Exploring the sociocultural situatedness of culture and cognition

As two sides of the same coin, (situated) embodiment and (sociocultural) situatedness are not in competition with one another. Rather they must be seen as different but integrated sources of conceptualization. This Januslike aspect of language is explored in the final section of the volume, dedicated to investigating the sociocultural situatedness of culture and cognition. More concretely, the contributions making up this section offer three different perspectives on the role of culture-specific knowledge in discourse and in the process they bring into view new innovative conceptual tools: (1) discourse metaphor, (2) the “Triangle Model” of metaphor, body and culture, and (3) the group as a variable in the development of cognitive schemata. In their contribution Jörg Zinken, Iina Helsten and Brigitte Nerlich investigate the relationship between conceptual bodily-based metaphor and cultural metaphor. They examine work based on one of the cognitive metaphor theories, i.e. Conceptual Metaphor Theory (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1999) in a variety of fields, e.g. psychology, archaeology, anthropology, robotics and communication studies, highlighting the successes and drawbacks of this theory, particularly the neglect of social and cultural aspects of cognitive activity in the theoretical modeling of metaphors and metaphor use. They then put forward an integrated model of interaction between universal, bodily-grounded knowledge and culture-specific knowledge in discourse. In the process they introduce the concept of discourse metaphor. Approaching the relationship of cognition and culture in the sense of Lakoff and Johnson (1999), Ning Yu argues that many conceptual metaphors are universal, because they are based on universal bodily experiences. At the same time he highlights many culturally-specific linguistic realizations of conceptual metaphors. Moreover, Yu suggests that metaphor, body and culture may form a “circular triangle relationship” (the “Triangle Model”). While conceptual metaphors are usually grounded in bodily experiences, cultural models filter bodily experiences for specific target domains of conceptual metaphors. Thus, cultural models themselves are very often structured by conceptual metaphors. In this way Yu’s contribution offers an exciting compromise between bodily and cultural situatedness. Gitte Kristiansen’s paper offers an insightful set of linguistic reflections on cultural situatedness. She no longer associates cognitive (image) schemata with the individual as in a narrow embodiment approach, but

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rather introduces the social approach as one of the various categorycreating forces. The social group creates such cultural categories of selfgroup identification and “otherness” identification, thereby specifying and categorizing “otherness” as national, regional, social-class or occupational otherness. Thus, social cognition, social categorization and successful social functioning constitute the main focus of this contribution. In sum, Kristiansen asserts that the many aspects of sociocultural situatedness are so massively represented in human experience that they necessitate and command the attention of present and future research. 5.

Conclusion

In summary, at this particular juncture in time it is far too early to bring to closure the wide range of theoretical perspectives, approaches and applications of the concepts of sociocultural situatedness and situated embodiment, some of which have been laid out in this volume. Rather, heuristically speaking, we are still at an exploratory stage in the search for a theoretically unified framework that would adequately embrace the notion of situated embodiment and the sociocultural situatedness of language. In this respect, the papers included in this volume contribute to a fuller understanding of these basic concepts and to the importance of promoting broader interdisciplinary approaches to achieving our overall goal: that of defining the role of culture in language and cognition as well as in collective and distributed conceptualizations. Hopefully, the broad range of research perspectives offered in this volume will move us closer to achieving that goal. References Clark, Andy 1997 Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 1999 An embodied cognitive science. Trends in Cognitive Science 3 (9): 345–351. Clark, Andy and David Chalmers 1998 The extended mind. Analysis 58(January) (1): 7–19.

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D'Andrade, Roy G. 1995 The Development of Cognitive Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dirven, René, Roslyn M. Frank and Cornelia Ilie (eds.) 2001 Language and Ideology. Vol. 2. Cognitive Descriptive Approaches. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Dirven, René, Roslyn M. Frank and Martin Pütz (eds.) 2003 Cognitive Models in Language and Thought: Ideology, Metaphors and Meanings. Cognitive Linguistics Research 24. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Döring, Martin and Brigitte Nerlich 2005 Assessing the topology of semantic change: From Linguistic Fields to Ecolinguistics. Logos and Language: Journal of General Linguistics and Language Theory 6 (1): 55–68. Geeraerts, Dirk 1988 Cognitive Grammar and the history of Lexical Semantics. In: Brygida Rudzka-Ostyn (ed.), Topics in Cognitive Linguistics, 647–677. Amsterdam/New York: John Benjamins. 2002 The theoretical and descriptive development of lexical semantics. In: Leila Behrens and Dietmar Zaefferer (eds.), The Lexicon in Focus. Competition and Convergence in Current Lexicology, 23–42. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Verlag. Geeraerts, Dirk and Stefan Grondelaers 1995 Looking back at anger: Cultural traditions and metaphorical patterns. In: John R. Taylor and Robert E. MacLaury (eds.), Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World, 153–179. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Gibbs, Raymond W. 1999 Taking metaphor out of our heads and putting it into the cultural world. In: Raymond W. Gibbs and Gerard J. Steen (eds.), Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics, 145–166. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Heidegger, Martin 1962 Being and Time. New York: Harper and Row. (Trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robins of Sein und Zeit, Tübingen, Germany). Original version 1927. Jäkel, Olaf 1999 Kant, Blumenberg, Weinrich. Some forgotten contributions to the cognitive theory of metaphor. In: Raymond W. Gibbs and Gerard J. Steen (eds.), Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics, 9–27. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Johnson, Mark 1987 The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Johnson, Mark and Tim Rohrer 2007 We are live creatures: Embodiment, American Pragmatism and the cognitive organism. In: Tom Ziemke, Jordan Zlatev and Roslyn M. Frank (eds.), Body, Language and Mind. Vol. 1. Embodiment, 17–54. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kimmel, Michael 2005 Culture regained: Situated and compound image schemas. In: Beate Hampe (ed.), From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics, 285–311. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. this vol. Properties of cultural embodiment: Lessons from the anthropology of the body. Kövecses, Zoltán 2005 Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lakoff, George 1987 Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson 1999 Philosophy in the Flesh. New York: Basic Books. Lakoff, George and Zoltán Kövecses 1987 The cognitive model of anger in American English. In: Dorothy Holland and Naomi. Quinn (eds.), Cultural Models in Language and Thought, 195–221. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 1999 Assessing the cognitive linguistic enterprise. In: Theo Janssen and Gisela Redeker (eds.), Cognitive Linguistics: Foundations, Scope and Methodology, 13–59. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Langacker, Ronald 1994 Culture, cognition, and grammar. In: Martin Pütz (ed.), Language Contact and Language Conflict, 25–53. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lee, Penny 1996 The Whorf Theory Complex: A Critical Reconstruction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lindblom, Jessica and Tom Ziemke 2002 Social situatedness of natural and artificial intelligence: Vygotsky and beyond. Adaptive Behavior 11 (2): 79–96. 2007 Embodiment and social interaction: A cognitive science perspective. In: Tom Ziemke, Jordan Zlatev and Roslyn M. Frank (eds.), Body,

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Lucy, John A. 1992 a Grammatical Categories and Cognition: A Case Study of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1992 b Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1996 The scope of linguistic relativity: An analysis and review of empirical research. In: John Gumperz and Stephen C. Levinson (eds.), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, 37–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1962 Phenomenology of Perception. London/Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. (Trans. by Colin Smith of Phénoménologie de la Perception). Original version 1945. Nerlich, Brigitte, Craig A. Hamilton and Victoria Rowe 2002 Conceptualizing foot and mouth disease. The socio-cultural role of metaphors, frames and narratives. metaphorik.de 02/2002: 90–108. http://www.metaphorik.de/02/nerlich.htm Palmer, Gary B. 1996 Toward a Theory of Cultural Linguistics. Austin: University of Texas Press. 2006 a Energy through fusion at last: Synergies in Cognitive Anthropology and Cognitive Linguistics. In: Gitte Kristiansen, Michel Achard, René Dirven and Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza (eds.), Cognitive Linguistics: Foundations and Fields of Application, 264–305. Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 2006 b When does cognitive linguistics become cultural? Case studies in Tagalog voice and Shona noun classifiers. In: June Luchjenbroers (ed.), Cognitive Linguistics Investigations across Languages, Fields and Philosophical Boundaries, 13–45. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pires de Oliveira, Roberta and Robson de Souza Bittencourt this vol. An Interview with Mark Johnson and Tim Rohrer: From neurons to sociocultural situatedness Robbins, Philip and Murat Aydede in press Cambridge Handbook on Situated Cognition. Cambridge, U.K.: University of Cambridge Press. Rohrer, Tim 2006 Three dogmas of embodiment: Cognitive linguistics as a cognitive science. In: Gitte Kristiansen, Michel Achard, René Dirven and

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Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibánez. Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications and Future Perspectives, 119–146. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 2007 The body in space: Dimensions of embodiment. In: Tom Ziemke, Jordan Zlatev and Roslyn M. Frank (ed.), Body, Language and Mind: Embodiment, 339–377. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Rosch, Eleanor 1999 Reclaiming concepts. Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (11/12): 61–77. Sharifian, Farzad, René Dirven, Ning Yu and Susanne Niemier in press Culture, Body and Language: Conceptualization of “Heart” and other Internal Body Organs across Languages and Cultures. Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Sharifian, Farzad and Gary B. Palmer 2007 Applied cultural linguistics: An emerging paradigm. In: Farzad Sharifian and Gary B. Palmer (eds.), Applied Cultural Linguistics: Implications for Second Language Learning and Intercultural Communication, 1–14. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Sinha, Chris and Kristine Jensen de López 2000 Language, culture and the embodiment of spatial cognition. Cognitive Linguistics 11 (1/2): 17–41. Verhagen, Arie 2000 Interpreting usage: Construing the history of Dutch causal verbs. In: Michael Barlow and Suzanne Kemmer (eds.), Usage Based Models of Language, 261–286. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Violi, Patrizia 2004 Embodiment at the crossroads between cognition and semiosis. Recherches en Communication. 19: 199–234. this vol. Beyond the body: Towards a full embodied semiosis Vygotsky, Lev 1978 Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Trans. from Russian source text, 1930). Ziemke, Tom 2001 The construction of ´reality´ in the robot. Foundations of Science 6 (1): 163–233. 2003 Embodied AI as science: Models of embodied cognition, embodied models of cognition, or both? Embodied Artificial Intelligence 605– 615 Ziemke, Tom (ed.) 2002 Situated and Embodied Cognition [special issue]. Cognitive Systems Research 3 (3).

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Zlatev, Jordan 1997 Situated Embodiment: Studies in the Emergence of Spatial Meaning. Gotab: Stockholm. 2005 What’s a schema? Bodily mimesis and the grounding of language. In: Beate Hampe (ed.), From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics, 313–342. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 2007 Embodiment, language and mimesis. In: Tom Ziemke, Jordan Zlatev and Roslyn M. Frank (eds.), Body, Language and Mind. Vol. 1. Embodiment, 297–337. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Section A The dynamics of cultural categorization

An interview with Mark Johnson and Tim Rohrer: From neurons to sociocultural situatedness Roberta Pires de Oliveira and Robson de Souza Bittencourt

Abstract As one of the three findings of Second Generation Cognitive Science, the notion of embodiment changed radically the way the mind-body problem was viewed and consequently the scope of many disciplines associated with it. Many cognitive researching branches, from neural sciences to philosophy, concurred in saying that “our human embodiment determines both what we think and how we think” (Mark Johnson, in this interview). This is the core of this interview: a clarification of the notion of embodiment and its relation to the many issues. Human embodiment springs from the interview not as “the fleshy boundary of the skin”, on the contrary, our body and brain extend out to the world beyond us, engaging in all sorts of bodily and socio-cultural interactions, in experiences of meaning which are not objectively out there. These are only affordances, that is, “they afford opportunities for individuals to experience the meaning of things and situations and events”. Since embodiment entails interaction in levels – bodily, socio-cultural, aesthetic, etc – it rules out physicalist monism in the traditional sense. Thus, we end up with a new way of seeing: an embodied mind in a “minded” body! Keywords: Cognitive Science, Cognitive Linguistics, embodiment, embodied versus disembodied cognition, Experiential Realism, mind/body dualism, Social Embodiment.

Thank you for the opportunity of interviewing you both, Tim and Mark. It’s a great pleasure to have the opportunity to clarify the notion of embodiment and at the same time to be able to gain access to a more neuroscientifically oriented perspective as well as a more philosophical one. The notion of embodiment, generally associated with one of the three discoveries of the second generation of Cognitive Science, radically changed the way not only Cognitive Linguistics understood the mind, but also many

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other disciplines associated with contemporary Cognitive Science, evolutionary biology, philosophy and the “life sciences”, as well as more specialized areas such as AI, artificial life and robotics. Embodiment has no usual counterpart word in Brazilian Portuguese. In fact, there is no good translation for it, since every alternative would imply that something that had no body was embodied. In English, however, it seems that embodiment is an every-day word. For instance: “She’s the embodiment of honesty.” We could start by clarifying what (if any) relations exist between the ordinary use of the term and its use in the cognitive paradigm. MJ: The term “embodied” should be understood, first, as a contrast term to “disembodied”. The idea of disembodied mind, concepts and thought entails some form of ontological dualism, typically a mind-body dualism. On this view, the body as a material thing is the locus of sensation, images and feelings. It gives “input” to something called “the mind”, but it does not determine what the mind does with that input. Our view, by contrast, is that the fact of our human embodiment shapes both what and how we think. In a Pragmatist vein, and also in line with recent developments in cognitive neuroscience, we are denying disembodied thought. All dimensions of human thought emerge from increasing levels of complexity in organismenvironment interactions, and all of these interactions require and are grounded in our bodies. Could you, perhaps, clarify what you mean by Pragmatist vein? Do you mean American Pragmatism à la Dewey? MJ: Yes, we are referring to classic American Pragmatism as articulated by philosophers such as C.S. Peirce, William James and John Dewey. Their work is characterized by a non-dualistic metaphysics that sees experience as an ongoing process of organism-environment interactions that are at once physical, social, moral, cultural and spiritual. They argued that our traditional Western dichotomies – mind vs. body, cognition vs. emotion, fact vs. value, theory vs. practice, etc. – capture dimensions or aspects of the more primordial flow of embodied experience, but that these divisions do not represent ultimate metaphysical distinctions or types. Each of these pragmatists was committed to the idea that “higher” cognitive functions arose from our bodily engagement with our world. In other words, our capacities for conceptualization, reasoning and symbolic interaction were

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held to be continuous with our sensorimotor capacities. They saw human thought and creativity within an evolutionary framework, and they drew on the best science of their day in trying to understand how “mind” emerges from embodied activity in the world. How does the scientific meaning of embodiment emerge from the notion in ordinary language? MJ: In ordinary language, the term “embodied” can mean something as general and abstract as “having a concrete instantiation in some physical object”. Thus we say, “She is the embodiment of grace” and “He embodies our highest ideals”. In common parlance the term “body” is also used to identify certain material objects, with the human body as a prototype. Moreover, the prototype is a living, breathing, acting human organism, and not just the cold lump of flesh that rests in the morgue after someone dies, although this is certainly one sense of “body”. It is this living flesh that is at the heart of our conception of embodiment. To say that cognition is embodied is to recognize multiple levels at which the body shows itself. First, there is the physiological organism made up of flesh, bones, blood, muscles, viscera and many organs of perception and life-maintenance, all organized into complex interactive systems. Second, to be embodied is to have a brain and central nervous system that establish further conditions for how we monitor our body-state and our ongoing interactions with the environment. Third, the body does not terminate with the fleshy boundary of the skin. It extends out into its environment, so that the organism and environment are not independent, but rather interdependent aspects of the basic flow of bodily experience. Our embodiment gives rise to felt qualities and emotional responses and phenomenology provides us ways of becoming aware of how we exist – bodily – in our world. The neurosciences study how our organs, chiefly the brain and nervous system, constitute our patterns of thinking. And the other cognitive sciences can examine the role of our bodies in meaning, conceptualization, reasoning and communication (or symbolic interactions). Consequently, the scientific and philosophical senses of embodiment go far beyond our commonsense conceptions of the body to encompass virtually every aspect of experience, meaning, thought and language. But what runs through all of these various conceptions is the refusal to admit an ontological difference in kind between mind and body. Hence, John Dewey (1925 [1981]) coined the term “body-mind” to capture the idea that what

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we call “body” and “mind” are, as Merleau-Ponty (1962 [1994]) also observed, simply abstractions from the more primordial pre-subject and preobject flow of experience. To speak of embodied cognition is to say, "no body, never mind”. It is to say that we think from and within our bodily experience. TR: I would just add to Mark’s description of the levels at which the body shows itself by emphasizing that our interactions with the environment include interactions with other organisms – particularly other human beings and thereby our social, cultural and communicative systems. As you both have made clear, the notion of embodiment is a refusal of the traditional dichotomy of body/mind. At this stage there seems to be a consensus that the Cartesian, dualist view of the body/mind antithesis can no longer be accepted, though there are distinct non-dualist positions. Just to give an example, Chomsky (2000, among others) argues that Descartes was right about the mind, but wrong about the body. In his own terms, since Newton’s physics, the ghost is in the machine. Moreover, Chomsky postulates a clear distinction between natural phenomena, of which language, i.e. syntax, is an example, and socio-cultural phenomena, which cannot be explained naturalistically. It seems that the cognitive perspective within which you work would not accept either of the two claims by Chomsky, but would rather rely on the notion of body. But if ultimately everything must be explained in bodily terms, aren’t we back to some kind of physicalism? MJ: The crux of your question is whether everything must ultimately be explained in bodily terms. In answering “yes” to this key question, what we are rejecting is any proposed explanation that relies on the assumption of disembodied meaning, conceptualization and reasoning. The apparent counter example that is always cited, the one you mention from Chomsky, is that there are aspects of language and also of social and cultural meaning that cannot be explained via embodiment. However, it should be clear from my response to question 1 above that “embodiment” is used in a very rich, non-reductivist sense in the theory of embodied cognition. Meaning is based on our human embodiment, but it is not locked up within individual organisms. Meaning is public and shared. The principal reason it can be shared is that we have similar sensory-motor systems, similarly structured bodies, brains that function similarly and environments that afford us re-

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curring, shared patterns of interaction. What leads some people to say that meaning is somehow “outside” the body/mind is typically that our coordinated human actions involve language, symbolic interactions, rituals, shared practices, etc. There is thus meaning invested in what transcends the confines of any particular body. Andy Clark (1999) calls this vast transpersonal dimension of meaning “scaffolding”. These cultural forms and symbolic interactions are thus integral to meaning, and we see them as our shared way of carrying meaning forward from generation to generation. They make it possible for each person to enter a world of funded meaning, in which the prior accumulated understanding of our ancestors is available to us. That is why each new infant does not have to start from scratch to build the world anew or reconstitute all our learning and inherited understanding. However, these forms are always just affordances: they afford opportunities for individuals to experience the meaning of things and situations and events. Their meaning is not written objectively on them. It is not something pre-determined and fixed. Rather, they enter into our experience of meaning, which is organized by the character of our bodies and brains, as we reach out actively to engage what lies beyond us. These “objective” symbols and bodies of knowledge must be enacted (as neuronal patterns) within and taken up by each person for whom they become significant. And this requires embodied neural activations and the forming up of stable background knowledge, in the form of what Paul Churchland (2002: 28) calls “the entire activation space for the relevant population of neurons, a space that has been sculpted by months or years of learning, a space that encompasses all of the possible instances of which the creature currently has any conception”. TR: If you have to carve the world up that way, I’m with the Monists because I accept evolutionary explanations. Given enough time, the sociocultural parts of embodiment have emerged for us as a result of evolutionary changes in our material embodiment. But is it still useful to carve things up in this way? After all, the concepts of monism and dualism and the like presume that notions like body and mind belong in some fixed and final categories, not that one gradually emerges from the other in a long Darwinian process. We humans now live in a milieu which is partly social and cultural; to explain things in bodily terms is to explain them, at least in part, in terms of the social and cultural. Experiential Realism is not just physical Monism; it’s a subspecies of post-Darwinian philosophical Pragmatism in which later phenomena, like our sense of “mind” and the other

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sociocultural phenomena which Chomsky finds unamenable to naturalistic explanations, are now bound up with the physical body. So, it goes beyond traditional notions based on the mind-body dichotomy … TR: So neither monism, nor dualism, nor physicalism can really adequately label this theory. As Mark argues, explaining everything in bodily terms is no longer just explaining them only in the terms of the physical body. Only when considering evolutionarily long time-scales might it be possible to attempt that sort of reduction on a wholesale basis. The rest of the time, we attempt to explain things using embodiment in its richly non-reductivist and interactionist sense with the physical-body-to-mental/social-cultural evolutionary sense in the background. But on the other hand, there have been attempts – notably by the NTL research group headed by Lakoff and Feldman – to explain language and mind in terms of the brain. So, if we understood you correctly, when Lakoff says that “all concepts are physical”, as he did in Logroño at the ICLC 2003, he does not mean that concepts are identical with neural structures/patterns of activation, right? Otherwise, how can he avoid reductionism? MJ: To say that all concepts are “physical” is to deny that concepts are attributes of some alleged immaterial substance or structure. It is to insist that concepts are human creations and tools (and not just human, since some animals have concepts, too). There can be no conceptualization without a pattern of neural activation. That is the heart of the claim that concepts are physical. It does not follow from this that every concept is correlated with a single neural activation, even within the same person at different times. There is too much neural plasticity (thankfully) for this to be the case. Gerald Edelman makes this case very strongly in Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1992), and in his book with Giulio Tononi, A Universe of Consciousness (2000). Still, human brains process certain concepts using various parts of the sensory-motor system, although there may be great variability in how these concepts are realized in different people. As we mentioned earlier (in response to Question 2), however, it is important to always remember that grounding conceptualization in brain events does not mean that a complete account of concepts can be given

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without reference to social interaction and cultural symbols and institutions. TR: While physical, my neural experience of red is not identical to your neural experience of red – simply sufficiently similar in their patterns of activation due to evolutionary pressures. What it is not is some concept which corresponds to some disembodied experience of “red” as it might exist apart from the bodies interacting in and with the world. Your answers, as well as the literature in Cognitive Linguistics, clearly recognizes and advocates for a broader view of concepts and language, one that ranges from physical to social and aesthetic experiences as well as genetic and cultural heritages. One the other hand, as pointed out earlier, one central research topic is the neuronal basis of concepts. Lakoff seems to suggest this in his 2001 interview concerning blends, when he says: “So for us who are working in NTL, blends are real but they are just ordinary everyday phenomena. They are nothing special, no new theory is needed for them, there is no need for any theory of blending” (Sánchez 2003: 259). Accordingly, the reason there is no need for a new theory is because “blendings are bindings”, and this neuronal notion (binding) is enough to account for the phenomenon. However, Fauconnier and Turner (2002) use the term “binding” all the time, too. Do they mean the same thing by it or something different? So, could you say how you see their views: what is “binding” from a neuroscience point of view and how does it affect blending theory? Is the main task of NTL that of ultimately unifying mind and brain, and hence the complete elimination of this Cartesian dichotomy? TR: To neuroscientists, the “binding problem” is the problem of how the fairly well-understood qualia of experience (i.e. color, shape, motion) come together as a unitary conscious experience – i.e. my experience of the red pen as it moves across the paper as I write these words. Speaking as a cognitive neuroscientist, I can explain how and where perceptual “redness” is instantiated in neural patterns, I can explain where in our cortical circuitry we map the shape of the pen and where we map its motion across the paper, but no one has yet been able to explain how these different patterns are synchronized or bound together to give a unitary conscious experience. The debate comes up because Fauconnier and Turner (2002) have proposed that conceptual blending theory can be extended to be a model of

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how “red” is bound to “pen” in phrases such as “the red pen” that might serve to call up some mental image of it. Without presuming to speak for them, there seem to me to be at least two motives for extending blending theory in this way: First, it highlights that this “binding” operation is linguistic as well as perceptual. While cognitive neuroscientists have largely focused on the “bottom-up” (perceptual to unitary conscious experience) view of the binding problem, one can also ask how a more “top-down” (language to unitary conscious experience to perceptual imagery) view of neural binding could work. Second, this extension could serve to unify blending theory with a problem in neuroscience, providing a possible neural basis for explaining how blending might take place in other, more complex cases (e.g. their “the pope finding it hard to box with a mitre on his head” example). By contrast, in a more “bottom-up” model of language like NTL, linguistic expressions like “the red pen” are simply seen as the natural outcome of how processes of color and objects interact in neural terms. For my own part, I am not happy with either camp’s claims. I am not sure how pragmatically useful it is to think of these “perceptual” blends as equivalent to the neural binding problem – partially because like most problems in the study of consciousness, it remains unsolved and in my opinion its mention is likely to contribute nothing more than a distraction from a focus on unrelated problems that are solvable. Nor do I think that NTL is a very tight neurocomputational model of the underlying neuroanatomy, so I don’t buy the argument that modeling perceptual blends, i.e. solving the binding problem, will just be a natural outcome during the course of modeling metaphor. I can’t ever see any one single notation ever unifying “the mental” and “the neuronal” in general. But we might eventually be able to agree that a particular NTL-successor model is (i) a neurocomputational model of the particular neuroanatomical processes (ii) that underlies a range of linguistic expressions of a particular conceptual metaphor and (iii) how, on a specific run, it can produce a particular conceptual blend. Doing that much would be very impressive, and NTL isn’t really all that far away from doing that. MJ: Saying that Conceptual Blending Theory requires a theory of neural binding is true but not very startling, since, after all, all conceptualization, cognition and reasoning would have to involve neural binding (or how else would we have unified experiences and thoughts). I would simply observe that, if there is no thought without an active brain in an active body en-

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gaging its surroundings, then neural binding strikes me as the most plausible way to think about how various kinds of conceptual blending are possible. If concepts involve patterns of neural activation, then the ways those patterns are connected (i.e. bound together) during a certain temporal window of co-activation will determine how the conceptual blends have the meanings they do. Fauconnier and Turner (2002) do not attempt to give a theory of neural binding as part of their theory of conceptual blends. One of the things that most distinguishes the Neural Theory of Language (NTL) project is that its supporters actually do take seriously the challenge of modeling the neural architectures and dynamic processes that underlie human cognition and language. This is, of course, a monumental undertaking, far beyond the reach of current computational neuroscience. Lakoff, Feldman, Narayanan, Regier, Gallese (2005) and other NTL proponents are under no illusions about the tentative and partial nature of their current proposals. They recognize that they are offering computational models that are going to have serious shortcomings, they recognize that much of what they say is and must be highly speculative (in light of the nascent character of cognitive neuroscience), and they are fully aware that nobody can pretend to have neural reductions of all cognitive phenomena. Yet, the merit of their project is that they have accepted the assignment of actually describing neural processes underlying language. They don't just provide a theory of syntax or semantics or pragmatics and then naively assume that the elements of their theory must somehow have neural mechanisms. They've tried to build their models on recognized neural architectures, and then they refine these models on the basis of research coming out of Cognitive Linguistics. Could we concentrate a little bit more on the Neural Theory of Language (NTL) model? There are some aspects of it that we would like to clarify. Would you say that NTL view is holistic, and thus incompatible with a modular view of the mind? Aren’t there different systems, which work in different ways and interact with each other? TR: This is basically a confusion resulting from misunderstanding what concepts apply at which levels of investigation. There is world of a difference between saying the mind-brain is holistic and saying it is nonmodular. Holism is clearly false if by that word we mean that the entire brain is significantly involved in every local computation. But modularism goes awry because while there is reasonable neuroanatomical support for

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modularity in the neurocomputational modeling of some small scale neural structures, e.g. Marr’s original work on orientation-tuning columns, it is not the case that the brain in general is merely the succession of such isolated structures, each taking as their inputs the output of previous modules. In fact, once you move to the scale of describing the brain at a systems level – spatio-visual, auditory, sensorimotor, object-recognition and so on – there is considerable interconnection between neural systems, even though they are largely localizable to different brain regions. The notion of distinct modules is just simply not useful at this level of scale, unless you purposefully want to abstract away the complexities of those interconnections for the purposes of producing a neurocomputational module of some largescale process. But unlike in the small-scale cases that modularity theory was built on, there is generally no strong neuroanatomical motivation for doing so. This misunderstanding has real consequences even for good work on language. For example, Levinson took modularity so seriously in analyzing Tzeltal body-part prepositions that he assumed that “spatial-primitives” of the visual system would be inaccessible to the language system (cf. Rohrer 2001). However, our position is that language is not a neural system at the same level of analysis as systems such as these. I believe that language and mind use these same cortical subprocesses of these neural systems – just in an off-line, emulative way. When neuroscientists write about the brain’s “semantic system”, they typically mean something at the end of “objectrecognition system”, typically in the anterior temporal cortex, because our prototype example of semantics is object-naming. Naturally, many of them have been pleasantly surprised by my work and that of Hauk, Johnsrude and Pulvermuller (2004) showing that primary and secondary sensorimotor cortical areas respond to linguistic stimuli for body parts. Similar results have been published for hand tools, and we are also getting similar reports of neurological deficits involving body-part naming (Coslett, Shaffran and Schwoebel 2002). From a modularist’s perspective this is terrible: semantics belongs in its black box down in the anterior temporal cortex, not up in motor cortex. Fortunately, however, most neuroscientists are more wedded to the data than to a modularity theory of language. It is my belief that we will ultimately show the same sort of results for syntax. My hunch is that many syntactic relations rely on spatial neural subprocesses found largely in the parietal lobes.

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Let us move back to Lakoff’s views on embodiment. He extensively argued that language is explained directly by our bodily movements/experience, which are given a neuronal explanation. My language about love, for instance, is explained by my physical reactions: I feel a warmth through my body when I meet my beloved ones, my heart beats faster, … and this explains my making sense of sentences such as: You are the sunshine of my life. But there certainly are different levels of “embodiment”: one is of my conscious feelings about love, and another is my non-conscious being. What do you believe to be the relationship between a “sub-conscious” level of being, and a “conscious level”? Aren’t there intermediary levels? TR: Well, I believe that when you consciously hear language such as above, you subconsciously imagine sensations like warmth and so on – to a degree, of course – you typically don’t consciously feel warm just as a result of hearing such language. Similarly, we know that experimenters can measure the activation of low-level visual cortical areas of subjects asked to do visual imagery tasks, though the same doesn’t seem to hold true for low-level auditory areas when subjects imagine auditory phenomena. From my own research, I know that with language tasks we often have to build up the theme of body-part language before we can measure any activation (how much depends in large part on which neurophysiological measurement method is being used). But I think it is important to note that we are just at the beginning of figuring out how to design the right stimuli, how to measure these activations and where exactly to look. I don’t see a need for intermediate level to mediate between our sensations and the neural. We can just have activation below the threshold of consciousness. Of course, it is important to acknowledge that there is a common cultural component underlying what I am saying are the expected neural activations. Most of this work is done on Indo-European speakers in North America and Europe who have highly similar cultural models underlying their conceptual metaphors. A really interesting experiment would compare the neural activations of both westerners and non-westerners reading both non-western cultural conceptual metaphor expressions and western cultural conceptual metaphor expressions. However, we will have to wait for some enterprising person to perform such an experiment to see what differences, if any, could be found and attributed to cultural factors. MJ: I don’t know of anyone who has a completely satisfactory explanation of the relation of the unconscious to conscious processes, but I like Anto-

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nio Damasio’s (1999) attempt to explain the processes by which the body monitors changes in its own state, as the result of ongoing interactions with its surroundings. He says that a moment of core consciousness consists in the feeling awareness of what is happening in your body, as it is affected by both its internal processes and events in the external world. But Damasio doesn’t pretend to have an adequate neural theory of how this works in all cases. Moreover, even if we had a good theory of consciousness, this wouldn’t really address the claims Lakoff and I (and many others) have been making about the unconscious activation of various sensorimotor domains as the basis for different conceptual metaphors. We are seldom, if ever, consciously aware of the neural activation of the sensorimotor source domain of a conceptual metaphor. That is the primary reason why we need the methods of the cognitive sciences to probe these unconscious processes, since we cannot rely merely on phenomenological reports of what we are feeling or thinking. Lakoff does not attempt to ground concepts and language in neurophysiology, but instead he uses an intermediary “computational level” of structured connectionism, X-schemas etc. as implemented in the computer models of Regier (1995), Feldman and Narayanan (2004) and Feldman (2006), among others. What status does, in your opinion, this “computational level” have? If it is a higher-level description of, but otherwise identical with the neurophysiology “beneath” it, isn’t Lakoff a philosophical functionalist – “the software matters rather than the hardware” – despite frequent claims to the contrary? If it is only an “approximation” or “model”, then how can Lakoff claim that NTL really grounds language in neurobiology? TR: The NTL computational level has exactly the status it is defined to have: it is comprised of programming constructs that are mathematically reducible to known neural behaviors. But it is also no more than that: by definition it is not a very tight model of the way any particular neuroanatomical structures perform whatever actions a particular NTL model seeks to model. That’s why NTL typically claims to have a neurally plausible model, not a tight neurocomputational model of what this particular brain region is doing. Furthermore, NTL isn’t philosophical functionalism in its strict sense because in this case the software is being designed with the constraints of the biology in mind, i.e. all constructs are mathematically reducible to known facts about the neurobiology. The claim is never that

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the software matters and the hardware doesn’t. In fact the hardware (or more accurately the neurophysiology) determines what kinds of constructs the software can have. In this sense NTL grounds its ability to comprehend language in the neurobiology. When we look at the details of exactly what constructs are used in one particular NTL model (KARMA or SHRUTI for instance), the degree to which the neurophysiological details constrain the software constructs is often not enough to satisfy someone who wants a more neuroanatomically tight model such as myself, but it is still a starting place. Because I would define the levels of the investigative model in terms of the physical scale that produces the phenomenon to be studied (or modeled), I would further argue that NTL is mistaken to consider computation as a level rather than a method. I would say it this way: NTL models use an adequately neurallyplausible computational method to produce a model of linguistic activity in the brain-where the brain is considered at a fairly high level of investigation where the interaction of neural systems is the focus of investigation. If one wants more detailed models of linguistic activity in the brain at lower levels of investigation, one needs to use constructs which have more direct neurophysiological analogs. As it stands, I think NTL is a really interesting case of bridging machine language efforts and neurocomputational modeling. Closely linked is the issue of representations, which seems to play a role in the cognitive view you advocate, right? Does (human) cognition depend on the use of representations, and if so, what kind of representations? If, on the other hand, one rejects the idea that representations play any (important) role in cognition – as some proponents of embodied cognition such as Maturana and Varela do – how can one account for capacities such as the abilities to plan, imagine, believe, etc.? MJ: We are arguing that the classical Representationalist view of cognition is mistaken, even though it continues to exercise a virtual stranglehold on commonsense and philosophical views of mind. The Representationalist view is that thought involves the mental processing of internal mental entities (called variously, “ideas”, “concepts”, “representations”) that can stand in a relation of intentionality (directedness at or toward) some mindindependent object, person, event or state of affairs. However obvious it might seem that we can entertain ideas (such as dog) that, through some mental function of referring, allow us to pick out which objects in the

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world are dogs, this account is seriously misleading. The problem is twofold: (1) It involves an incipient mental/physical dualism, and (2) it generates an inescapable and insoluble skepticism, since we can never be sure that our inner ideas do actually represent correctly what is “out there” in the world beyond our minds. Consider the fact that there are topographical and topological “maps” in our brains. We now know that there are neural maps in the visual cortices that preserve structure and relations of objects “in the world”. While these might appear to be prime examples of “inner representations of outer realities”, they are not. For an organism that has such visual maps, they just are the structures of its visual experience. The maps don’t re-present anything; rather, they are the neural activations that allow us to experience what we experience and to think what we think. I suspect that we are too easily seduced into the Representationalist view, just because we have the gift of language. Language makes it possible for us to name our concepts, and this tempts us to treat them as if they were mental objects with various properties and relations (like the relation of “referring”). The fact that we can abstract aspects of the ongoing flow of our experience and treat them as general patterns capable of being instantiated in past and future experience need not lead us into Representationalism. The neural account of how this is possible will require accounts of reentrant mapping, feedback loops, binding and other cognitive processes, and nobody has the full story on this yet, but we are taking the first steps in this direction. I do not object to the use of “representation” for any pattern of neural activation, but this can be risky, insofar as it can lead us to mistakenly hypostatize concepts and to reinstate the inner vs. outer ontology of mind. We can even say that our representations have the property of intentionality, as long as we mean by this only that when we attend to some part of the flow of experience and treat it as a generality that transcends its particular present instantiation, then it can “point beyond itself” to aspects of past and future experiences. As abstracted, it can become part of a reasoning process that goes beyond the immediately given. TR: Though its use is rampant in the neurosciences I try hard to avoid the term – although when cognitive neuroscientists like Steve Kosslyn (1994) take the pains to emphasize the term’s roots with hyphenation when explaining how visual images are re-presented to successive visual cortical areas, I think he shows how to rectify this confusion by making the term a little bit more active and dynamic. However, the presentational metaphor

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still suffers from the problem that there is really nothing in neural terms for the re-presentation to be presented to – no homunculus in the brain. That is why I prefer to talk about neural cognition using terms like mapping, maps, image-like wholes and topography/topology preservation (and omission!). It is obviously not the case that the brain has static copies of every image we have ever seen stored in our heads, or I could quote every page I’ve ever read. As Nietzsche (1874) observed, there is real virtue in forgetting. Some of the topographic and topological details drop out in every cortical re-presentation. In fact, our brains learn to select for the parts of the image that are useful for us to survive and flourish. (Similar observations hold for the other perceptual modalities.) I don’t think Maturana and Varela (1980, among others) are vulnerable on this point either. We can dream, imagine, plan, believe and the like because we can use these same brain areas in an emulative and offline manner to re-present future possibilities – to anticipate. In their terms, we are enacting these possibilities as part of the normal process of living, just as when we reach for a tool our neural structures are already forming the hand into the appropriate shape to grasp it. In fact, recent fMRI studies show that premotor and motor areas of the sensorimotor cortex are activated by simply viewing pictures of hand tools (Vingerhoets et al. 2002). So we still need a better account of re-presentation, right? Mind, computers and related issues bring us back to a more precise definition of embodiment, which, according to Ziemke (2003), has been used since the mid-1980s. The author identifies the following notions of embodiment: i) structurally coupled embodiment (which does not require a body), ii) historical embodiment, iii) physical embodiment, iv) organismoid embodiment, and v) organismic embodiment. Ziemke understands that Lakoff’s approach (Ziemke explicitly quotes a passage from Lakoff (1988)) belongs to the fourth type (organismoid embodiment), which supports the idea that cognition “might be limited to organism-like bodies”, e.g. that human-like cognition requires a human-like or humanoid body with, e.g. eyes, hands, legs, etc., and the (neural) mechanisms for their control and coordination. In contrast, the fifth type of embodiment, i.e. organismic embodiment, differs from organismoid because it holds that cognition is limited to organisms, i.e. living bodies. “According to this view, there are crucial differences between living organisms, which are autonomous and autopoietic, and man-made machines, which are heteronomous and allopoietic” (Ziemke 2003: 1308). This classification corresponds roughly to

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that given in the Chrisley and Ziemke (2002) paper published in the Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science). First, do you think that Lakoff’s NTL fits into the organismoid notion of embodiment? TR: More or less. In my opinion, current versions of NTL are probably most compatible with organismoid embodiment as Ziemke’s categorization system cleaves the subject. However, allow me to point out that Ziemke’s categorization system for embodiment is drawn with respect to issues in cognitive robotics. That is not the only pragmatically useful way to cleave embodiment theory – for example, I use the more biologically-based approach common within cognitive neuroscience to discuss different approaches to embodiment on the basis of the physical size of the phenomena which produce them, as well as giving a purely descriptive linguistic accounting of the kinds of uses of the terms that exist within the literature on embodiment (Rohrer BLM volume 1). Even more importantly, NTL wasn’t explicitly conceived in terms of robotics, but as a way to bridge linguistic theory, neural behavior and neurocomputational modeling by way of solving difficult problems in machine language learning. That’s a significant difference from Brooks and Stein’s (1994) Cog proposal for a humanoid robot, for instance. In fact, there’s nothing vaguely humanoid about the physical instantiation of any of the current NTL models. The humanoid aspect is coded into how the models are built and what they model. But these models are very partial; they model only limited parts of cognition and language. In principle, could a vast collection of NTL models similar to current ones, operating together model all of human cognition and thought? I think that even more important than attaching a body to them will be the practical problems engendered by having the wrong physical architecture – silicon – will serve to limit that problem long before it could be accomplished. We have engineered silicon in the image of vacuum tubes to embody an all-ornothing logic, and then we run analog simulations on top of it. I think you’ll need a more flexible medium – one that self-organizes and is error tolerant. Are you envisaging the possibility that the living body is not a necessary requirement for providing agents, with meaning, consciousness? So we would get the same human mind if we put NTL models into humanoid robots and “raise” them like children?

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TR: Isn’t this a false dichotomy? I see that you are trying to raise what you see as the key difference between organismoid and organismic embodiment – whether or not the living flesh is necessary for meaning and consciousness like ours. But if an NTL robot were to succeed on the grandiose scale you outline, it would for all practical purposes have a body – one whose NTL organization was dictated by the human neurophysiology, one whose humanoid robotic body was determined by developing sensors and motors that are dictated by how human physiology interacts with the physical environment, and one whose cognition was enculturated from birth in a human socio-cultural world. Those are the three tenets of embodiment in cognitive linguistics: the physiological and neurophysiological body, the interactive body, and socially and culturally embedded body. So such a grandiose success would then have a body. But would the grandiose success be fleshy (as in organismic)? Well, matter matters. In order to have cognition like ours, I think that it is a necessary requirement to have a medium – a collection of matter – that is formally organized quite similarly to ours. Our usual idea of what that entails is at minimum a living body, where living is defined in terms of autopoiesis. Now, if there were just one, it would be hard to see how it could reproduce. But given enough of them to make a cultural milieu, then perhaps they could. However, I think it may be less important here that something be capable of self-reproduction than self-organization, and I would certainly maintain that we humans have created some interesting selforganizing machines. Unfortunately we are more apt at creating selforganizing machines which emulate how crayfish swim (Rowat and Selverston 1997) than machines which can emulate human cognition and language. I think NTL is a one small step on the road to getting at that latter set of problems. But to accomplish the grandiose dream one probably would have to rethink the medium as well. Part of that would involve simply putting NTL in touch with a humanoid body, while another part would involve re-engineering how the silicon has been optimized – or perhaps rethinking whether silicon is the optimal substrate to solve these sorts of problem. Couldn’t it be artificial, and yet still fleshy? I guess so, but then the notion of body is too restricted, isn’t it? It is just flesh, but that is not really the point, is it? TR: Believe me, NTL is still a long way from such grandiose success. It doesn’t even work that much like the neurophysiology yet. As a counter-

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point, consider that the Darwin II robot at Edelman’s Neurosciences Institute is both much more neurophysiologically sophisticated and yet doesn’t do very much at all yet that we would think of as human cognition – certainly not language. Aren’t you reduplicating the dichotomy between mind and brain (mind being software that can run on different hardwares)? TR: No. I don’t buy the definition of artificial intelligence as mind equals software, brain equals hardware. I would instead argue that an artificial intelligence simply means that we have imbued something with some sort of patterns that we can recognize as having cognitive processes close to our own – as Marvin Minsky (1965) puts it, the problem is that no one is even remotely close to coming up with an AI with whom we can talk. If anyone were to build such an artificial intelligence, it would be intelligent in part because it would have a certain kind of physicality – one that we could interact with. (A nanorobot won’t cut it on this definition – just the wrong physical size.) In my view the hardware (the robot body and brain) would be as much a part of the intelligence as the programming (the model). Another way to think of this view of the possibility of artificial intelligence comes out of how I think of work in cognitive anthropology by researchers like Ed Hutchins (1995). Consider a watch as an example of an intelligent cognitive artifact. We certainly interact with them cognitively – they embody very useful patterns to us. A good one at least is pretty much self-organizing – we don’t have to constantly reset it. Moreover, it is artificial – not even William Paley (1802 [1986]) would dispute that. To me, what most people mean by artificial intelligence is nothing more than an extension of the class of intelligent cognitive artifacts which are at least minimally self-organizing – the wristwatch, the compass, the gyroscope. Such an artificial intelligence would just be much more self-organizing and more sophisticated than the wristwatch. And perhaps even that much more useful. Putting aside the issue of the creation of artificial bodies, one still faces the problem of how to bring together mind (and subjective experience) and brain. Violi (2003: 217), for instance, claims that the reduction of embodiment to the brain no longer allows us to cope with the phenomenological realities of perspective and subjectivity. She concludes her paper with these remarks: “We have a deeply paradoxical chiasmus: on the one hand,

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there is a theory of embodiment without the subject, on the other a theory of the subject without a body. To finally achieve a bringing together of body and subject might well be the most challenging goal of all for a cognitive semiotics to [have].” To what extent do you agree with this conclusion? MJ: Violi is absolutely correct that “reduction of embodiment to the brain” is reductivist and leaves out key aspects of human experience. That is why Lakoff and I (1999) have insisted on the necessity of multiple levels of embodiment, and correlatively, multiple levels of explanation in cognitive science and philosophy. As we have already seen above, “the body” is not just the brain, it is not just the physical body, and it is not just the organism-environment coupling. It is all of these, and probably more. The phrase that Lakoff and I repeatedly use to capture this richer sense of embodiment is something like “a brain, in a living body, in a changing environment that is at once physical, social, cultural, economic, religious, gendered, etc.”. I believe that second-generation cognitive science (with its attendant nonreductivist philosophical orientation) is trying to overcome the chiasmus of which Violi speaks, where we have found ourselves with a “theory of embodiment without the subject” and a “theory of the subject without a body”. The most philosophically sophisticated cognitive neuroscientists – people like Antonio Damasio and Gerald Edelman – would never, ever say that you are your brain. They recognize that we need the combined dialogue of neuroscience, cognitive and developmental psychology, phenomenology, Pragmatist views of mind and language, cognitive anthropology and other disciplines, if we are to have a realistic view of what it means to be a human person. This cannot be an easy task, as anyone knows who has ever tried to move among the very different methods, vocabularies and assumptions of even the most open-minded versions of these different approaches. But we can’t, or shouldn’t, give up, just because it is so difficult and frustrating. We have to remember that each of our little attempts to make sense of human cognition, identity and values is necessarily perspectival, highly limited, oversimplified and likely to be supplanted at some future time. Once we realize this, one of our biggest errors would be not to listen to voices that remind us of how much our precious stories leave out about what it means to be human. In the same vein, it is common to define being a human by “intentionality” (see Davidson (1980, among others), Searle (1979, 1980), among others).

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We are meaningful organisms because we have intentionality. Artificial systems lack this property (they also lack qualia; see interview with Sánchez García (2003)) and this is the reason why they are necessarily meaningless. Is intentionality derived from our bodies? If so, in what sense? Would it be possible to build a robot with intentions? Imagine, for instance, that intentionality is fully derived from our bodily experiences and that we are able to trace all the way from body to intention and to reduplicate this in a machine. (Though this seems to be science fiction, it is a hypothesis seriously entertained by Zlatev (2001).)1 MJ: I don’t want to deny that so-called “intentionality” is one of the great glories of humanity. Our human ability to go beyond our present situation by using symbols and signs that have meaning has made possible our most impressive scientific, social, cultural and spiritual achievements. But I’m convinced that this claim is overblown, since certain other animals surely have intentionality. And I’m especially distressed by the impoverished and limited ways in which intentionality has been traditionally understood in philosophy. The main problem, as I see it, is that intentionality has been defined in terms of the human capacity for processing concepts and propositional content. But, as Paul Churchland and others have been arguing for many years now, on the basis of cognitive science and neuroscience, it is just false that human meaning and thought are essentially propositional and linguaform. We’ve mistakenly assumed that the fact that our capacity for language distinguishes our species entails the claim that all thought must have the form of linguistic statements. As Damasio (1999) shows, much of our thinking doesn’t rely on propositions or anything like them. It works via what he calls “images”, which are not just visual quasi-pictures, but include all sensory modalities, motor programs and patterns of action that are meaningful to an organism. Much of this cognition, of course, takes place beneath the level of conscious awareness and doesn’t consist in proposition crunching. It also involves qualities, feelings and emotions. I would argue that we can still use the term “intentionality” for all of these various dimensions of meaning and thought, just because they all can involve structures that have some kind of directed character that points beyond themselves. That is, an image schema (e.g., Source-Path-Goal or Container) has meaning for us by virtue of the ways it leads to possible inferences, plans for future action or anticipated future experiences. The 1. Zlatev does not hold this hypothesis as viable anymore. See Zlatev (2003).

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image schema points beyond itself, as it is instantiated here and now in this present experience, to other possible experiences. And even emotional responses have intentionality, since emotions are part of our monitoring of how it is going with our bodily states in relation to our flourishing. Emotions involve evaluations of our situation and are part of our acting in response to changes in our internal and external milieu. On our account, then, intentionality is not a mysterious property of disembodied mind, but is instead simply a consequence of the fact that we are directed, interested, evaluative organisms in ongoing interaction with our environment. We can select aspects of our experience that have a general character and use them, together with other such abstractions, to think about the nature and possibilities of our experience. The patterns of these interactions can be described as “about” aspects of our experience, insofar as their significance can transcend the confines of our present concrete experience and make it possible for us to gather the meaning of our experience, to evaluate and to plan actions. You mentioned that the role of intentionality, though important for human developments in various aspects, cannot characterize human beings, since other animals have it too. That leads us to the issue of the discontinuity between human and non-human animals. According to Anderson (2003), a central tenet in contemporary Cognitive Science is the critique of the Cartesian discontinuity between humans and animals. But without positing some sort of discontinuity isn’t it difficult to understand why only human beings have language, in the sense of a non-ostensively learned creative system? MJ: Once again, we have here a claim that has a kernel of truth, but that is vastly overblown. Nobody could reasonably deny that language (which John Dewey (1925 [1981]) called “the tool of tools”) is one of the keys to what distinguishes humans from other animals. However, you can maintain this truism without insisting that language marks the Great Ontological Divide that places humans a little lower than the angels and quite a bit above the so-called brutes. The use of words to coordinate our actions, to plan, to bind us into communities, to express our feelings, to develop knowledge, and to create new meaning is a grand and wondrous accomplishment. Let us remember, though, that language is not the sole repository of human meaning, conceptualization and thought. Work in the cognitive

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sciences has revealed the vast territories of meaning-making that are embodied and non-linguistic, and it has shown some of the ways that the linguistic is grounded in the non-linguistic. Some of these ways we make meaning are ways we share with other animals. But, once we developed spoken and then written language, we so vastly increased our capacity for abstract thought that we began to far outstrip our oxen, our dogs and our cats (well, maybe) in our ability to understand and control aspects of our environment. Much of Cognitive Linguistics is devoted to showing how language is tied to embodied processes of perception and action that are already meaningful without language. This is not to deny that the emergence of language often comes later to shape our pre-linguistic experience of meaning. TR: You know, I’ve often thought that I would like to be able to run as fast as a cheetah, but I can’t. Discontinuities in evolution are pretty standard fare. Evolution isn’t always generous in her distribution of the best survival strategies, and even her unique innovations don’t always work out for the best either. There are many unique abilities which are part of our basis for distinguishing organisms from one another; why should human language be so different from them? Because humans are so special, so unique, so complex, or at the endpoint of the evolutionary process? And as the novelist Kurt Vonnegut (1985) asked in Galapagos, who is to tell whether evolution’s grand experiment in big-brained, talking chimpanzees will be successful? Although we may seem to be at the moment, drowning in one’s success remains always a possibility. In short, human language and reason are no more radically discontinuous than the innovations of other animals; consequentially it is not difficult to understand why we have them and they don’t. Our ancestors simply happened upon a series of evolutionary innovations which worked so well we managed to kill off all of our closest competitor species (see Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel), providing an illusion of evolutionary discontinuity. So, you both agree that the discontinuity claim is not totally false. The point is that language seems to introduce something (qualitatively) new in primate cognition, for instance symbolicity (arbitrariness), systematicity, hierarchical structure, narrative, extensive self-consciousness. Aren’t they (largely) novel developments in Homo Sapiens, and doesn’t their emergence depend on human language?

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MJ: Everybody recognizes that, once you have language, you vastly increase your cognitive resources, because you can transcend the present moment in thought and action. Abstraction lets you go beyond the presently given, back to what has come before, and forward toward what may come (and over which you might exert some influence). So, clearly, language introduces something qualitatively and quantitatively different that sets humans apart from higher primates and other animals. Maybe we can teach bonobos to use signs to convey meaning, but the fact that it takes us years to do this, and with only modest results, makes it plausible to think that there is something special about humans. However, we should not think that one of the things that distinguishes human language is the so-called “arbitrariness of the sign”. Although the use of a particular word (sign) for a concept might be mostly (but not entirely) arbitrary, there is nothing arbitrary about meaning and conceptual structure. To cite again the research from Cognitive Linguistics, our meaning structures are grounded in embodied experience, which highly constrains what can be meaningful and how it is meaningful. This extends even to notions of form and syntax, which appear to be tied to the nature of our embodied experience and are not the result of cognitive modules. The task for Embodied Cognition theory is to explain the growth of all forms of human symbolic interaction (including language, music, ritual practice, architecture, visual art, dance and on and on) as emerging from ever increasing complexity within the organism. As Dewey put it, increased complexity of functions can result in qualitative changes for the organism, from the emerging possibility of locomotion, to the capacity for emotional response, all the way up to the ability to make abstract inferences. An important part of this emergentist story will involve neuroscience, since we will have to discover how ever more complex functions can develop through neural binding and reentrant loops. Another vexed question is the relation between concepts/categories and experience. The best account for the relationship between concepts, categories and experience in CL is provided in Philosophy in the Flesh (1999). There Lakoff/Johnson claim that categories are formed as part of our experience; they are not separate from it. They also say that concepts “are neural structures that allow us to mentally characterize our categories and reason about them” (1999: 19). Thought prototypes are not categories, but the most salient member of them, they are also neural structures that permit inferences to be carried out about categories. Similarly, categories are

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not out there in the world, but rather come about because of the way one ensemble of neurons groups together input patterns and passes them to the next ensemble. Could you clarify how, according to Lakoff/Johnson, linguistic meanings relate to neurally stored concepts (and prototypes)? And, at the same time, what the relation is between neurally stored concepts and gestalts? MJ: In your formulation of the question, you have given a very nice summary of how categories are not something separate from experience. Concepts are patterns of neural activation, and categories are concepts that define the general kinds of things that populate our experience. As such, categories are the stable neural activation patterns that provide the basic structure of our shared experience. They constitute distinctions that we, as a developing species, have found to be important to pursuing our needs, interests, values and goals. They are not absolute structures written indelibly into the nature of Being; rather, they are the cuts and demarcations in our shared experience that we have found it most useful to make. Many (most) of them are not going to change evolutionarily, because some parts of our bodies and some dimensions of our environments aren’t likely to change (such as our existing within a gravitational field, or our needing nourishment, or our being erotically attracted to certain people). They could change, in some imaginable, though unlikely, future scenario, but their stability leads us to treat them as fixed givens (which has, unfortunately, led to a mistaken ontology of the world as fixed). You next raise the question of how “linguistic meanings relate to neurally stored concepts”. Well, I am inclined to say that linguistic meanings are those communally shared neuronally-realized concepts, which are gestalts, or unified patterns. When I hear or read the word “dog”, this “turns on” a fairly complex set of neural activation patterns that would include whatever goes into processing the actual sound of the word, or its written form, plus a large array of connections called up by that word – all the related concepts that form a what Fillmore calls a “semantic field” or “frame”. Some parts of this complicated network are going to be more strongly activated, such as animal, four-legged, furry and domesticated, as compared with more weakly activated patterns like “wild cat” and “man’s best friend”. There will, of course, be associated images (with their distinctive neural patterns), feelings, emotions and possible metaphorical extensions connected with this concept as part of its semantics.

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Both of you have emphasized that embodiment embodies our cultural life. Thus concepts are not solely physical. In fact in your answer the concept of dog is culturally oriented, being man’s best friend, for instance. But this property is ascribed a less prominent role, as if we first learned what really matters, and then culture. Could you elaborate on the issue of what role culture plays in our cognition. MJ: One of the more frequent criticisms leveled against Lakoff and me is that we don’t have a place for culture in our account of cognition and meaning, since we locate meaning in the body. As I have tried to indicate above, meaning is located in the complex, dynamic arc of interactions that includes brains, bodies, environments and cultural artifacts and institutions. A culture involves various symbols, institutions, shared practices, rituals, values and traditions. Cultures can appear to have an existence independent of particular people, since so many aspects of culture transcend the living and dying of individuals. But I want to suggest that culture exists only as enacted by individuals and groups over time. And this enactment requires that people take up the practices characteristic of a culture, that they utilize and interpret its symbols, and that they carry the culture forward in their lives. Buildings, written languages, paintings, sculptures, musical works, scientific theories, technical discoveries, machines, tools, clothing and so forth do not constitute a culture. People have to appropriate these objective structures and live by means of them, in order to realize culture. So, culture exists in the interaction, in the living out of meaning, and in the transformation of experience via what are known as “cultural resources”. As soon as we start to investigate how these cultural resources (objective and observer-independent as they might be) shape our lives and our understanding, then we are back in the domain of studying human understanding and cognition. We are back in the realm of embodied cognition, and we can utilize the resources of Cognitive Linguistics and other parts of cognitive science to study how we think, feel and act. These methods and tools will shed light on how cultural artifacts, institutions and practices can do what they do to shape our existence. What you just said seems to be at the central core of the cognitive research program since its very beginning, as can be seen from the following assertion by Lakoff and Johnson which has been cited by many investigators in the field:

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In other words, what we call “direct physical experience” is never merely a matter of having a body of a certain sort; rather, every experience takes place within a vast background of cultural presuppositions. It can be misleading, therefore, to speak of direct physical experience as though there were some core of immediate experience which we then “interpret” in terms of our conceptual system. Cultural assumptions, values and attitudes are not a conceptual overlay which we may or may not place upon experience as we choose. It would be more correct to say that all experiences is cultural through and through, that we experience our “world” in such a way that our culture is already present in the very experience itself (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 57) But it is still not quite clear how culture contributes… MJ: In light of what I’ve just said in answering the previous question, I hope it is clear in what sense “experience is cultural through and through”. The vast array of cultural symbols and ways of being and doing are not added onto a culture-free experience. Young infants are probably good examples of pre-cultural creatures, but, of course, from the moment of birth they are being en-culturated or cultivated in the ways of being a member of a particular culture. Perhaps they start with their animal ways of communicating, but they gradually learn to grasp the meaning of a situation and to interact with other people via cultural practices, using cultural resources, such as language. Lorraine Brundige, in her doctoral dissertation on Swampy Cree Philosophy (2004), explains how the Swampy Cree (of southern central Canada) understand their world via the enactment of very specific kinds of narratives that presuppose quite specific views of agency and causation that are not universally shared by some other cultures. Brundige shows, for example, how the Cree make sense of their identity and define their values relative to the land they inhabit, so much so that they will proclaim, “We are the land”. I don’t think that Swampy Cree babies come into their world knowing this and having it as part of their selfunderstanding, since they don’t even have a well-developed selfunderstanding in the early months of life. But what I want to say is that, as they progressively acquire this cultural self-understanding, it is not merely an “add-on”, not merely an externality imposed on the child’s intrinsic nature. The intrinsic vs. extrinsic dichotomy is not apt here. The Swampy Cree child has myriad bodily interactions with their homeland – its vegetation, water, light, geography, weather, animals – that becomes part of the meaning of “We are the land”, for that child. The child doesn’t have to

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know this consciously in order to live it. So, to say that experience is cultural through and through is to refuse to accept any rigid inner/outer, intrinsic/extrinsic, body/culture, individual/social dichotomy. Let me push this question a little further. Take the notion of a container, which Lakoff/Johnson claim is one of the most pervasive bodily linked image schemata we have. However, this may not be universal, or homogeneous, since the experience of drinking or eating something may not be the same as pouring or putting something into a box, or the same as entering a house or a building. So it appears that there are different schemas for container, and they differ in substantial ways: force-dynamics, causality. Frank (2003) suggests that there is reason to believe that at least in Basque the body is not conceptualized as a container and, consequently, that the CONTAINER/CONTAINED spatial image schemata is not as prominent as in English. In short, in contrast to the Western mindset, in the Basque ontology there is no fundamental ontological separation of “mind” and “body” to begin with and, hence, to be overcome. Others have suggested that the prevalence of CONTAINER/CONTAINED could be linked to the dominant role played by “form” and “matter” in Western thought. Could you expand the way you understand the relation between our (embodied) cognition, our bodies and our socio-cultural embodiment? TR: Although I don’t know Basque, I find it unlikely that they would lack a container schema altogether. What about the physical interactional level of embodiment? Surely the Basque people drink out of cups and glasses, use bottles, carry water in buckets and the like. Just because the container schema doesn’t map onto the skin boundary of body doesn’t mean they don’t have the schema. And with respect to ingestion and excretion, I would expect they must have a sense of it in terms of their physiology as well – though it might not be one which is elaborated on linguistically. This all within the realm of possible sociocultural variation, though it is perhaps surprisingly different – or not so surprising considering how unique a language Basque is. I see the socio-cultural, the physical interactional and the physiological all as important elements in embodiment theory. What Frank (2003) meant is that the container/contained image schema isn’t nearly as prominent in Basque as it is in English, for instance. The body/mind dichotomy is far less obvious, if there is any at all. Thus, perhaps the way the body is understood in Basque might also be reflected in the fact that the word in Basque that would translate as “thought”, con-

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cretely, gogo, is already embodied, i.e. it is conceptualized in a way that would make Damasio proud, with the bodily sensation aspects internal to the concept – whereas in English thoughts are generally considered to be “mental” rather than bodily informed. At www.Metaphoric.de/04/frank. pdf the reader may find a deeper description of this aspect of Basque language. Thank you very much for this opportunity to get both of you together in elaborating the notion of embodiment. It made clear that this notion must not be misunderstood as advocating physicalism or some sort of narrow Embodied Realism. The very complexity of the matter – since embodiment encompasses various levels of realization and scholars have to tie together various levels of investigation – explains the difficulties the cognitive sciences still face in addressing issues as consciousness, the general architecture of mind, the place of culture in embodiment, etc. Our hope is that this interview made clear that there is still a lot to be done, a lot to be understood, and probably a lot to be re-done, and corrected, as it is always the case in science. References Anderson, Michael 2003 Embodied cognition: A field guide. Artificial Intelligence 149 (1): 91–130. Brooks, Rodney A. and Lynn Andrea Stein 1994 Building brains from bodies. Autonomous Robots 1 (1): 7–25. Brundige, Lorraine 1995 tansi taisinisitohtamáhk kitaskino: Cre Philosophy awa kagáshkyácimowin (translation: how we understand our world: Cree philosophy and history). PhD Dissertation. University of Oregon. Chomsky, Noam 2000 New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chrisley, Ronald and Tom Ziemke 2002 Embodiment. Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, 1102–1108. Macmillan Publishers. Churchland, Paul 2002 Inner and outer space: The new epistemology. In: Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 76 (2): 25–48. American Philosophical Association.

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Clark, Andy 1999 Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again. Cambridge: MIT Press. Coslett H. Branch, Eleanor M. Saffran and John Schwoebel 2002 Knowledge of the human body: A distinct semantic domain. Neurology 59: 357–363. Damasio, Antonio R. 1999 The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace. Davidson, Donald 1980 Mental events. Reprinted in Davidson, Donald [2001], Essays on Actions and Events, 206–224. Oxford: Claredon Press. Dewey, John 1981 Experience and Nature. In: Jo Ann Boydston (ed.), John Dewey: The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953. Vol. 1. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Original version 1925. Diamond, Jared 1997 Guns, Germs and Steel. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Edelman, Gerald M. 1992 Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of Mind. New York: Basic Books. Edelman, Gerald M. and Giulio Tononi 2000 A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination. New York: Basic Books. Fauconnier, Giles and Mark Turner 2002 The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. Feldman, Jerome A. 2006 From Molecule to Metaphor: A Neural Theory of Language. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Feldman, Jerome A. and Narayanan, Srini 2004 Embodied meaning in a neural theory of language. Brain and Language 89: 385–392. Frank, Roslyn M. 2003 Shifting identities: The metaphorics of nature-culture in Western and Basque models of self. metaphorik.de 4: 66–96. http://www.meta phorik.de/04/frank.pdf Gallese, Vittorio 2005 Embodied simulation: from neurons to phenomenal experience. Phenomenology and Cognitive Sciences 4: 23–48.

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Hauk, Olaf, Ingrid Johnsrude and Friedmann Pulvermüller 2004 Somatotopic representation of action words in human motor and premotor cortex. Neuron 41 (2): 301–307. Hutchins, Edwin 1995 Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kosslyn, Steven 1994 Image and Brain: The Resolution of the Imagery Debate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lakoff, George 1988 Cognitive Semantics. In: Umberto Eco, Marco Santambrogio and Patrizia Violi (eds.), Meaning and Mental Representations, 119–154. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson 1980 Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. 1999 Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. Maturana, Humberto R. and Francisco Varela 1980 Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Boston: D. Reidel Publishing House. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1994 Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Original version 1962. Minsky, Marvin Lee 1965 Matter, Mind and Models. Cambridge: MIT Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich 1874 On the use and abuse of history for life. In: Daniel Breazeale, Karl Ameriks and Desmond M. Clarke (eds.), Nietzsche: Untimely Meditations, 57–124. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Original edition 1874. Paley, William 1986 Natural Theology: Or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature. Charlottesville, VA: Lincoln-Rembrandt Publishing. 12th edition. Original edition 1802. Regier, Terry 1995 The Human Semantic Potential. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press at Berkeley. Rohrer, Tim 2001 Pragmatism, ideology and embodiment: William James and the philosophical foundations of cognitive linguistics. In: René Dirven, Bruce Hawkins and Esra Sandikcioglu (eds.), Language and Ideol-

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ogy: Cognitive Theoretic Approaches. Volume 1, 49–91. Philadelphia/Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Rowat, Peter and Allen Selverston 1997 Oscillatory mechanisms in pairs of neurons connected with fast inhibitory synapses. J. Computational Neuroscience 4: 103–127. Sánchez García, Jesús 2003 Language and cognition: George Lakoff on some internal and external complexities. An interview. In: Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza (ed.), Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 1: 233–267. Searle, John 1979 Intentionality and the use of language. In: Avishai Margalit (ed.), Meaning and Use, 181–87. Dordrecht: Reidel. 1980 Minds, brains and programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (3): 417–457. Vingerhoets, Guy, Floris P. de Lange, Peter Vandemaele, Karel Deblaere and Erik Achten 2002 Motor imagery in mental rotation: An FMRI study. Neuroimage 17: 1623–1633. Violi, Patrizia 2003 Embodiment at the crossroads between cognition and semiosis. Recherches en Communication 19: 199–217. Vonnegut, Kurt 1985 Galapagos: A Novel. New York: Delacourte Press/Seymour Lawrence. Wilson, Margaret 2002 Six views of embodied cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 9 (4): 625–636. Ziemke, Tom 2003 What’s that thing called embodiment? In: Richard Alterman and David Kirsh (eds.). Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 1305–1310. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Zlatev, Jordan 2001 The epigenesis of meaning in human beings, and possibly in robots. Minds and Machines 11 (2): 155–195. http://www.lucs.lu.se/People/ Jordan.Zlatev/Papers/Epigenesis.pdf

Beyond the body: Towards a full embodied semiosis Patrizia Violi

Abstract The notion of embodiment has become very prevalent in current research in a number of disciplines associated with cognitive science such as philosophy, computer science, psychology, linguistics and semiotics. However, there is no unified theory of embodiment, only many different uses of the term, each presupposing different assumptions and conceptual frameworks. This paper reviews and discusses several of these theories, and the different conceptions of body each implies. It is claimed that for a fully embodied semiosis, able to account for the role body plays in our processes of giving meaning to experience, we will need to overcome static, biological conceptions of the body, and open up to a phenomenological understanding of it. This will imply taking into account crucial components of embodied experience not always accounted for within cognitive approaches so far, namely emotion, affect, subjectivity and intersubjectivity. To fully understand the role of the body in meaning-making processes, we will then have to, so to speak, go beyond the body itself. Keywords: affect, constructivist perspective, emotion, enunciation, experience, intersubjectivity, Merleau-Ponty, Peirce, phenomenology, semiosis, Semiotics, situated meaning, subject, subjectivity.

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Body is not enough: the semiotic body

The notions of body and embodiment have become more and more prevalent over the last 20 years, in a number of disciplines associated with cognitive science such as philosophy, computer science, psychology, linguistics. Today, the centrality of the body in human cognition, meaning-making and experience is broadly acknowledged and this has provoked a huge quantity of research in this general area throughout a wide range of scientific domains.

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This is certainly a more than welcome shift in our traditional Western research paradigm, since it can help free us from the old, seemingly unresolvable dualisms between body and mind, between the internal world of immaterial concepts and thoughts and the external world of objectivist reality. However, the present widespread use of the notions of body and embodiment across different fields and with different meanings makes it particularly important to develop a better understanding and clarification of these two notions, beginning with a rethinking of the first one, “body” which sometimes appears to be, paradoxically, the most misleading. Body is often taken as a “natural” concept, and one which does not need any further elaboration. Apparently body is something easily accessible, objective and physically defined. The body seems to be “there”, possessing an immediate self-evidencing character which does not need to be explained. But this is not the case. The body is not a self evident concept, but the result of the various discourses that construct it. If the phenomenological experience of the body can appear an immediate one, the concept of “body” certainly does not. Rather, it appears to be seen in terms of the construals made of it within any given disciplinary perspective. In other words, the various meanings attributed to the notion of body are the sum of the various effects on its sense of the different disciplines as they investigate and define it. The body as described by neurosciences is not the same body as the one described by psychonanalysis, or by experimental psychology, and so on. All these different “bodies” are not reducible to one another; on the contrary they produce a quite “heteroclitic” object, not very different from how language appeared to be when Saussure first started describing it. Many of the differences in the use of the very word “embodiment” that I will discuss in this paper depend on the different discourses that construct “body” in their respective ways as an object of research. So, the first point to be made here is that there is no such thing as a body “in itself”, naively taken as a given, immediate object of inquiry. Body cannot be described outside of the different discoursive practices that define it: to forget this implies the risk of hypostatising the body, as if it were endowed with an inherent essence, independent of the different practices, discourses and cultures that shape it. No “hard” science can escape from this paradox: even the the body as it is described by the most sophisticated technologies – radiography, magnetic resonance imaging and spectroscopy, etc. – is not a more basic level of description that reaches some

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more essential hypothetical “structure” of the body, but just another way of representing it. Even the body as studied in medicine is a construal, so much so that different medical practices in different cultures construe as many different bodies as there are cultures: the “Western” body studied in our medical tradition is not the same as the body mapped by Chinese acupuncture. This does not mean a denial of the very exsistence of bodies as material entities, but rather, within a radical constructivist perspective, one which would have appealed to Peirce, to recognize that we can only reach these bodies through different practices and discourses, i.e. through semiosis. “The” body in such a perspective becomes a kind of unreacheable Dynamic Object, to use Peirce’s terminology, only approachable through a series of partial descriptions, depending on the particular perspective or disciplinary approach we decide to take. Such descriptions, which we can consider as forming part of an open set of Immediate Objects in Peirce’s sense, will not necessarily converge to form a completely homogeneous picture. Rather they may continue to remain highly divergent as, for example, in the case of the phenomenological body we perceive proprioceptively, and the body as it appears to us on the basis of the results of a laboratory experiment. Body is, then, a semiotic construal, and this remains the case even when we attempt to describe its more basic, material levels of organization, such as neurons or brain synapses, which are certainly “real”, but are not the body. If we miss this point we risk a curious paradox, which could be defined as “embodiment without the body”. To understand the role the body plays in processes of producing and understanding meaning, i.e. in semiosis, we need much more than this. In what follows I will discuss the issue of embodiment from a semiotic perspective, starting with a (very brief) look at some of the main contributions to be found in this theoretical field, then going on to review some of the different forms that embodiment has taken in cognitive science, and concluding with a look at what I believe still remains to be investigated. That the body plays a major role in semiosis is not a total novelty in semiotic quarters. Semiotics, like all the other disciplines already mentioned, has in its recent developments begun to concern itself more and more with issues related to the body, and semiotic investigations have also been started into a related set of problems connected with the role that feelings, emotions, and sensory and perceptual elements play in meaning making processes – in a word: the embodied dimensions of meaning. If such a “corporeal turn” is only quite recent in the post structuralist tradi-

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tion that gave birth to contemporary generative and narrative semiotics, this is not the case for the other main tradition in semiotics, i.e. interpretative semiotics, as it is commonly referred to today, which may be traced back to the work of the pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. This is not the place to enter into an in depth discussion of the complex philosophical approach advocated by Peirce; it will suffice here to mention just a few points that are relevant for our present purposes. Peirce is often remembered mainly for his cognitive semiotics, and for his important contributions to the logic of abductive reasoning. However I believe that in his phenomenology, which is perhaps less well known than his logic, an important theory of the role of the body in semiosis and a very innovative intuition regarding the nature of the body-mind relation can be found. Although Peirce does not thematize in an explicit way the role of the body in semiosis, it is quite evident that for him, the body plays an important role: it would be enough to consider that at the very basis of the semiotic processes that enable us to make sense of the world there is, for Peirce, perception with its bodily based inferential processes. Perception, for Peirce, far from being an automatic record of external reality, is a highly constructive process, which requires exactly the same inferential and abductive devices as abstract forms of reasoning do, while being rooted firmly in the basic physiological functioning of our bodies. Therefore, semiosis begins in the body and in its perceptive and proprioceptive processes. But this is not the only hint of embodiment we can find in Peirce’s semiotics. Even more interesting is his theory of interpretants with its implications of a potentially endless process of sign production and interpretation that gives rise to meaning and sense. For Peirce all interpretation implies an interpretant, which is always a sign, produced from a first, preceding sign, as its effect. According to Peirce, there are several kinds of interpretants and more than one classification of these; interestingly enough the first two levels of interpretation, before arriving at the level of logical interpretant, which is the cognitive level of concepts, are the emotional and the energetic interpretants. The first is concerned with the emotions signs evoke in us, the second with the muscular bodily reactions they evoke. Now, all these three levels of interpretants remain active during the ongoing semiotic process, and this means that even in more cognitively oriented tasks, such as abstract reasoning, emotions and bodily reactions are always involved, although with different degrees of relevance with regard to the specific task and situation in hand.

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More generally speaking, Peirce does not conceive the mind as something qualitatively different from the body or other forms of matter: there exists a fundamental continuity (referred to in his terminology as “synechism”) between these, since both share some natural common characteristics, as we can see from the following citation: We ought to suppose a continuity between the characters of mind and matter, so that matter should be nothing but mind that had such indurated habits as to cause it to act with a peculiarily high degree of mechanical regularity or routine[...]. This hypothesis might be called materialistic, since it attributed to mind one of the recognized properties of matter, extension, and attributes to all matter a certain excessively low degree of feeling, together with a certain power of taking habits. (CP 6.277)

In this way body, mind and the world are not only connected, but fundamentally interdependent of one another in an endless process of sense making which reminds us of the dynamics of self organizing systems in an ongoing developmental relationship between organism and environment.1 The classical dualistic relationship between mind and matter is overcome, as well as that between the internal and the external world, which are no longer seen as being dramatically and irreducibly separate from one another. There is mutual interpenetration in all directions. If the role of the body forms the basis of Peirce’s notion of semiosis, then the same cannot be said for classical structural semiotics, rooted in the work of Saussure and Hjelmslev, where a formalistic approach to meaning was dominant. However in Greimas’ latest works, as well as in the most recent work by Fontanille2 the mind-body question is reopened, in particular through a rereading of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. According to Merleau-Ponty, meaning is in the first place articulated in our body, through perception. Also for the French philosopher perception is not merely the simple and passive record of an external world, already structured and pre-given in its configuration; perception is rather the active construction of a world already endowed with meaning and intentionality. Through perception the subject meets the world in the first place and be1. For an elaboration of this point, see Coppock (2002), where there is a criticism of simplistic naturalistic definitions of the notion of body. Also other forms of embodied mind as in culturally produced material artefacts, bodily borne protheses, communication devices or other types of new media technologies, all take part in the continuity of the body-mind-world complex. 2. Cf. Greimas (1987); Fontanille (1999, 2004).

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gins to give meaning to it. Phenomenological and perceptive meaning is transformed into linguistic meaning through the corp propre which founds, at one and the same time, the subjectivity of consciousness and the exteriority of the world. Here we can see another possible compatibility with Peirce’s philosophy: in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, too, external and internal world are not separate and in opposition with one another, but related to each other via the mediation of the corp propre that operates, in a way, as the translator of perceptually constructed meaning into linguistc and conceptual meaning. But the body is also the place where affect and emotion are rooted, as Freud and psycoanalysis have taught us, reminding us that the Ego is first and foremost a corporeal Ego. Recent developments in semiotic theory3 are insistent on the fundamental role emotions play on the very deep level of sense structuring. The basic approach to the body that emerges from such a background is not always consistent with the way in which embodiment has been studied in other cognitively oriented research domains. What I shall claim in the present paper is that in order to fully understand the role that embodiment plays in meaning construction and semiosis, we have, so to speak, to go beyond the body itself. To develop a satisfactory theory of embodiment the body is not enough, and we will need to incorporate not only issues related to action and movement, but also those related to affect and emotion, a move that will force us to open up to the crucial issues of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. At this point, however, it has become vitally important to look more closely at some of the basic tenets of the notion of embodied cognition as developed in various areas of the cognitive sciences, in order to see if we can discover some possible links, overlappings, or differences relative to a more semiotically oriented approach. In particular I would like to claim the following: 1) there are today within the field of cognitive studies many very different notions of embodiment, only some of which are of real theoretical interest from a semiotic perspective. It is therefore crucial to distinguish between these in order to specify which type of conception of embodiment might be most productive for semiotics; 2) embodiment is related in an important way to the problem of meaning processes, and it can help in a decisive way to reframe some of the most controversial questions in semantics. A context oriented, encyclopedic approach to meaning, which 3. Cf. Greimas and Fontanille (1991).

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semiotics intrinsically offers, needs to take into account the role of the body; 3) as I already suggested, the notion of “body” is not a self-evident nor simple one, as is too often assumed in contemporary cognitive science; on the contrary the body is a constructed concept, and as such, cannot be reduced to purely neuro-physiological aspects nor to the brain. The kind of body we need to incorporate into our theory of embodiment is more complex than that; it has to be considered in its full phenomenological complexity, as the place where affect and emotions are articulated, and, maybe more importantly, it must to be tied in with the central issue of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, a topic not often addressed in cognitive approches to embodiment. But it is now time to have a closer look at what is exactly meant by “embodiment”, and how it might constructively be related to a more specifically oriented semiotic approach 2.

Different embodiments

In very general terms we could say that the main idea behind embodiment is that mind derives and takes shape from the fact that we have a body that interacts with our environment. Such an assumption is generally seen as drastically opposed to classic representational cognitivism, which is based on functionalism and the computer-mind metaphor. According to functionalism, mind is independent from its material implementation, as the computer-mind metaphor suggests. Implicitly connected to this position is a theory of concepts and semantic categories which is generally referred to as the “classic” theory, where it is claimed that it is possible to arrive at a precise definition of the semantic categories over and above, and independently from, their uses and contexts of application. In this perspective the body does not play an important role: it is essentially an output device, as often defined, merely executing commands generated in the mind through symbol manipulation. In the embodied perspective, on the other hand, cognition is seen as depending in a fundamental way on the body and its perception and motor systems, as well as on bodily-based experience and our interactions with the world. Before going on to discuss these matters, we must immediately point out that there is no such thing as a unique theory of embodiment. On the contrary, the concept of embodiment is a very polysemic one, and different

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authors use it in quite different ways. Rather than referring to a single theory of embodiment, we ought to refer to different theories of embodiment, often highly divergent from one another, and sometimes having very little in common. So let us now return to the issue of what might be considered the basic idea underlying the various approaches to embodiment. What exactly does it mean to say that the mind is embodied, and that it emerges and derives from the body? If we look more closely, we can see that there are many different readings of this same thesis, ranging from an extremely weak to an extremely strong, which is theoretically more interesting, but also more controversial. It will certainly prove useful to examine these various positions more closely, since, as has been stated, only some of them will turn out to be of interest from a semiotic point of view. A first and extremely weak interpretation would simply imply that all cognitive processes have a material basis. This is such a generic option that it would be difficult to disagree with it, but at same time it is so generic that it is not very meaningful. A more interesting assumption would be to say that cognitive processes cannot not have a material basis or, in other words, that cognition is directly connected to the various structures and biological processes that implement it. A somewhat similar version, still rather weak, implies that in order to understand mental processes one cannot ignore the way the nervous system and the brain work. In the last few decades, both neuroscience and neuropsychology have made such a position highly popular, and also widely accepted: today there are probably very few researchers in cognitive science who would disagree with this position, with perhaps the exception of few more orthodox functionalists. From a semiotic point of view, however, this appears to be somehow a more background type of issue, since a semiotic analysis is not directly concerned with these more basic levels of description, but rather with the higher levels of sense organization. A third interpretation, defined as “material” embodiment (Núñez 1999: 55), also takes into account – in addition to the idea that the mind depends on underlying neurobiological processes – the constraints imposed on cognition by real-time bodily actions performed by an agent in a real environment. This is a quite popular position today in robotics, where research is focused on low-level cognitive tasks such as visual scanning or motion. Since it has to deal with the construction of robots able to perform real actions in a real environment, robotics must necessarily develop models of vision, perception and movement constrained by genuine perceptual-motor

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interactions with the environment. Here embodiment means essentially taking into account the spatial-temporal constraints implicit in real bodies, but it does not imply any strong theoretical assumptions. Lakoff and Johnson (1999: 37) distinguish here between embodiment as realization and embodiment as shaping. Embodiment as shaping, often defined as full embodiment, or radical embodied cognition, is certainly the more popular position in contemporary cognitive semantics, and appears to be the one we should look at more closely from a semiotic point of view. According to this view, all concepts, even the most abstract ones such as those of mathematics4 are the result “of the way the brain and body are structured and the way they function in interpersonal relations and in the physical world” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 37). Notice that in this quote from Lakoff and Johnson, brain and body are used as substantially interchangeable; this kind of overlapping is found in many fields of research on embodiment. According to Nunez, for example, embodiment explains concepts “in terms of the non-arbitrary bodily experiences sustained by the peculiarities of brains and bodies” (Núñez 1999: 56). This is a crucial question, since there is a potential ambiguity in considering body and brain as equivalents – an ambiguity that could produce potentially dangerous levels of confusion. Body and brain are not the same thing, as the phenomenological tradition, both of Husserl and of MerleauPonty, has taught us, a tradition to which most researchers today seem to refer. So this would seem to be a vital issue if we want to incorporate an embodied approach in a serious way into semiotics. The body is something quite different from the brain, and if the latter can be seen as an immediate object for scientific study, the body certainly is not, at least not in any direct and transparent way. Indeed, I have already made the opposite claim, i.e. that the body is not at all a self-evident concept, as it might appear at a first sight. For the moment I just want to make salient one specific ambiguity of this kind which underlies most work on embodiment. While material embodiment refers to the properties of the brain, and, therefore, in this model the body may be described as a body-brain, when we are speaking of embodied concepts or embodied cognition, a quite different meaning of “body” is at stake, much closer to the notion of “corporeal schema” than to 4. Cf. Lakoff and Núñez (2000).

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that of the brain. Although embodied cognition might well have a neural plane of implementation, we have here two different levels of description, which do not coincide, and it would be helpful to keep them apart. Semiotics, with its phenomenological tradition, might very well play an important role in clarifying these issues and distinguishing between these two conceptual levels, of which only the second is, as I have already mentioned, of real semiotic concern. Within the field of cognitive science, the picture is even more complicated, however, since the new paradigm is pursued within different disciplines and by means of different methodological approaches, which do not all necessarily share the assumptions of cognitive linguistics, not to mention those of semiotics. To simplify, three main research domains relevant for our present discussion might be designated: connectionism (and neo-connectionism), robotics and cognitive semantics. These domains do not necessarily share the same notion of embodiment. For example, many of the neo-connectionist models which use a dynamic modelling approach are not at all necessarily embodied, in the sense of having systematic, continuous relations with their actual perception and motor referents. What we have here is rather a conceptual interpretation that has little to do with empirical perceptive states, as Prinz and Barsalou (2000) have shown. Connectionist nets do not guarantee embodiment, neither the radical embodiment of cognitive semantics, nor the weaker notion of material embodiment. Situated robotics, on the other hand, as I have already pointed out, has necessarily to take into account actual bodily constraints, since, in order to be fully operative the cognitive system underlying a robot must have an efficient interface with perception and action data: a simple abstract computing system would not be sufficient. Maybe the main lesson we can derive from situated robotics is that to perform perception and action we cannot use only the cognitive system itself, we need also to exploit the resources inherent in the body and the environment. As Clark (1997: 36) claims, intelligence is not based exclusively on cognitive abilities rather it evolves from the dynamic interaction between brain, body and world. The concept of embodiment used in situated robotics is also different from the one used in the more theoretical fields of cognitive semantics and contemporary cognitive semiotics, which are crucially concerned with embodied experience. Both cognitive semantics and semiotics see human

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experience as fundamentally bodily based: concepts and cognition emerge from our experience and are bodily grounded. To conclude, there are probably more differences than similarities among researchers who explicitly refer to the notion of embodiment. For some, the “embodied” mind is still computational in a literal way, for others it is not computational at all. Some refute completely the concept of representation, generally preferring dynamic systems, others, like Barsalou, refute dynamic systems and still use forms of representation. For some, embodiment exists only in authentically living systems (and not in simulations, not even connectionist ones), for others this is irrelevant; finally for cognitive semantics and semiotics the crucial idea is that of phenomenological bodily experience. What then do all these different approaches have in common? Well, probably the only real unifying aspect to be found is a critical one. Embodiment theories are essentially a critical reaction to representational cognitivism, and in particular Fodor’s functionalism. Here, there are two points of criticism: first, the non-consideration of body-based “material” aspects of cognition; second, the reduction of cognitive processes to purely syntactic symbolic manipulation. From this point of view, theories of embodiment appear to be a natural development of cognitive semantics and cognitive linguistics of the seventies and eighties. Theoretical antecedents can be traced back to cognitive grammars, especially Space Grammar and Mental Space theory5; research on space and language6 and Force Dynamics, the system of forces that Talmy (1988) posits as the ground of the linguistic system of modality, which is essentially derived from embodied structuring. A fundamental antecedent is also to be found in the critical review of the classical category theory that goes under the generic name of prototype theory7. Since these seminal works first arrived, research in this field has continued to advance, reframing in a radical way some of its key concepts, beginning with that of representation.

5. Cf. Langacker (1986); Fauconnier (1985). 6. See, among others, Talmy (1983). 7. It is impossibile to provide even a very concise bibliography on this topic. For a critical reading of the theory, see Violi (2001).

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3.

Body and situated meaning

The anti-representational controversy is more properly a controversy against a particular type of representation: symbolic representation, in the Fodorian sense. Such a criticism, as we will see, is not at all contradictory to basic semiotic tenets, rather quite the opposite. Rosch (1999: 62), for example, claims there is a need to distinguish between two types of representation: the first is a device that mediates between mind and world, close to Peirce’s idea of semiosis, connecting the external and internal worlds; the second is based on a notion used in classical cognitivism, where symbols are seen as syntactic symbols – formal operations within the closed system of a machine (or a mind, which is nothing but a machine). One of the most important differences between these two models is the different ways they offer for looking at context. Traditional cognitive science sees representations as stable, context-insensitive configurations that cannot be affected by contextual change. The so-called classical theory of categories was based on precisely such an assumption: a category might be a node, a network, a set of features, or a mental world, but it was in any case always a static and immutable entity. In other words the basic idea was that one and the same invariant structure represented one particular concept in all possible contexts. Now such a conception of the matter seems highly problematic: there is little doubt that natural cognitive systems exhibit a high degree of variety, and that our functioning in the world is much more flexible than any fixed structure could describe. Both our behaviours and our mental states adapt continuously to changing contexts, responding in a highly flexible way to environmental modifications. The traditional concept of representation thus turns out to be radically inadequate. This is not something new in semiotics: similar criticisms of the classical theory of representation have been developed within a semiotic perspective since the Seventies. Umberto Eco in his A Theory of Semiotics (1976) had already pointed out the fundamental incapacity of any kind of invariant, dictionary-like structure to represent meaning, and successively, in 1984, he elaborated further the general notion of the encyclopedia as the only viable alternative to dictionary based models. From this point of view, semiotic perspectives, at least those developed within a Peircian interpretative framework, and those of cognitive semantics based on prototype

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theory, are certainly highly compatible, as I have discussed elsewhere (Violi 2001). At this point, however, my thesis is that developing the issue of embodiment can help us to go even further and to develop a more sophisticated approach to meaning and semiosis, and their relation to context, an approach that is theoretically more radical than that presupposed in Eco’s models. Concepts are indeed sensitive to contexts because we are embodied organisms and we interact with the environment. Embodiment and interaction are basic features of our semantic system, and more generally, of the ways in which we make sense of all our ongoing experience. Taking embodiment seriously in describing meaning can help a semiotic approach to overcome some of the limitations that can still be found in the encyclopedic model. Indeed the concept of encyclopedia, as elaborated by Eco, is a cultural construct that can account, in terms of a regulative hypothesis, for all possible cultural and social components of meaning. However, it has considerably less to say regarding the phenomenological side of our experience, although it does not in principle exclude it. I believe that if something such as a cognitive semiotics is to be established as a field of study, it cannot avoid incorporating embodiment in its basic definition of cognition, and indeed taking this very incorporation of embodiment as its starting point. Among the various embodied approaches we can already find some interesting suggestions in this particular direction. Rosch, for example, emphasizes the role of situation and context in an embodied perspective. According to Rosch (1999: 72), even when concepts appear to be universal and abstract, they always refer to specific and concrete situations. Real situations are events rich in information and should be the real object of study. Generally speaking, psychology tends to see contextual effects as negative elements that invalidate experimental work, but this perspective should be changed, and variations should become the main data for analysis. Interestingly enough, the adoption of a strong contextualism of this kind parallels some recent positions in semiotics, where focus has been shifted from the system, and therefore from structural regularities, to process and text. The textual turn in semiotics implies making, and considering the text as the real unit of analysis; this is compatible with Rosch’s positions, where the single situation is considered to be the correct object of analysis.

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In both approaches we can find a common holistic component, which in some semiotic approaches appears to be extremely radicalized.8 Today, Rosch’s broader assumptions regarding representations and the nature of concepts are quite different from her previous work on prototypes, and are embedded in a strongly holistic idea of the mind-world whole. Concepts are now seen as intrinsically non-representational: they do not have the function of representing the world in the mind, nor do they mainly have an identifying function, as is generally taken for granted in experimental research on naming tasks. Rather, concepts participate in situations. “Concepts and categories do not represent the world in the mind, they are a participating part of the mind-world whole” (Rosch 1999: 72). Their participative nature derives from their being a natural mediation between mind and world, a mediation which is necessarily anchored into specific and locally defined situations. Concepts are the natural bridge between mind and world to such an extent that they require us to change what we think of as mind and what we think of as world; concepts occur only in actual situations in which they function as participating parts of the situation rather than either as representations or as mechanisms for identifying objects. (Rosch 1999: 61)

Even those who do not share such a radical position would agree to not conceiving of representations primarily as structures that represent the external world, but rather as control structures for the regulation of interactions with the external world. This shift from mirror or encoding models to action-device models is quite common in current research on embodiment. In robotics, for example, Clark describes representations as control structures: “The idea here is that the brain should not be seen as primarily a locus of inner descriptions of external states of affairs; rather, it should be seen as a locus of inner structures that act as operators upon the world via their role in determining actions” (Clark 1997: 47). Representations become here oriented toward action, while at the same time describing aspects of the world and prescribing possible actions, in a fine balance between pure control structures and passive representations of the external world. With respect to the issue of representation it is worth noticing how close an approach of this kind is to the basic tenets of Peirce’s pragmati8. Cf. Rastier, Cavazza and Abeille (1994).

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cism. For the American philosopher, too, concepts (and representations) are always correlated with actions: while concepts, seen as habits of mind, have a regulative function in relation to the internal world, stabilizing the process of unlimited semiosis; on the other hand when operative as beliefs, they also constitute the basis for behavioral and communicative habits, which are nothing but regularities in actions. In this way the very same semiotic structures regulate both the internal world of concepts and beliefs and the external world of actions, acting as a bridging system between the two. A similar idea can be found in the model for memory proposed by Glenberg (1997: 1–55), where memory does not primarily have a representative function “to store the past”, but is rather an embodied device for facilitating interactions with the environment. Such a perspective, largely shared among embodiment theorists, focuses on the role of the larger environment and its interactions with the organism, and on the relation between external and internal worlds. This explains a growing interest in Gibson (1979) and his concept of affordances. For Gibson, too, representations and internal states that mediate the relationship with the external world are centred on action, or, to use Gibson’s words, connected to affordances. Affordances are nothing more than possibilities for action and use offered by the local environment to a particular type of embodied agent, equipped with specific bodily features. In this way perception is always contextualized and constructed: the world is essentially perceived by some given organism endowed with its own intentions in some given context, and is seen as affording opportunities for goal directed actions. Perception is therefore always connected to action, and both perception and action are always connected to cognition. This is a crucial point, because the action-perception-cognition link is perhaps one of the most important acquisitions of embodiment theories. Perception is never seen as a passive recording of information, but is immediately connected to action potentials. Therefore any kind of rigid distinction between perception and cognition disappears, and they become highly integrated and overlapping processes. Not surprisingly, such an approach is very interested in results of neuro-physiological studies that show a connection, even at neuronal level, between perception, action, thought and imagination. Recent research on mirror neurons have shown that in primates, and also in humans, the same neurons fire both when a given action (like grasping a cup of coffee) is effectively executed by some individual, and when it is observed while being executed by an other, and

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as well as when the subject merely thinks of executing it. Interestingly enough, this does not happen just for any kind of movement, only for intentional actions, finalized to a goal (such as grasping a cup), and thus only for intentional interactions with the environment, or, to use Gibson’s words: interactions connected to precise affordances. The existence of underlying schemas common to perception, action, language and cognition probably represents one of the most challenging acquisitions of work on embodiment, and it is one that semiotics cannot ignore, since it implies a highest possible level of integration between all these systems. Perception, action, language cannot any more be considered as totally autonomous and independent modules, they must become functional specifications in a common unitary configuration. This is also the ground of metaphorical concepts, so central in cognitive semantics, in that they represent linguistic and conceptual projections of bodily configurations of various kinds (perceptual, motor, spatial, and so on). Metaphorical projections are always motivated; this is the second important lesson we can derive from embodiment studies. Together with the motivational aspect, this offers a radical challenge to the dominant view of language as a formal system, totally arbitrary and abstract. An important consequence of this work is a shift from the study of linguistic forms to the study of linguistic substances, a shift fully shared by contemporary cognitive semiotics. As Petitot suggests: Il s’agit d’abord de rompre avec l’idéalisme sémiotique à l’œuvre dans les approches formalistes du sens qui auront dominé la grande période du structuralisme logico-combinatoire. (Petitot 2000: 84) [What is at stake here is a break with the semiotic idealism of the formalist approaches to meaning that dominated the heyday of logic-combinatory structuralism.]

Idealistic formalism has several important consequences: first of all it implies a totally disembodied approach to meaning : Le sens perd tout rapport au monde naturel externe et au couplage perception-action qui fonde notre rapport écologique et ethologique à ce monde. (Petitot 2000: 85) [Meaning loses all relationship with the external natural world and the coupling of perception and action that grounds our ecological and ethological relationship with this world.]

Secondly, meaning is deprived of all self-organizing systemic principles and cannot but be purely logical and combinatory. A semiotic approach based on embodiment should pursue a double program that we could define at one and the same time as a de-formalisation and a de-mentalisation of

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meaning and sense, reintroducing the study of substance as an essential part of its project. 4.

Intersubjectivity and the embodied subject

The new field of embodiment has brought to light many interesting concepts and questions of central concern for semiotics. Firstly, there is a more realistic idea of the way human beings perceive and interact with their environment, and the way in which meaning emerges from these activities. Next, there is the interconnection between cognition, perception and action; the crucial relevance of situations and contexts, and a different and more articulated idea of the relationship between external and internal world. Finally, there is the central role of embodied structures in language and cognition, and the embodied nature of metaphorical mappings. All this points to a contextualist and pragmaticist conception of semiosis, in the Peircian tradition, allowing an anti-idealisitic and anti-formalistic shift in semiotics, such as the one advocated by Petitot. Embodiment allows and indeed requires a superceding of the purely logical and formal approach which had characterized semiotic structuralism in its initial period of development; meaning ceases to be a purely negative value, as it has been conceived in the Saussurian tradition, for it now acquires a living connection with our perceptional, phenomenological and emotional experience of the world. In this way world, experience, body and mind will all come to be seen as much more closely interconnected and strictly related to one another than before, in a way highly consistent with the Peircean tradition, as I have already indicated. These are all very important acquisitions. However, there are still a few points which will need to be more carefully considered, and where I believe that semiotics will be able to contribute an important series of clarifications to the wider study of embodiment. Indeed, in research on embodiment, there are some possible “zones of confusion” that appear to be particularly crucial in our current situation. The first zone of confusion has already been mentioned and concerns the interchangeable use that is sometimes made of the terms “body” and “brain”. It is important to emphasize once again the complete lack of coincidence between these two levels: the body can certainly not be reduced to purely neural forms of activity. A “body-brain” of this kind would exclude the whole phenomenological di-

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mension of experience, that live presence that Husserl called Leib, as opposed to the material Körper. The second zone of confusion arises in relation to the distinction between body and corporeal schema. The confusion is more implicit than explicit, since corporeal schemas are rarely mentioned, although the notion might represent a crucial concept for the discussion of embodied experience. The concept of corporeal schema was first used by psychiatrists and neurologists towards the end of the nineteenth century, and was then further elaborated by Paul Schilder in the mid-1930s (Schilder 1935). The corporeal schema is not only the general kinaesthetic experience we have of our body, but it is also the spatial dimension that is occupied by the body. According to Schilder, it is neither a sensation nor a mental representation, but rather something intermediate between these two things. Merleau-Ponty (1945) refers to the notion of corporeal schema in order to define the corps propre and its relationship with subjectivity. According to Merleau-Ponty the notion has a gestalt configuration and a dynamic character, implying an intentional dimension. The body is always endowed with a project in the world; it has its own goals deriving from its interactions with the environment. The notion of corporeal schema seems crucial if we wish to investigate the embodied grounding of concepts, since at that level what is at stake is not the “body” as a material and natural object, but its schematic configuration, as has been well demonstrated in studies on spatialisation in language. On the basis of this type of embodied configuration, the body becomes the first place of meaning articulation, and its embodied schema are the basic structures that organize meaning, even before language, as I will discuss in a moment. However, to fully understand the role of embodied configuration in semiosis, we have first to discuss a very important issue, related to affect and emotion. Bodily states are always, and at the same time, pathemic states, endowed and infused with feelings and emotions. Body is where emotions have their primary space, and if we do not take this aspect of embodiment into account in our analysis, we miss a crucial dimension of meaning making, and risk ending up with a totally inadequate and reduced conception of the body itself. Affect and emotion are in the body from the very beginning, in all our sensations and perceptions, which are always permeated by an affectiveemotional tone. We do not only feel sensations of warmth or coldness: we feel pleasant, unpleasant, or unbearable temperature levels, and the same also holds for perception: what we see, hear, taste or smell is never “neu-

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tral”, but always endowed with some sort of emotional reaction along the pleasure-displeasure scale. Body is, in other words, never pure “soma”, but always soma animated by certain affective and emotional states, in other words: soma and psyche are always simultaneously co-present. Here we can see that it is precisely the notion of psyche that enables the overcoming of body-mind dualism, unravelling the categorial distinction between the two terms. But this switch from a naturalistic body to a somatic-psychic one also implies that we must enter into the domain of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. The whole issue of subject and subjectivity is almost completely absent in the North American tradition of work on embodiment. However we can in several cases quite easily find implicit reference to something that we more appropriately would have referred to as subjectivity, but which is not always recognized as such. Let us take as an example the otherwise excellent article by MacWhinney (1999), where the author analyses some of the different forms in which language emerges from embodiment. According to MacWhinney “language comprehension and production are embodied processes whose goal is the creation and extraction of embodied meanings […]. We can refer to these processes of active embodiment as the perspective-taken system” (MacWhinney 1999: 214). The embodied perspectival systems operating in language are related to four levels: 1) affordances, where language and cognition are related to individual objects and actions through affordances; 2) spatio-temporal reference frames, which refer to “the set of competing spatio-temporal reference frames” (MacWhinney 1999: 215); 3) causal action chains, most centrally involved in the emergence of grammar and the different perspectives of nominative-accusative language or ergative-absolutive language; 4) social roles, where the perspectival system allows us “to adopt the social and cognitive perspectives of other human beings” (Mac Whinney 1999: 216). What is of interest here is that all of these systems are not equivalent in their relations to the issues of embodiment and subjectivity. If the first level of affordances is certainly linked to the body and its grounding in the linguistic perspectival system, since all the properties we can think of in relation to an object are affordances grounded in the perspective of our own body, the same does not hold for the other three levels, where it is not so much the body that plays a role, but the point of view of the subject as represented in language. Consider the spatio-temporal reference frames.

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MacWhinney explicitly mentions three alternative frames, an objectcentred, a speaker-centred, and an environment-centred frame. These frames do not depend on the body, but on the way the position or perspective of the subject is framed within discourse. The same is true for the other two systems: both the perspective a given grammatical construction imposes on the action, and the perspective connected to interpersonal and social frames, refer to subjectivity more than to embodiment. What we have in these cases are traces left at the sentence level by the process of enunciation. The notion of perspective can be framed in the wider issue of linguistic subjectivity, which, in European post-Saussurian linguistics, has most convincingly been elaborated in the Theory of Enunciation.9 Such a theory unifies in one and the same framework a family of heavily interconnected issues, ranging from pronominal, temporal and spatial reference systems, to focalization, perspective, point of view, and so on. So obviously the question is not whether or not we use enunciation theory as formulated in post-Saussurian linguistics, but the possible overlappings that may be found between two different issues, both of which are extremely important. However, they are not necessarily interconnected. Perspectival systems depend on the presence in every sentence of an uncancellable point of view which is the trace of the enunciation process. This is something quite different to embodiment, which is the existence, in semantic structures, of motivated configurations, all of which depend on embodied experience. Given the extent to which these two issues are not the same, the theory of enunciation removes the issue of embodiment altogether, leaving only reference to a transcendental subject, completely deprived of any form of bodily qualification, gender difference or any other dimension which might be linked to individual subjects.10 Here we have a deeply paradoxical chiasmus: on the one hand there is a theory of embodiment without the subject, on the other a theory of the subject without a body. In order to develop a fully embodied theory of semiosis we certainly need a bringing together of body and subject, and to do this we must develop an approach to subjectivity which is quite different from the transcendental Ego that is implicit in the classical structuralist framework. An alternative approach of this kind will need to be more firmly connected to the dynamic dimension of enunicative practices of subjects, and, above all, 9. Cf. Benveniste (1966, 1974 ). 10. Cf. Violi (1986).

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to the interplay between the embodied subject and the relational dimension of intersubjectivity. Subjectivity is not the emergence of a transcendental subject revealing himself (and here the masculine pronoun seems more than appropriate), but rather the emergence of a subjective dimension within a complex, relationally grounded interpersonal, social and cultural environment, in other words: the realm of intersubjectivity, in which all embodied organisms necessarily ground their meanings. This implies, in a way, going beyond the individual subject itself, which cannot manage to exist in any kind of isolated, solipsistic form, and even beyond the body itself, if considered merely as an encorporalisation of mind. An embodied subject is more than a body and more than an individual entity: it is a somatic-psychic organism, constituted by embodied affect and emotions and inextricably enmeshed in a complex world of intersubjective relationships. To exemplify this last point, I will conclude with some, necessarily very brief, references to my current research on preverbal children. Working on video of interactions of young children (aged less than 12 months) with their mothers it becomes strikingly evident how meaning is inherently embodied, in that it emerges from embodied interactions well before it begins to manifest itself in language. Preverbal babies are already engaged in a complex work of building meaning on the basis of their interactions with their environment and the relationships they are involved in with the adults around them, especially the mother. Their gestures, gazes and movements can all be read as an already articulated kind of “language”, where the emotional and mental world of the child manifests itself, not yet through words but through embodied actions. It is quite intriguing to notice in analyzing these materials the strong interconnections that can be seen to exist between the ongoing intermingling of intersubjective patterns – a kind of relational dance involving both mother and child – and different bodily responses on the part of the child. In order to understand the process of meaning construction at this very early developmental stage it would be quite misleading to look only at the body, without also taking into account the full range of intersubjective practices within which it is created. Meaning seems to emerge as a series of bodily and emotional responses to environmental interactions: a kind of coupling of embodied actions on the part of the individual subject to a wider pattern of intersubjective relations, a process which might be defined as a coupling of subjective and objective components of meaning.

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From its very beginnings the embodied subject, far from being either a transcendental ego or a purely neural brain, will emerge as the unique way in which each individual body shapes emotions and feelings in the intersubjectivity of relations with the other. References Barsalou, Lawrence 1999 Perceptual symbol systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22: 577– 609. Benveniste, Emile 1966 Problèmes de linguistique générale I. Paris: Gallimard. 1974 Problèmes de linguistique générale II. Paris: Gallimard. Clark, Andy 1997 Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Coppock, Patrick 2002 Semiotics and the body: C. S. Peirce on the mind-body-world relation. Versus. Quaderni di Studi Semiotici 93: 135–167. Eco, Umberto 1976 A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1984 Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fauconnier, Gilles 1985 Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Languages. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fontanille, Jacques 1999 Polisensorialità e autonomia della dimensione figurative. In: Pierluigi Basso and Lucia Corrain (eds.), Eloquio del senso. Dialoghi semiotici per Paolo Fabbri, 188–212. Milano: Costa e Nolan. 2004 Figure del corpo. Per una semiotica dell’impronta. Roma: Meltemi. Gibson, James 1979 The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Glenberg, Arthur 1997 What memory is for. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20: 1–55. Greimas, Algirdas 1987 De l’imperfection. Paris: Pierre Fanlac. Greimas, Algirdas and Jacques Fontanille 1991 Sémiotique des passions. Des états des choses aux états d’ames. Paris: Seuil.

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Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson 1999 Philosophy in the Flesh. New York: Basic Books. Lakoff, George and Rafael Núñez, 2000 Where Mathematics Comes from: How the Embodied Mind Creates Mathematics. New York: Basic Books. Langacker, Ronald 1986 Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Stanford: Stanford University Press. MacWhinney, Brian 1999 The emergence of language from embodiment. In: Brian MacWhinney (ed.), The Emergence of Language, 213–256. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1945 Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard. Núñez, Rafael 1999 Could the future taste purple? Reclaiming mind, body and cognition. Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (11/12): 41–60. Peirce, Charles S. 1934–1948 Collected Papers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Petitot, Jean 2000 Les nervures du marbre. Remarques sur le “ socle dur de l’être” chez Umberto Eco. In: Jean Petitot and Paolo Fabbri (eds.), Au nom du sens. Autour de l’oeuvre d’Umberto Eco, 63–102 Paris: Grasset. Prinz, Jesse and Lawrence Barsalou 2000 Steering a course for embodied representation. In: Eric Dietrich and Arthur Markman (eds.), Cognitive Dynamics: Conceptual and Representational Change in Humans and Machines, 51–77. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum. Rastier François, Cavazza Marc and Abeillé Anne 1994 Sémantique pour l’analyse. De la linguistique à l’informatique. Paris: Masson. Rosch, Eleanor 1999 Reclaiming concepts. Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (11/12): 61–77. Schilder, Paul 1935 The Image and Appearance of the Human Body. New York: International Universities Press. Talmy, Leonard 1983 Language structures space. In: Herbert Pick and Linda Acredolo (eds.), Spatial Orientation: Theory, Research and Application, 225– 282. New York: Plenum Press.

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Force dynamics in language and cognition. Cognitive Science 12: 40–100. Varela Francisco, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch 1991 The Embodied Mind. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Violi, Patrizia 1986 L’infinito singolare. Considerazioni sulla differenza sessuale nel linguaggio. Verona: Essedue. 2001 Meaning and Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Properties of cultural embodiment: Lessons from the anthropology of the body1 Michael Kimmel

Abstract At present for a genuinely cultural theory of embodiment the first step should be to bring together cognitive linguistic and anthropological discourses on embodiment. The specific strength of cognitive linguistics is its analytic tool of embodied image schemas. However, a cultural approach requires moving towards a more contextadaptive analysis, as expressed in my notion of situated image schemas. The specific strength of the anthropology of the body, in particular cultural phenomenology, is a contextually situated, qualitative and performative approach that views embodiment as being-in-the-world. Based on both theoretical strands, I will argue that cognitive theory should widen its purview (a) by looking at the integral relation between embodied intentionality, agency and human selves, as well as the cultural nature of the preconceptual; (b) by exploring “shared” or “distributed embodiment” between agents; and (c) by modeling the body-discourse relation bi-directionally, including how discursive imagery is implanted into body awareness. Keywords: anthropology of the body, cultural phenomenology, distributed embodied cognition, embodiment, image schemas, retrojection, socioculturally situated cognition.

1.

Introduction

Of late few buzzwords have kindled interest across so many diverse academic disciplines as embodiment, a vogue that has swept through the cognitive sciences, philosophy, several social science disciplines and cultural studies (Weiss and Haber 1999). Indeed, the term embodiment is on the verge of generating what theorists of science have called a “theory net” 1. I would like to thank Roslyn Frank for reading several drafts versions of this paper and for freely giving her advice and constant support.

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(Balzer, Moulines and Sneed 1987), that is, it acts to bring together several relationally connected “theory elements” constitutive of a theory core. However, in order for embodiment to become a viable and tightly knit theory net, there is still one unfulfilled challenge, namely, that of bringing together the divergent cognitive and cultural approaches to embodiment under a unifying terminology. This rapprochement already is in the offing in some quarters (Gibbs 1999; Geurts 2003). In particular, the framework of “experiential realism” which originated in cognitive linguistics (Lakoff and Johnson 1999) has many things to commend it as an integrative approach. Yet, – so I will argue – at least to date this framework: (1) holds a too limited view of cultural variation in embodied learning and performance; (2) it demonstrates a narrow view of cultural experience and the preconceptual; (3) it offers no comprehensive model of how cultural discourse and the body relate to each other; and, finally, (4) it fails to take notice of embodiment as something frequently involving interactions between cultural agents. My task here is to indicate ways that experiential realism could incorporate research from the anthropology of the body, particularly the cultural phenomenology framework (e.g. Csordas 1990, 1993, 1994 a, b, 1999; Kirmayer 1992, 1993), which allows for a better understanding of what is “cultural” about embodiment. This chapter is divided into four major sections. The first section sketches, from a systemic standpoint, what speaking of cultural embodiment implies. The following section addresses cognitive linguistic research. It argues that only a more situated ontology of its key notion of image schema will bring out cultural aspects of embodiment. The third section introduces a phenomenological approach to embodied cultural experience, as originating in the anthropology of the body. Building on this, the final section draws attention to several integral aspects needed for a cultural theory of embodiment. These pertain to the body’s relation to the self, discourse and collective cognition, respectively. 2.

Where is culture in the embodiment literature?

Provisionally defined, the term embodied cognition designates the study of how cognitive phenomena are informed by the body substrate or by bodily experience in one way or the other, albeit at diverging levels of observation and from differing disciplinary perspectives. Where culture sits in all this

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has not been a major topic in the many recent attempts to bring order into the vast field of approaches intent on reclaiming the notion of embodiment. 2.1.

Surveying recent embodiment approaches

Ziemke (2003) asks what kind of body-substrate forms the precondition of cognition and if it can also be realized in computational systems. He differentiates physical, organismoid and organismic substrates. Further along, Ziemke introduces the criterion of depth-in-time, if only implicitly, when he speaks of “historical embodiment”. This refers to the view that the present embodiment (at the level of an organism) is “a result of reflection of a history of agent-environment interaction” (Ziemke 2003: 3). Notions of embodiment can then also be distinguished according to how they are timerelated: Do they only refer to the present state of the unit of analysis or do we need to backtrack into its history? Rohrer’s (2001: 60–66, 2007) detailed typology surveys ten levels for deploying notions of embodiment. First, by means of the criterion of disciplines and methods he distinguishes phenomenological and cultural views, linguistic and psychological approaches to the cognitive unconscious, as well as neurophysiological, neurocomputational and even evolutionary senses of the word. Second, what is particularly useful in Rohrer’s approach is his heuristic which groups the analytic units under study by a scale of magnitude. This ranges from the subcellular via neural regions (brain) to the individual (mind) and finally the supra-individual levels of communication and social behavior (collective representations). Cultural approaches to embodiment are, according to this view, situated at the scale of 1 meter or higher and include agent interactions and the socio-cultural system as such. Consider, as a third position, Wilson’s (2002) catalog of embodimentrelated claims in cognitive science. Her first five claims I would characterize as background assumptions rather than directly related to the body: (1) “cognition is situated”; (2) “cognition is time-pressured”; (3) “we off-load cognitive work to the environment”; (4) “the environment is part of the cognitive system”; and (5) “cognition is for action”. Finally, there is, according to Wilson, the best documented claim that (6) “off-line cognition is body-based”. As Ziemke (2003) observes, it is the only claim of hers directly addressing the body as a physical entity.

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Do these wider philosophical frameworks model culture satisfactorily, as ethnographers would understand it? Not really. True, part of the environment is cultural, as are the settings that serve to situate cognition; and much of action is directed to specifically cultural ends. Yet, spoken of abstractly, all of these helpful insights target only generic properties of culture, culture in the singular, while the counterpart of specific cultures is not addressed. 2.2.

Culture, systemic complexity and structural coupling

Perhaps the philosophical term of structural coupling (Maturana and Varela 1987) can open a window on the specific complexity any cultural theory worth its name buys into. The concept of “structural coupling” is a kind of shorthand that expresses the inescapable attunement of the individual’s cognitive system to her environment. The complexities of cultural embodiment reflect different aspects of structural coupling, overlapping aspects of what constitutes an “environment”: first, part of our individual environment is manifested in the other individuals around us reciprocally making us their environment, and sharing it intersubjectively. Second, we must look at the specific ways that collectives “attune” their environment through technology, symbolic culture and symbolic action and thus how the latter shape minds and bodies in turn. Third, environment includes an internal environment, the way we reflexively perceive our body-selves. And, finally, the collective of internal environments operates on partly, although never wholly shared dispositions towards partly, but not wholly shared goals (Strauss and Quinn 1997). All this adds distinct levels of complexity, subsumed under the label of culture. While the anthropological notion of culture is a vague and perhaps debated label, it does remind us of the need to treat these complexities of human interaction integrally and with ethnographic sensitivity. In this spirit, the following cultural account of embodiment will inquire into how embodiment becomes phenomenal, intentional and action-directed, self-related, a matter of shared or distributed interaction, and dialectically related to conceptual knowledge.

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A cultural perspective on image schemas and embodiment

Cognitive linguistics made its mark with the major insight that an imagerybased descriptive framework is a crucial methodological resource for studying embodiment (Johnson 1987). And indeed, its key notion of image schema has proven to be an interface of great productivity. It reaches out into neural, experimental and linguistic research dealing with general structures of analog cognition, while aptly describing cultural gestalt representations rooted in FORCE, PATH, CONTAINER, UP-DOWN, BALANCE, CYCLE, etc. From its inception onward cognitive linguistics has seen itself as contributing a theory of how conceptual cognition is grounded in embodied image schemas. However, to what extent this theory is, at present, fully able to address what is cultural about embodiment remains debatable (cf. Sinha 1999; Kimmel 2002). Recognizing that image schemas are an apt descriptive tool for any specific analysis, I will contend that this tool has to be honed further in order to illuminate the cultural aspects of embodiment. 3.1.

Image schema = embodied?

Let us put culture into parentheses for now and begin with some general reflections about what makes image schemas embodied. To what extent cognition at large may be deemed embodied can be divided up into several methodologically and theoretically separate question (cf. Gibbs 2003: 13). There is the claim that cognitive linguistics started out with and which concerns the grounding of conceptual cognition in the bodily activity of infants: language and thought are embodied because the primary units of cognition called image schemas are acquired in kinesthetic experience (Johnson 1987). Image schemas are then used in metaphorical mappings and thereby extended to concepts. In this process non-sensory and abstract meaning becomes grounded in sensory meaning. Developmental data confirms the role of image schemas in concept acquisition (Mandler 1992). Complementarily, linguistic data demonstrates that a vast amount of abstract notions that adults use can be legitimately interpreted as structured by image schemas (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). However, are these two sources of evidence sufficient to conclude that cognition is fully embodied? In order to address this question appropriately we need to go beyond the previous claims and focus on a distinct, and stronger, embodiment hy-

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pothesis which targets embodied performance, i.e. the on-line cognition of adults. Only with regard to the criterion of the immediate bodily activation in conceptual processing does the Achilles’ heel of the image schema argument for embodiment become evident. The difficulty lies in a premature equation of terms. First, evidence that a conceptual image is structured by image schemas need not be tantamount to showing that the concept produces a strong sensori-motor resonance in on-line cognition. A phenomenological view in particular cautions that image schemas may be frequently used without substantial co-activation of bodily awareness, if we take Leder’s (1990) work on the conspicuous absence of the body in experience seriously. Similar conclusions result from neuroscience methods which address whether conceptual image schemas activate the same neural maps as perception and motor action. PET scans indicate that imagining something in action-oriented terms recruits elements of the sensorimotor cortex (Barsalou 1999: 579, 585; Gibbs and Berg 2002: 8). However, neural activation does not prove that what gets activated are the exact brain-state counterparts of image schemas. Importantly, “[m]ost scholars agree that motor processes activated during perception and imagination are always a limited subset of those activated during overt movement.” (Gibbs and Berg 2002: 8, my italics). Similarly, Barsalou et al. (2003: 4–5) concede that “this process may range from simulation, to traces of execution, to full-blown execution”. Presumably, at the far end of the continuum we will find extremely weak embodied activation. What about experimental data dealing with analog cognition? Here, there is good evidence for the on-line simulation of physical settings and their sensori-motor affordances for an acting self, with ego imaginatively placed into the simulation. There is also some evidence for the vicarious experiencing of emotional, affective and proprioceptive states that are inherently linked to bodily states in real experience (Gibbs 2003). Yet, what remains more open to debate is the wider (and more interesting) claim that conceptualizing abstract entities that are prima facie situated outside the body and its environment equally involves an on-line simulation of embodied or perceptual states. Although Barsalou’s theory of “perceptual symbol systems” (1999) spells out many particulars of this possibility, pending more experimentation we don’t really know how widely analog states in on-line conceptual processing are embodied. All this seems to point to the necessity of defining the cognitive nature of image schemas in

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real-life settings, of distinguishing situations of various types, and of inquiring into their experiential aspects in situ. 3.2.

Returning culture to embodied image schemas

Next, we may ask how the aim of culture-sensitivity affects the way that we think about image schemas. A culture-sensitive viewpoint is tied to a widened view of meaning, which, as Johnson and Rohrer (Pires de Oliveira and Souza Bittencourt, this volume: 21) say, is “located in the complex, dynamic arc of interactions that includes brains, bodies, environments, and cultural artifacts and institutions”. Yet, at present, several mutually reinforcing ontological and methodological assumptions still bias us against a cultural differentiation of image-schematic embodiment. They do so either by unduly de-emphasizing cultural variation in embodied learning or by insufficient attunement to cultural aspects of embodied performance. 3.2.1. The universalist acquisition bias: “Image schemas are, by virtue of pre-linguistic embodiment in infancy, developmental universals” Experiential realism has a relatively a-cultural and universalist take on how primary cognitive forms emerge. What looms large are presumably universal patterns of bodily experience that developmentally prefigure conceptual discourse. The grounding of conceptual schemas is either envisaged to issue from highly transcontextual kinesthetic experiences like FORCE (Johnson 1987) or from primary scenes – experiential co-occurrences of metaphorical source and target – like RELATIONSHIPS ARE ENCLOSURES (Grady 1997). Both accounts involve image schemas and conceive of them as grounded in early experiences of a universal nature. Yet, we need to recognize that image schemas are also acquired and refined by culturespecific practices throughout socialization. Bodily interaction with other bodies, social space or artifacts as well as bodily participation in rituals and everyday life substantially flesh out each individual’s image-schematic inventory. Ethnographically oriented studies reveal several mechanisms of culturespecific concept formation that involve the body’s interactions with other people or the environment. First, acquiring complex image schemas occurs through the mediation of formative special situations or special practices.

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Shore (1991) describes ritualized postural techniques that are instrumental in acquiring the twin concepts mana (“generative potency”, “luck”) and tapu (“sacred”, “bound”, “set-aside”). When tapu is imposed on people or objects “in the interest of rendering these people or objects intelligible and redirecting personal potency for general or cosmic ends” (Shore 1991: 17), body techniques are involved that can be connected with BINDING, CONTAINMENT, CENTEREDNESS, RIGIDITY and STASIS schemas that must be co-activated in body awareness. In another study of cultural learning, Shore (1996: ch. 3 and 4) discusses how Aboriginal novices, over several years, distill a complex “walkabout” schema (arguably having to do with CYCLE, ITERATION and IN-OUT) of geographical and epistemic relevance, from a multitude of overlapping episodic memories, procedural schemas from ritual and connected semantic memories. Beyond these specialized settings, image schema acquisition is also mediated by a mix of overt and covert body practices that are ubiquitous in everyday activities. Bourdieu’s ethnography of Kabyle habitus (1977) does not speak of image schemas proper, but it does describe a systematic array of gendered homologies in which a whole system of postures, practices and social space define OUTWARD and UP schemas as male and INWARD and DOWN schemas as female. More recently, Geurts (2003) studied the image schema of BALANCE across contexts in the Anlo–Ewe culture of Ghana. Finally, acquisition is mediated through the body’s cultural environment of artifacts or spatial arraying (cf. Toren 1993). According to Sinha and Jensen de López (2000: 31), children employ social knowledge of the canonical use of objects in conjunction with their innate capacity for schematizing spatial relations. The image-schematic nature of cultural objects may be a prototypical ecological affordance that influences language (Sinha and Jensen de López 2000: 22). Thus, Zapotec children are not as quick as Danish or English children to notice linguistic differences between senses of “under” and “in” because they are not encouraged to play with upright cups, and more generally because Zapotecs use a smaller variety of containers while tending to use them more multi-functionally.2

2. Although this does not form part of embodied learning proper, acquisition is also mediated through language itself (Bowerman 1996; Zlatev 1997). For example, when categorizing, Yucatec Maya speakers pay more attention to what something is made of, while English speakers pay attention to its shape (Lucy 1996: 49 ff.). This is probably due to ontological commitments that are embedded in linguistic marking.

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The upshot of these studies is that image schemas need to be defined as inherently culturally mediated and augmented. Hence, concept acquisition involves a dialectical relationship between bodily dispositions and sociocultural practices. 3.2.2. The feed-forward bias: “Embodiment is rooted in general kinesthetic experience in space, whereby the body constrains culture, but not vice versa” Experiential realism highlights particular relations between the body and conceptual discourse, but downplays others. With a feed-forward logic it emphasizes that the kinesthetic experiences of the body, notably in infancy, constrain cultural concepts that develop later. This unidirectional view is too limited because discourse and cultural practices also shape embodied cognition in children and adults. One part of the reductionism results from the view that, when an individual learns, it is necessarily the body that comes first and that brings forth concepts. However, discourse just as often plants metaphors into individual body awareness, a point that is examined in detail in section 5.3. A related reductionism holds that it is only the body that constrains cognition. Thus, experiential realism most often traces the bottom-up nexus of how conceptual metaphors are experientially motivated by universal body physiology. This needs to be replaced by a framework that shows how cognition is doubly constrained by embodied experiences and by cultural ideology (cf. Bernárdez this volume). For example, Kövecses’ (2000) cross-linguistic comparison of emotion concepts indicates that the conceptual metaphor ANGER IS A HOT FLUID IN A CONTAINER is experientially so well-motivated through blood pressure, body heat and muscle tension that it occurs in almost all cultures he studied. Yet, the people of Ifaluk in Micronesia seemingly lack this concept, simply because anger, to them, is ontologically nothing intra-personal or psychological, but something situated in the social sphere (Lutz 1988). Apparently, cultural beliefs may constrain conceptual metaphors through feedback mechanisms, even when they are so plausibly motivated by physiology as in the case of anger. Kövecses is justified in arguing for culturally responsible multidimensional models when he concludes that the “cultural models of anger and its counterparts are the joint products of metaphor, metonymy, (possi-

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bly universal) actual physiology and cultural context” (Kövecses 2000: 162; cf. Gibbs 1999; Harkins and Wierzbicka 2001). In addition to these blind spots which result from a selective view of the empirical evidence, biases also result from the fact that image schemas have been endowed with an overly non-situated ontology. 3.2.3. The maximal transcontextuality and schematicity bias: “Image schemas are what maximally different settings share” I agree with the view that defines image schemas as structures of cognitive competence entrenched in long-term memory (Gibbs and Berg 2002; cf. Johnson’s 1987: 183–190 discussion of the Searlean notion of “Background”). They acquire their profile not through the specifics of episodes, but through what many contexts share, and, hence, comprise primary building blocks of cognition, regardless of how these may combine in any specific setting. Yet just how transcontextual does the origin of an image have to be to make it an image schema? The simple image schemas formulated by Johnson (1987) like FORCE or BALANCE only capture schematic commonalities across the widest possible scope of differing situations. They are as schematic as our imagination allows, without a trace of contextuality. But do image schemas qua schemas need to be maximally schematic entities?3 In other words, is it possible for a limited set of contexts to produce a more set-specific image schema that encodes how the image schema is used in a specific type of action? Answering affirmatively, I propose to go beyond the practice of describing image schemas through maximally abstract formulas like FORCE, CONTAINER, or BALANCE which have been distilled from the lowest common denominator of otherwise highly different experiences. To achieve this aim, I argue in favor of two important add-ons for the description of image-schematic variants which are characteristic of a narrower class of experiential settings. Sensitivity for such variants comes into focus in two ways: (1) from a detailed description of the specific image-schematic intentionality that a given setting brings

3. The notion of schema per se does not enforce a commitment to maximal schematicity. Schemas are spoken of at various levels of embeddedness. Hence, the term is legitimate, even if it captures commonalities of a limited set of experiential settings.

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into play and, (2) from a characterization of compound image schemas and their emergent effects in this setting. Furthermore, there is reason to go beyond image schemas in entrenched memory and to look at on-line cognition as well. Generally, we may always take a double perspective on cognition, as non-situated competence and as situated performance (a.k.a. on-line cognition). Exemplifying this, Strathern (1996: 188–189) argues that in symbolic healing [d]emonic possession […] begins with an inchoate (pre-objectified) feeling of loss of control over the body […]. This is then objectified by a healer in terms of what Johnson calls the “container schema” and is diagnosed as an intrusion across a boundary, to be corrected by a suitable form of embodied action in response. What emerges, then, is something quite particular and also something comparable to other contexts in which the container schema is similarly activated. [my italics]

A cultural perspective necessitates a “stereoscopic” view recognizing the more context-bound as well as the fully transcontextual functions of image schemas in cognition (Kimmel 2002: 162ff). 3.2.4. The Euclidean imagery bias: “Image schemas can be described devoid of the intentionality, emotions or entire scenario they are enacted with” Image schemas reside in long-term memory. Yet, from another viewpoint their ontological status is also that of contextual significance bestowing devices, never actualized as pure idealizations or Euclidean abstractions (Alverson 1991: 117). Recurrent cultural contexts add something to the universal form of image schemas and unique experiences may further add to the specifications that already come with cultural contexts. Gibbs (1999: 154) recognizes this: containment is not just a sensori-motor act, but an event full of anticipation, sometimes surprise, sometimes fear, sometimes joy, each of which is shaped by the presence of other objects and people that we interact with. Image schemas are therefore not simply given by the body, but constructed out of culturally governed interactions.

How even simple image schemas are intentionally construed and may be subject to cultural patterns, as Palmer (1996: 148) shows on the basis of the Yaqui tendency to construe seemingly static scenes as dynamic. What is

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more, image schemas become imbued with emotion and motivation to the degree that they are full carriers of intentionality for a certain kind of context. Palmer (1996: 107, 109) argues that “emotions are complex configurations of goal driven imagery that govern feeling states and scenarios, including discourse scenarios”. This sits well with Paul’s (1990: 439) definition of drives as “cognitive mental images already endowed with an affective tone that renders them motivational” (cited in Strauss 1992: 15). To be emotion-imbued, image schemas must be goal-directed, and situated at least at the level of some given scenario. Depending on their situated intentionality and emotional valence basal image schemas spawn sub-variants, e.g. the difference between conceiving one’s glass half FULL or half EMPTY. Any simple image schema turns into a more situated one through its intentional usage in context. Our own body container, a thermos flask and an all-encompassing metaphysical entity are not all simply CONTAINERS with the same intentional relation to the body. Our descriptive ontology of a container will have to go beyond in-out and boundary dimensions and become sensitive to such striking differences. Above all, the locus of an image schema must be specified, i.e. whether it is felt in one’s own body, attributed to the body of a conspecific whom we can empathize with, projected into a perceptual scene or used in conceptualizing something abstract. Since image schemas rarely occur in isolation, we also need to recognize that the embodied intentionality is more strongly connected with holistic experiential scenes (Alverson 1991: 112; Cienki 1997: 7ff), e.g. NEAR-FAR, MERGING and MASS in the experience of seeing something recede, and not so much with any single image schema. 3.2.5. The micro-unit or primary gestalt bias: “Primary building-blocks of cognition are ontologically or functionally prior to higher-level gestalts” Through its focus on simple, basal image-schematic building-blocks like experiential realism makes these seem ontologically more “real” or at least functionally more basic than complex gestalts. In fact, when image schemas are combined in complex ways, many authors would no longer refer to them as image schemas. Consider however that every complex body posture (not to speak of an extended dance choreography) involves the simultaneous activation of numerous image schemas, the spine being STRAIGHT, CONTAINER, CENTER-PERIPHERY, UP-DOWN, LINK, PATH or BALANCE

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the arms in BALANCE, the shoulders UP, the chest a rigid CONTAINER, etc. Arguably, such a configuration is remembered as a complex imageschematic gestalt. Compound image schemas may gradually become “psychologically simple” (one of Lakoff’s [1987: 489, 525] criteria for a successful image-schematic gestalt) although they are structurally complex. Compound image schemas may include body postures, action sequences and ritual, material culture and visual imagery, as well as complex thought models (Kimmel 2002, 2005). 3.2.6. Single level bias: “There is a single preferred scope of contexts at which image schemas are stored” Although image schemas may be entrenched in long-term memory, this need not imply that embodied experiences impact the conceptual architecture at one given level. Image schemas may be encoded at multiple mental hierarchies out of which situated or high-level gestalts can be just as easily generated as simpler ones. Enacting a complex ritual dance in which my body is perceived in balance, but does many other things at the same time, will reinforce both the gestalt image of the entire ritual and activate the basal BALANCE schema that forms part of many other contexts. Assuming multiple hierarchies is congruent with neurocognitive evidence of sensorimotor feature maps that are funneled into convergence zones. In these associative areas “mechanisms outside sensory-motor systems enter into conceptual knowledge” (Barsalou 1999: 583). This points to processing at multiple hierarchic levels as well as the meshing with situated knowledge. 3.2.7. The de-contextualized methods bias: “Image schemas emerge from non-ethnographic or discourse analytic data” The currently dominant methods for discovering image schemas mirror a theoretical perspective that sees them as entirely transcontextual entities. This view typically emerges from synchronic linguistic and laboratory methodologies and, less so from more context-sensitive discourse-data, and least from ethnography. More detailed ethnographies cast a somewhat different light on image schemas than the view that children all over the world acquire them in a roughly comparable way from universal kinesthetic experience (see 3.1). Moreover, variation within a culture remains inaccessible,

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in cases where linguists study image schemas by collecting linguistic expressions across the widest possible number of contexts where, say, MORE IS UP or PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS occurs. Decontextualized distillations from collections of metaphors or idioms can explore a more general layer of the cognitive inventory of a cultural community, but not more situated usages and their intentional particulars. (Of course, metaphor formulas of the above sort are not designed to capture discourse pragmatics.) What precisely is embodied about image schemas in an on-line sense invariably gets lost in this perspective. 3.3.

Studying situated image schemas

What about embodiment as rich phenomenal reality and performance? Is performance too qualitatively saturated to be within the scope of image schema theory? Not necessarily. An example of symbolic healing, discussed below in section 4.2, will show that a phenomenological study of cultural performance often brings to the fore image-schematic scenarios and that these can in turn be enriched by phenomenological analysis. For now, let me address some helpful theoretical steps. If we seriously shift our focus onto performance as documented in discourse and ethnographic data, this will immediately nudge us towards rethinking our nonsituated ontology of image schemas. Studying embodied performance is tantamount to creating a notion of situated image schemas. A situated view of image schemas makes sense in the face of a more general connection drawn between embodiment and the fact that cognition is inherently situated in environments (Zlatev 1997; Gibbs 1999). As the active body extends out into and establishes an interdependency relation with the environment (Pires de Olivera and Souza Bittencourt this volume), not only universal affordances like standing, running and holding will move into view, but also the ways in which the environment is culturally adapted. Several earlier points taken together contribute to making our analysis situated. First, in targeting concept acquisition, we must attend to the specific embodied cultural practices whereby image schemas are acquired and refined after infancy. Second, in targeting on-line embodiment in everyday practices, we must differentiate sub-variants of generic-type image schemas by descriptively specifying the embodied intentionality, the emotion and motivation that typically emanate from the context in question. In dif-

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ferentiating, we will also need to stop pretending that this intentionality is independent of the body-related locus of image schema usage. Intentionality depends on whether an image schema occurs in: (1) one’s own body; (2) other bodies that we can partly “mirror”, but that remain external to us; (3) external perceptual objects and events; or (4) wholly abstract notions. Finally, the kind of analysis I envisage would examine how primitive image schemas combine into compound experiential gestalts. Such a focus means studying the embodied intentionality of holistically conceived image-schematic scenarios or scenes, because only at the level of whole scenes we can explain how action-related or conceptual affordances are created. A wider notional issue is that a view of experience is needed which takes into account the inherent transformation of experience by “cultural resources” (Pires de Oliveira and Souza Bittencourt this volume; cf. Alverson 1991, 1994). To date, it remains a paradox of experiential realism that, despite its early recognition that “all experience is cultural through and through” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 57), it fails to incorporate studies of culture-specific embodied experience, notably from the anthropology of the body. 4.

Cultural experience and the anthropology of the body

What can cognitivists learn from the anthropology of the body? Scheper– Hughes and Lock (1987) distinguish three perspectives on embodiment in social and cultural anthropology. (1) The perspective of phenomenology (“the individual body”) focuses on the lived body as experience. Marcel Mauss was the first to embrace this perspective with the notion of “techniques of the body” that constitute triggers for cultural experience. (2) The perspective of structuralism and symbolism (“the social body”) in the work of Mary Douglas and Victor Turner. Their research focuses on the human body as a source of symbolism with which to think about nature, culture and society. For example, a healthy body offers a metaphorical model of organic wholeness that is applied to the “social body”. (3) The poststructuralist perspective (“the body politic”) identifies the body as the locus of regulatory social practice. Here, Michel Foucault’s history of discursive formations analyzes the body as an instrument of regulation of the self in medical, penal, labor, reproductive and sexual systems.

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Of course, this tripartite distinction points “not so much to three bodies as to three types of text produced by scholars. In any real event they form a single system” (Kirmayer 1992: 324).4 However, while symbolism à la Douglas speaks of the bodily source of representation and Foucault of the bodily results of representation, phenomenology speaks of a process instead of the body as an object. I will focus on phenomenology here because of its singular perspective on embodied experience and the “living flesh” (cf. Pires de Olivera and Souza Bittencourt this volume), which, in turn, sits well with the present turn to a performance-focus and on-line cognition. 4.1.

Culture within: Proprioception

Before introducing phenomenology, which deals with the cultural experiencing and performativity of the body, an approach coming from the ethnography of cultural sensoria should be mentioned. While this field traditionally had more to say about the five external senses than about the inner bodily dimension, Geurts (2003) breaks new ground by framing embodiment as an inner kind of sensory perception. For the purposes of studying sensoria, the innovative move here is to highlight processes happening at the level of proprioception, i.e. the senses of deep tissue, balance, kinesthesia, body displacement and joint position, and thereby going beyond the limitations dictated by our folk-model of the five senses. For embodiment theory, classifying how people monitor internal phenomena with percepts serves to highlight the fact that proprioception, the “inner sense”, is subject to culture in the same way the externally perceived world is. Proprioception is not only a universal substrate, but also the locus of culture-specific ways of monitoring one’s own body. Geurts’ ethnography of the Anlo–Ewe of South Ghana culturalizes this inner sense by describing a mode of embodied engagement, specifically the kinesthetic and proprioceptive schemas relating to what the Anlo–Ewe cultural theory calls seselelame (“attending to feeling within the body”). Part-and-parcel of this is a generative principle of perception, thought and enaction that clusters together variants of the BALANCE image schema. Learning and maintaining proper bodily balance plays a key role in Anlo– 4. Cognitive linguists have focused more on conceptual relations (2) where the body remains a metaphorical source for understanding body-external entities than on lived body experience and performance (1) or on power relations (3).

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Ewe life: infants get their joints flexed to develop an awareness for graceful movement; toddlers are exhorted to balance. At all ages, posture and walking express moral fortitude and psychic disposition. The conceptual metaphor is both linguistically more varied and performatively more elaborated than Euro-American counterparts such as “to show backbone”. Next, in ritual the head-balancing of ritual objects is elaborated. What is more, balance is also perceived as a dynamic relation: diachronic balance schemas determine the embodied dramaturgy of ritual as it alternates between heated and cool. Likewise, with respect to extra- and introversion an Anlo– Ewe should achieve a balance between these two modes of being. Finally, balance is not strictly intra-individual; it also refers to the necessary balance of the social and cosmic bodies. Living in balance therefore also requires sensitivity to kinship relations, as it were, beyond one’s skin. Thus, Geurts’ ethnography describes practices of body awareness manifested in metaphors, everyday body habitus and ritual elaborations. Partaking of a culture-specific disposition for cultivating proprioceptive imagery, Anlo–Ewe BALANCE underlines the importance of differentiating sub-variants of the more generic image schemas. Here, a generic BALANCE schema is transformed and refined with regard to a cultural intentionality. To be sure, this happens in various loci giving BALANCE various functions; yet these appear as co-determined by an overarching cultural ethos of approaching one’s body.5 4.2.

Being-in-the-world: culture and the preconceptual

Phenomenological anthropology is arguably the field that probes most deeply into what is uniquely cultural about embodiment. Influenced by Merleau-Ponty (1962), Csordas (1990, 1993, 1994 a, b, 1999) and Kirmayer (1992, 1993) emphasize the nature of embodiment as a cultural mode of being in the world. This perspective transcends the mode of “representation”. It does so by targeting an existential condition and it thereby establishes a methodological perspective addressing culture and the self (Csordas 1999: 147). Phenomenology’s aim has been to act as a counter5. One drawback of conceiving embodiment as an internal sensory process is that more entrenched cognitive dispositions are neglected. A second drawback is that speaking of a proprioceptive “sense” makes us think more of what is perceived, and less of a bodily self that enacts reality. In this respect we have to go further.

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balance to the exclusive focus on representational systems (or, in cultural studies, on what is expressed by the metaphor of “texts”). Culture, conceived as a semiotic fabric or lattice of public symbology, tells only half the story. Our aching, craving or sick bodies remind us that there is a second intrinsic order to experience; the conceptual dimension has a preconceptual counterpart situated in the body. Phenomenology offers a dialectical partner to textuality and representation. Merleau-Ponty was the first to suggest that the “body’s influence in thought is more presentation than representation, given in substance and action than imagination and reflection” (Kirmayer 1992: 325). According to Merleau-Ponty, meaning cannot be reduced to signs that represent, i.e. that stand for an entity external to the signs themselves. Instead, some meaning is isomorphic with experience. Phenomenological anthropology is thus directed against the classical representationalist bias in epistemology harkening back to Descartes’ disembodied mind which resides in a transcendental ego. Phenomenology specifies one point that cognitive linguistics has left very vague and to its own disadvantage, namely, the nature of the preconceptual. For Csordas, the preconceptual is much more than the raw material of later cognition. Rather, the preconceptual body, in itself, brings forth cultural intentionality. By consequence, calling an experience preconceptual does not necessarily imply that it is also precultural. The notion of somatic modes of attention as discussed by Csordas (1993: 138) is a key for understanding how culture shapes pre-objectified experience. Somatic modes of attention encompass culturally elaborated ways of attending to one’s own body, to the bodies of others, and to other people’s attention to our body. Pathological somatization disorders such as hyper-vigilance in hypochondria or tolerance for self-mortification in anorexia and bulimia involve somatic modes of attention. Culture also shapes the way somatic modes of attention attribute special significance to bodily processes such as pregnancy or menopause. In summary, phenomenology is most interested in the interstitial zone between body and concepts and the processes occurring there. Accordingly, Csordas’ (1994 b, 1999) notion of embodied imagery emphasizes that mind and body are intertwined and all imagery is to some extent embodied. In many respects Csordas might have subsumed the notion of image schema under this term, if only the preconceptual were better illuminated in image schema theory and if we had a better model of how preconceptual and conceptual modes interact in culture.

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Three properties of embodied culture

Having set forth this review of the contributions of cultural phenomenology, I would now like to elaborate three major theoretical aspects that I see as integral to a theory of cultural embodiment: (1) intentionality, the self and the performativity of the cultural body; (2) supra-individual embodiment; and (3) the placement of discursive imagery into the body. 5.1.

Intentionality, self and performativity

Speaking of modes of being-in-the-world has several advantages over other views of embodiment. First of all, being in the world emphasizes the tie with intentionality, that is, attending to and taking up the world. In this perspective, embodied perception and cognition are inherently directed towards action and prepare us for action. A good example from perception is stepping on an escalator that unexpectedly remains immobile. We experience being slowed down since we intentionally had expected the escalator to jolt us forward and had adapted our body to that expectation. Intentionality directed at action is not confined to the individual. It may be shared (see below) and emerge in cultural interaction. Being-in-the-world inherently also engages the self, a recognition that further increases this notion’s scope compared to non-phenomenological theories. Instead of a disembodied mind that mediates between perception and cognition, what takes place inside the living flesh is an interface between external stimuli, what we know, and, more fundamentally, what we are. Another way to express this is that the proprioceptive sense is directly tied up with the knowledge of being an integral body and thus an entity that is distinct from others and endowed with a body image as well as a center of existential awareness. Neurological impairments illustrate this deep nexus to the self dramatically. Sacks (1986) describes the case of a woman who, upon losing her sense of joint position, was on the verge of losing her self-identity. Another patient repeatedly tried to toss his leg out of his bed because he could not feel it and believed he had an alien appendage. This sense was so strong that it overrode his visual knowledge that the leg was attached to his trunk. Another kind of transformation of the self is frequent in the case of those suffering from chronic pain, those who often end up foregoing all attempts to communicate their experience to others (Scarry 1994). In a similar fashion, the rationale of torture is to destroy the self by

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inducing unbearable pain (Daniel 1994). Kafka’s (1948) short story The Penal Colony epitomizes with remarkable premonition the Foucauldian notion of “inscribing knowledge” via the flesh into the self. The verdict, at first incomprehensible to the delinquent, is engraved in his back with needles over many hours until he dies in a state of embodied epiphany of his guilt. There is ample evidence of the collective nature of such techniques of inscribing, inaugurated by Foucault’s work on bodily power regimes in the clinic, the prison and sexuality. Another strength of speaking of modes of being-in-the-world is its emphasis on the inherent meaningfulness of embodied performance. “Modes of action and ways of life” are the substrate of embodied metaphors (Kirmayer 1992: 380). One aspect of phenomenology that cognitive linguists also emphasize is that the embodied imagination frequently projects itself into the conceptual world. The flipside of the coin, and one that is often neglected by cognitive linguists, is that the body may enact culture without substantially engaging in conceptual representation. For instance, Scheper– Hughes (1990) reports a mass-syndrome of involuntary seizures and trembling legs among exploited female Brazilian sugar-cane workers. She interprets this as a shared, collectively embodied manifestation that could be expressed as: “I cannot carry my burden any longer so that my legs falter.” Scores of other culture-bound collective syndromes – Indonesian amok, Victorian hysteria, Western anorexia, female nervios or susto in Latin America, and many more (Csordas 1994 a) – display what Dreyfus and Dreyfus call “intentionality without representation” (1999: 110ff) and may be interpreted as enacted metaphors of the body occurring at a yet preconceptual level. 5.2.

Supra-individual embodiment

Beyond embodied dispositions that are culturally shared between individuals, embodiment can be genuinely collective in the sense of being interactive. Csordas emphasizes this supra-individual dimension by expressly including in somatic modes of attention both our attention to the bodies of others and the others’ attention to our own body. For example, the social contexts of dance, team sports and sex involve distributed embodiment in both of these senses. Considering the ways in which distributed embodied cognition occurs, it seems to me that this notion encompasses both symmetrical (i.e. either fully mutually attuned or partially shared) as well as

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more asymmetrical and therefore complementary modes of action or experiencing. Symmetrically attuned somatic modes of attention are present in cultural techniques of “consubjectivity” (Csordas 1993: 144). For example, in pulse diagnosis of the Siddha medical system of South Asia before the healer gives a diagnosis, he must enter a state of synchronization of his own pulse with the client’s and experience shared pulsations. Melanesian couvade, i.e. men experiencing birth pain when their women are in labor, can be understood as attuned bodily sensations and therefore as embodied, rather than mere imitation or charade. Consubjectivity also occurs in transfers from client to therapist in psychoanalytic therapy. In these and many other contexts, we may say that modes of collective “selfing” via the body occur. Let us now look at embodied states that are asymmetrically distributed among agents committed to a common social goal.6 Here the dissimilar somatic modes of the participants contribute to a joint experience. This means that differing somatic modes and actualizations of embodied imagery contribute to an integral event in such a way that each participant role interlocks with the other and provides feedback for it. For example, symbolic healing typically distributes somatic states both between the expert healer and the lay client, as well as over the stages of the ritual. Csordas’ (1990) study of a Charismatic Pentecostal healing session illustrates this very well. The ritual aimed at casting out evil spirits starts with the clients in the congregation sensing a particular and distressing thought, emotion or behavior outside their control, but without them knowing exactly what it is. This requires the intervention of a healer, an expert in objectification, who diagnoses their distress as a case of spirit possession. The healer reifies the congregation’s pre-conceptually embodied experience by introducing the cultural concept “demon”. Only at the stage when the clients accept this conceptually objectified image suggested by the healer, do they confer a more explicit causal interpretation on the experienced loss of control. The healer uses the semantic label demon and the associated field of conceptual metaphors to set into motion a range of performative acts for “expelling” the demon.

6. This is somewhat analogous to Hutchins’ (1995) finding that complex collective tasks like navigating a ship are typically achieved because cognitive resources are distributed between agents (and artifacts) in specific configurations.

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Specifically, the healer objectifies these anxieties as evil forces intruding from the outside, and by classifying them as “possession”, the healer has his client dissociate the source of distress from the individual’s inside. In cognitive linguistic parlance, this ascription of external agency draws on a scenario of image-schematic metaphors in which the self is a bounded, but semi-permeable CONTAINER, evils are intruding AGENTS that exert captivating FORCE, and healing takes effect as symbolic EXPULSION through recourse to a more powerful AGENT (God). By applying this cultural model of causal attribution, the healer is able to lift the burden of guilt from the client. Ritual healing typically displays both of the aspects we have just discussed: a sequential and an interpersonal distribution of somatic and conceptual states. Initially, a client experiences subjective distress at the level of body awareness. Upon this, an expert performs metaphoric predications on the client’s inchoate experience to help her turn it into an objectified body image (typically drawing on a conceptual model like demonic possession). Finally, the causal inferences emanating from the healer’s actions feed back onto the client’s body awareness and even her physiology. In short, Csordas’ example highlights the inherent two-way street that links embodied states and conceptual ones (body awareness problem => body imagery altered/created =>body awareness improved). Thus, embodied states in wider social settings may be distributed, both interpersonally and over time. For instance, concerning social roles like healer and patient, we need to study the role-specificity of jointly orchestrated embodied states, which may range from more bodily to more objectivized states. We also need to cultivate a sensitivity for “feedback loops” in which embodied states of an individual trigger conceptual imagery and vice versa in, as it were, a cycle of objectivization. 5.3.

Embodied learning and imagery: Projection, retrojection and mimesis

The literature is replete with treatments of the relation between discourse and the body (e.g. Featherstone, Hepworth and Turner 1991; Coupland and Gwyn 2003). Among these, Bourdieu’s habitus theory (1977) has become influential for its recognition of the dialectic between discourse and the body, and for eschewing subjectivism and objectivism as false alternatives. The notion of habitus illuminates the “circular process whereby practices

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are incorporated within the body, only to be regenerated through the embodied work and competence of the body” (Crossley 2001: 126). Social constructivism and cognitive theory have also highlighted the dialectic interplay between instituted models in the social sphere and mental models (Berger and Luckmann 1967; Shore 1996; Strauss and Quinn 1997), a fact that logically extends to embodied models. This interplay has been emphasized also by cognitive linguists such as Sinha (1999) and Harder (1999) who point out that neither the embodied nor the discursive grounding of cognition make sense in isolation.7 How can an approach rooted in imagery take this dialectic into account? By assuming that bodily states create conceptual states, the view of embodied realism operates rather unidirectionally. Johnson’s (1987) feedforward or bottom-up nexus – perhaps best glossed as “projection” – takes a developmental perspective and emphasizes how embodied image schemas provide basic units of discourse. This view remains silent on how discourse, ritual and material culture may conversely shape, refine and recombine basic image schemas and turn them into cultural experiences. Quite plainly, it often happens that discourse “goes under our skin”. This occurs whenever discursive imagery is taken in and appropriated by the body. Although the notion of image-schematic mapping appears to be eminently suitable for explaining this appropriation into the body, the prevalent feed-forward focus on image schemas has remained silent on it. Thus, Johnson’s projection view needs a feedback counterpart explaining how individual body awareness becomes a map onto which discursive imagery is inscribed. For this reason I propose retrojection as an apt term to describe situations in which cultural metaphors are picked up in discourse and then mapped back into the body. Retrojection is a process whereby discursively objectified body images or other symbolic associations resonate with proprioceptive body awareness and thus come to be felt inside the body. Such embodied sensations may be triggered by speech, symbolic action or visual symbols and may manifest themselves in muscle tonus, kinesthetic readiness, metabolic flow, focus of somatic attention, relaxation or arousal. The retrojection of words or symbols into the body can account for situations where instructors use metaphor to encourage embodied and emotional experiencing. In “How words move people to dance” Felton 7. Cf. Frank (this volume), who incorporates the systemic back propagation from the wider environment as an alternative to the linear, feed-forward framework.

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(2004) studies contact improvisation, in which teachers extensively use varied metaphors to make dancers experiment with new kinds of bodily experience. One teacher envisions the body as a container that holds the dance to encourage an awareness of interiority and boundedness and then, in counterpoint, as something permeable from which dance pours forth and into which it trails back. Through metaphors of connectedness and reaching out, the teacher seeks to create a continuous field of dance so that the dancers may feel continuity with the room as well as with the others. Another teacher uses water imagery extensively and depicts dancing as a continuous flux and the bodies as “pouring through” their partners. Similar patterns of infusing the body with experience through the use of metaphor may be found in fields as varied as body therapy or other healing systems, meditation in yoga, qi gong, or tai chi or even in military drill. While not everything about body movement or body habitus is learned through linguistic metaphors, we should become very sensitive to the many subtle ways that cultural discourse shapes or refines embodiment. In addition to such specialized instructional practices, the concept of retrojection enlarges our view of conventional conceptual metaphors that people live by. Of course the fact that conceptual forms may frequently have systematic bodily counterparts is predicted by cognitive linguists. The embodied and conceptual double-nature of metaphor is nicely exemplified by morality metaphors in English. As discussed by Lakoff and Johnson (1999: ch.14), MORALITY IS PHYSICAL STRENGTH and MORALITY IS RESISTING A PHYSICAL FORCE, both of which relate to EVIL IS A FORCE. Phenomenological introspection suggests that these conceptual images of force mirror preconceptual qualities sensed in the body. After all, “resisting” immoral temptations and keeping “baser” impulses “in check” can be felt as sapping one’s strength. (In the special case of BEING GOOD IS BEING UPRIGHT / DOING EVIL IS FALLING the embodied implication may be that morality requires resisting the “pull” of gravity by applying force vertically.) MORALITY IS PHYSICAL STRENGTH8 has a preconceptual dimension insofar as the awareness of moral strength may be felt inside one’s body container. Note also that conceptually realizing one’s immorality may go with an embodied feeling of weakening.

8. Locating morality in the body is conceptually manifest in the MORAL ESSENCE metaphor of the self, where character is evaluated in terms of bodily essence (“He’s rotten to the core”).

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But how should we interpret these correspondences between body awareness and conceptual images? We cannot know a priori whether, in an individual learner, a specific discursive metaphor is brought forth by an embodied feeling or vice versa. Both, the retrojection of discourse and the projection of pre-discursive embodied experiences, offer a plausible account. Grady’s (1997) theory of primary metaphor exemplifies the projection account. Here conceptual mappings in adulthood are prefigured by several dozens of embodied co-occurrences in infancy. Hence, the prototypical infant experience of RELATIONSHIPS ARE ENCLOSURES linguistically surfaces later as “I’m in this marriage”. As I see it, primary metaphors in infancy alone cannot shed light on the acquisition of specific somatic modes. They often underspecify how people embody morality in ways like MORALITY IS STRENGTH. The notion of retrojection may serve to fill in this gap in the current embodied explanatory paradigm. It makes the body-discourse loop genuinely bi-directional. For example, growing up, a child will internalize culturally appropriate body feelings by hearing linguistic metaphors over and over again. A child with a strict upbringing will begin to enact what the parental morality metaphors exhort it to do by “showing backbone”, “keeping her chin up”, standing “upright”, keeping her poise, not flinching, and/or trying to “pull herself together”. Often, young children may be partly familiar with a conceptual metaphor but may not have experienced its full implications yet in their own body awareness. Thus, retrojection may infuse the imagery of cultural metaphors into the individual’s body and thus let people feel the power of discourse within. Clearly, the explanatory avenues of retrojection (discourse => body) and projection (body => discourse) aren’t mutually exclusive. That a person first hears discursive metaphors and only then achieves their embodied resonance need not clash with a (partial) experiential motivation in more fundamental primary metaphors. A fuller view would assume that motivated, but underspecified body feelings enter into an elective affinity with cultural discourse, through which their embodiment is further specified in contextually appropriate ways. In this way, specific somatic modes of attention resonate with systems of conceptual metaphor. Finally, we should mention mimesis (Bourdieu 1977; Taussig 1993; Maran 2003) as an equally indispensable explanatory avenue that usually goes hand in hand with retrojection. Mimesis bypasses the discourse-body nexus by mapping from the perceived body of another person to ego’s body directly. To illustrate mimetic learning, a person who notices that individu-

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als with a radiant and strong character tend to stand upright may mimic this postural habitus. Together, retrojection and mimesis have empirical and methodological implications we should seriously consider. Future research projects should involve interdisciplinary teams of linguists and anthropologists who could study how children – or, for that matter, soldiers, priests or company employees – acquire body habitus and/or somatic modes of attention. Since all three mechanisms will usually interact, any study of embodied learning will need to study retrojection (learning through exposure to discourse) and mimesis simultaneously, while also holding in focus our linguistically derived background knowledge about shared primary conceptual mappings which retrojection and mimesis refine or transform. Perhaps this call for a more complex and more integrated perspective amounts to a reinvigoration of Bourdieu’s approach to embodied knowledge. At the same time, the approach I advocate has a more cognitive bent. It benefits from imagery theory and cognitive linguistic methods to the fullest, while also incorporating a strong phenomenological sensitivity (cf. Bernárdez this volume; Crossley 2001). 6.

Conclusion

This chapter has surveyed the mutually complementary analytical perspectives needed for a genuinely cultural theory of embodiment. The indisputable merit of experiential realism in cognitive linguistics is its recognition that an imagery-based framework is an indispensable resource for describing embodiment in detail. Image schemas also constitute an important notional interface between disciplines by reaching out into neural, experimental and linguistic research while also being apt for addressing cultural facets. However, I have expanded this perspective. Acquisition studies caution against a too universal view of embodiment through image schemas, as these may be culturally refined. Moreover, from a viewpoint that is interested not only in schematic structures but also in a degree of sociocultural situatedness, we will have to focus on image schemas combined in holistic scenes rather than on maximally schematic micro-units of experience. To move part of the way towards performativity-oriented views like cultural phenomenology, I have called for a descriptive apparatus that differentiates experiential characteristics of particular activity types like dance and symbolic healing. The notion of situated image schemas meets this

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goal by describing the intentional, emotion-imbued and goal-directed subvariants of more generic schemas, as manifested in image-schematic scenarios or compounds. A full theory of situated embodiment will also have to enlarge the scope of image schemas with regard to their diverse functional roles. Here lies the merit of cultural phenomenology. It highlights dimensions that a fully situated perspective must bring into play, specifically, the fact that embodiment oftentimes deals with what happens between people (its inter- or consubjective nature), its deep involvement with cultural selves, the fact that the pre-conceptual is cultural in itself, and the fact that we have to look at embodiment not only from a developmental perspective but also by taking into account bodily performance in everyday environments. In conclusion, it is encouraging that cognitive research is now turning to an on-line and situated perspective on embodiment. This perspective clearly dovetails with the existing anthropological sensitivities for performativity, lived experience and context (Gibbs 1999; Frank 2004; Sharifian this volume). The joint impact of these developments broadens our understanding of the subject matter of embodiment and makes it more and more legitimate to speak of a socio-cultural embodiment view in cognitive research. In my opinion, the current challenge of theorizing cultural embodiment requires that we hold in focus complementary dimensions of cognition and that we do so at several levels: individual and collective cognition; entrenched dispositions in memory and lived experience; cognitive competence and cognitive performance. References Alverson, Hoyt 1991 Metaphor and experience. Looking over the notion of image schema. In: James Fernandez. (ed.), Beyond Metaphor. The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology, 94–119. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1994 Semantics and Experience: Universal Metaphors of Time in English, Mandarin, Hindi and Sesotho. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Balzer, Wolfgang, Carles Ulises Moulines and Joseph D. Sneed 1987 An Architectonic for Science: The Structuralist Program. Dordrecht: Reidel.

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Barsalou, Lawrence 1999 Perceptual symbol systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22: 577– 609. Barsalou, Lawrence W., Paula M. Niedenthal, Aron K. Barbey and Jennifer A. Ruppert 2003 Social embodiment. In: Brian H. Ross (ed.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Advances in Research and Theory, 43–92. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann 1967 The Social Construction of Reality. A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Penguin. Bernárdez, Enrique this vol. Collective cognition and individual activity: Variation, language and culture Bourdieu, Pierre 1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bowerman, Melissa 1996 Cognitive versus linguistic determinants. In: John J. Gumperz and Stephen C. Levinson Gumperz. (eds.), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, 145–176. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cienki, Alan 1997 Some properties and groupings of image schemas. In: Marjolijn Verspoor, Kee Dong Lee and Eve Sweetser (eds.), Lexical and Syntactical Constructions and the Construction of Meaning, 3–15. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Coupland, Justine and Richard Gwyn (eds.) 2003 Discourse, the Body and Identity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Crossley, Nick 2001 The Social Body: Habit, Identity and Desire. London: Sage. Csordas, Thomas J. (ed.) 1994 a Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Csordas, Thomas J. 1990 Embodiment as a paradigm for anthropology. Ethos 18 (1): 5–47. 1993 Somatic modes of attention. Cultural Anthropology 8: 135–156. 1994 b Introduction: The body as representation and being-in-the-world. In: Thomas J. Csordas (ed.), 1–24. 1999 Embodiment and cultural phenomenology. In: Gail Weiss and Honi F. Haber (eds.), 143–162. Daniel, Valentine E. 1994 The individual in terror. In: Thomas J. Csordas (ed.), 229–247.

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Dreyfus, Hubert and Dreyfus Stuart 1999 The challenge of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment for cognitive science. In: Gail Weiss and Honi F. Haber (eds.), 103–120. Featherstone, Mike, Mike Hepworth and Bryan S. Turner (eds.) 1991 The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory. London: Sage. Felton, Lori 2004 How Words Move People to Dance. Ms. Frank, Roslyn M. this vol. The language-species-organism analogy: A complex adaptive systems approach to shifting perspectives on “language”. 2004 What do John Lucy's “unitizer” languages tell us about topological image schemas? Presentation at the “Workshop on Image Schemas and Linguistic Relativity: Empirical Methods in Cognitive Linguistics” held in conjunction with the International Conference on Language, Culture and Mind, Portsmouth, UK, July 17th, 2004. Geurts, Kathryn Linn 2003 Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gibbs, Raymond W. 1999 Taking metaphor out of our heads and putting it into the cultural world. In: Raymond W. Gibbs and Gerard Steen (eds.), Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics, 145–166. Philadelphia ; Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 2003 Embodied experience and linguistic meaning. Brain and Language 84: 1–15. Gibbs, Raymond W. and Eric Berg 2002 Mental imagery and embodied activity. Journal of Mental Imagery 26 (1/2): 1–30. Grady, Joseph E. 1997 Foundations of meaning: primary metaphors and primary scenes. Unpublished Dissertation, University of California. Harder, Peter 1999 Dual grounding of language in the physics and physiology of the body (causal grounding) and in the social-interactional context (functional grounding). In: Theo Janssen and Gisela Redeker (eds.) (1999). Cognitive Linguistics: Foundations, Scope and Methodology, 195–222. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Harkins, Jean and Anna Wierzbicka (eds.) 2001 Emotions in Crosslinguistic Perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Hutchins, Edwin 1995 Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

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Distributed, emergent cultural cognition, conceptualisation and language Farzad Sharifian

Abstract This chapter presents an integrative view of cognition as a system that emerges from the interactions between the members of a cultural group. Members of a cultural group negotiate and renegotiate their emergent cultural cognition across time and space. Emergent cultural cognition is the locus of cultural conceptualisations such as cultural models, cultural schemas and cultural categories. Another integral aspect of emergent cultural cognition is language in that human languages largely embody the cultural conceptualisations of their speakers. In terms of their representation, cultural cognition, cultural conceptualisations and language are heterogeneously distributed across the minds in a cultural group, rather than being equally imprinted in the mind of each individual. Overall, cultural cognition and language appear to reveal properties of complex adaptive systems. This chapter elaborates on these notions and provides examples of cultural conceptualisations and their instantiations in various aspects of human languages. Keywords: complex adaptive systems, cognitive linguistics, cultural cognition, cultural conceptualisations, cultural models, emergent cognition, heterogeneously distributed cognition, schema.

1.

Introduction: The locus of cultural cognition

In classical circles of cognitive psychology the word “cognition” has largely been associated with mind and mental activity. Different paradigms within cognitive psychology have, however, not agreed upon the nature of the human cognitive system. Proponents of what came to be known as classicism (Newell 1980) viewed cognition as a symbolic system whereas advocates of connectionism (Davis 1992) viewed cognition as emerging

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from interactions among networks of interconnected processing units called neurons. The notion of cognition did not remain a focus only within the field of cognitive psychology but attracted the interest of scholars from other disciplines such as biology, linguistics and anthropology. This led to the development of the mega-discipline called “cognitive science” and also to the emergence of sub-fields such as cognitive anthropology and cognitive linguistics. One of the natural consequences of the development of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of cognition was a revisiting and in fact expansion of the notion of cognition. Not all scholars within the areas of cognitive science have been interested in finding out about what goes on inside the mind of an isolated individual. Some have been more inquisitive about population-level and group-level correlates or consequences of cognitive processes. The expansion of the notion of cognition took place along several lines. One group of scholars took interest in the interaction between the human mind and the environment. Hutchins, an anthropologist and a cognitive psychologist, and his colleagues, for example, observed that human cognition constantly interacts with an environment that is rich in organizational resources (Hutchins 1994). For Hutchins, cognition is distributed across individuals, tools and artefacts. Another departure from the limited scope of cognition in traditional cognitive psychology has been equating cognition with action (see Bernárdez this volume) as well as activity that is socially situated. In an introduction to a field guide, Anderson (2003: 91) states that: For over fifty years in philosophy, and for perhaps fifteen in Artificial Intelligence and related disciplines, there has been a re-thinking of the nature of cognition. Instead of emphasizing formal operations on abstract symbols, this new approach focuses attention on the fact that most real-world thinking occurs in very particular (and often very complex) environments, is employed for very practical ends, and exploits the possibility of interaction with and manipulation of external props. It thereby foregrounds the fact that cognition is a highly embodied or situated activity – emphasis intentionally on all three – and suggests that thinking beings ought therefore be considered first and foremost as acting beings.

The above quote clearly highlights two directions in which the notion of cognition has been expanded, that is, “situated” activity and “embodiment”. The embodiment thesis, in general terms, views cognition to be mediated by our bodily experience. The exact relation between the body

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and human cognition and the interpretations given to the word “body”, however, have varied from overlapping views to conflicting and contrasting ones (e.g., Violi 2003, this volume; Wilson 2002). In this context, again, different interpretations of the notion of “cognition” have had epistemological consequences for how the notion of “body” has been viewed and for the role that has been attributed to it in relation to cognitive activities (see more in Violi 2003, this volume). Another dimension along which the notion of cognition has been expanded is the dimension of culture. Scholars with interest in both cognition and culture have been exploring how culture and cognition interact with each other and with other systems such as language (e.g., Cole 1996; D’Andrade 1995; Hutchins 1994; Shore 1996; Strauss and Quinn 1997, 1995; Tomasello 1999). As in other approaches to the study of cognition, various scholars in this area have not totally agreed on the nature of the relationship between culture and cognition or even on what constitutes culture and/or cognition. For some, cognition is an aspect of culture in that culture influences various cognitive processes (e.g., Altarriba 1993; Redding 1980). Sperber and Hirschfeld (1999: cxv) view the relationship between culture and cognition along two dimensions, reflected in the following statement: The study of culture is of relevance to cognitive sciences for two major reasons. The first is that the very existence of culture, for an essential part, is both an effect and a manifestation of human cognitive abilities. The second reason is that the human societies of today culturally frame every aspect of human life, and, in particular, of cognitive activity.

Within the paradigm of cognitive linguistics many subscribe to the view of Langacker (1994), namely, that culture is primarily a cognitive phenomenon, with individual minds as its locus. Langacker, however, acknowledges that not all aspects of culture are represented in the human mind. 2.

Emergent cultural cognition

I maintain that “cognition” may also be viewed as a property of cultural groups, and not just individuals. I refer to this level of cognition as emergent cultural cognition in the sense that what is being described as cognition here is an emergent system (e.g., Johnson 2001) resulting from the interactions between the members of a cultural group across time and space. This of course does not confine the scope of culture to the cognitive

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domain. Emergent cultural cognition may be instantiated in various aspects of people’s lives including aspects of their physical environments, artefacts, tools, rituals, painting, dance, etc. Cultural cognition is heterogeneous in the sense that it is heterogeneously distributed across the minds in a cultural group. The distribution of cultural cognition extends across the dimensions of time and space. Members of a cultural group negotiate and renegotiate their cultural cognition across generations, vertically, and, horizontally, through a multitude of communicative events. The notion of cognition here encompasses complex systems that are dynamic and ever evolving, rather than a fixed set of representations that extend to a cultural group. Cross-sectionally, the notion of distributed, emergent cultural cognition may be diagrammed as Figure 1.

Figure 1. Distributed, emergent cultural cognition.

This simple figure is perhaps the closest visual depiction that can be offered of distributed, emergent cultural cognition. In this figure the top part represents the “global” cultural cognition that emerges from the interactions between the members of a cultural group while the lower part is meant to represent the way in which cultural cognition is distributed “locally” across the individual minds of the group members. The overall figure here reflects how emergent properties of cognition at the group level supersede what is represented in the mind of each individual. It should of course be kept in mind that emergent properties arise from the interactions

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between the group members, a process that does not lend itself readily to a static visual sketch. A crucial point that needs to be kept in mind when viewing Figure 1 is that the distribution that is being modelled extends to the dimension of time, a diachronic aspect of cultural cognition that cannot be visually shown in a simple two-dimensional picture. Another point that is meant to be reflected in Figure 1 is that members of a cultural group might share some but not every aspect of their cultural cognition with other members and the pattern is not exactly the same for all individuals across the cultural group (see Borofsky 1994), that is, two members may share more from their cultural cognition than others. In other words, as mentioned earlier, cultural cognition is heterogeneously distributed across the members in a cultural group. The above-mentioned view of distributed cognition is an initial step in the direction of constructing the type of ideational account of culture that Keesing (1987: 371) had in mind when he said: “An ideational theory of culture can look at cultural knowledge as distributed within a social system, can take into account the variation between individuals’ knowledge of and vantage points on the cultural heritage of their people.” It is this variation between individuals’ knowledge of cultural conceptualisations that my use of the term “heterogeneously distributed cultural cognition” is intended to highlight. It should be stressed here that I do not view the ultimate level of cultural cognition in terms of fixed representations inside the mind of individuals but as emergent properties resulting from the interactions between members of a cultural group. This conception of distributed cognition seems also to be implied in Kronenfeld’s (2002: 430) statement that “culture has no existence outside of our individual representations of it, and since these representations are variable, there exist no single place where the whole of any culture is stored or represented. Thus, culture is necessarily and intrinsically a distributed system.” Kronenfeld also observes that culture is not merely fixed knowledge, but productive representations of a growing repertoire capable of generating new responses to novel situations that still make sense to cultural groups. Such a view of cultural cognition constitutes a challenge for “cultural determinism” in that it allows for individual differences while acknowledging the existence of collective cognition. Cultural orientation, from this perspective, is seen as a continuum rather than either/or membership. In terms of consciousness, members of a group may be conscious of the influence that a particular “collective” cognition has on their thought patterns and behaviour and in fact may try to opt out of it. What is at issue

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here is that even in those cases, the individual is very likely to recognize certain knowledge or conceptualisation to be characteristic of the culture they belong(ed) to. Cultural cognition is usually the basis for many aspects of our actions and behaviour in two senses: one is that our behaviour, including our linguistic performance, largely derives from our cultural cognition, and second is that we largely operate on the basis of the assumption that other interactants’ behaviour draws on the same cultural cognition. In general we may say that cultural cognition serves as the basis for the “hypotheses” that people make regarding what they encounter during their cultural experience. The above-mentioned view of cultural cognition is at least partly consistent with certain versions of other expansions of the notion of cognition. Hutchins (1994), for example, also views cognition as “distributed”, though in a slightly different sense. Hutchins (e.g., 1994), mainly emphasizes the distribution of cognitive processes and includes the material environment within the domain of cognitive processing. I emphasise the emergent nature of cultural cognition, which is primarily cultural knowledge, and I use the term “distributed” in conjunction with the term “heterogeneous” to highlight the view that cultural cognition is not equally imprinted in the minds of the people in a cultural group. Despite these differences in the focus of research, the two strands should be viewed as complimentary, particularly given the fact that Hutchins acknowledges that cognition is a cultural process (see also Lindbloom and Ziemke, BLM Volume 1). The notion of cultural cognition presented here is also consistent with the version of embodied cognition which regards “body” as a constructed notion (see Violi this volume). Whatever the role of body in our cognitive life, it should be kept in mind that conceptualisations of “body” may be culture-specific and in general body takes part and acts as a conceptual resource for our cultural experience. Even the number of senses that we assign to our bodies may vary across different cultures. On the other hand, the situations and contexts implied by the notion of “situated cognition” are in fact largely social and cultural. Anderson (2003: 126) also stresses the importance of the role of culture in situated and embodied cognition, maintaining that: Along with research in situated cognition, EC [embodied cognition] further suggests that intelligence lies less in the individual brain, and more in the dynamic interaction of brains with the wider world – including especially the social and cultural worlds which are so central to human cognition – and therefore suggests that fields like sociology and cultural studies can them-

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selves be important resources for (and in some guises are part of) the cognitive sciences.

2.1.

Emergent cultural cognition as a complex adaptive system

It is to be noted at this point that emergent cultural cognition may be viewed as a complex adaptive system (e.g., Frank this volume; Waldrop 1992) in that it has the properties that are generally associated with complex systems. One of the main attributes of complex adaptive systems is that they reveal emergent properties. As mentioned earlier, cultural cognition is also an emergent system in that it results from the interactions between the members of a cultural group across time and space. The emergent properties of cultural cognition as a system at the global level (cf. Frank this volume), are not mirror images of those that characterize the cognition of each individual within the group. A closely related property of complex systems is that the parts constituting the system cannot contain the whole. In this sense, also, cultural cognition is a complex system in that an individual’s cognition does not capture the totality of their cultural group’s cognition. Furthermore, when analyzing the case of cultural cognition, we find that its control is distributed throughout the group; rather than it being subject to centralized mechanisms of control. Another characteristic of complex systems is that they are nested. That is, the agents that are components of the system are themselves complex adaptive systems. Similarly, members of a cultural group, as agents of cultural cognition, are themselves complex systems, controlled by nervous systems, endocrine systems, etc. Like other complex systems, cultural cognitions have their own unique history of interactions that constantly construct and reconstruct the system. Often small changes in the interactions of cultural groups have had a remarkable influence on the future direction of their cultural cognition. This view is largely reflected in the writings of Vygotsky (e.g., Vygotsky 1978), who viewed cognitive phenomena as embodying the characteristics of historically bound sociocultural relations. One of the characteristics of complex systems is the difficulty involved in determining their boundaries: they are “open systems”. The decision is usually based on the observer’s needs and prejudices rather than any intrinsic property of the system itself. This aspect of complex systems also ex-

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tends to cultural cognition in that the boundaries as to where one cultural group ends and another begins are difficult, if not impossible, to determine. In relation to cultural cognition, as is the case with other types of complex systems, the role of an individual agent can be viewed as two-fold. On the one hand, the individual is the locus of cultural cognition and can have an initial causal role in its development, dissemination and reinforcement. On the other hand, an individual’s performance can be influenced or determined to a varying degree by the cultural cognition that characterizes the cultural group. Thus, the role of individuals in a cultural group may be described in terms of a circular pattern of cause and effect. At this point, I would like to focus on conceptualisation and language as two integral aspects of cultural cognition. The whole field of cognitive linguistics is based on the assumption that various aspects of language embody conceptualisation of experience. While it is acknowledged that the locus of language and conceptualisation is the individual, the two ultimately emerge at the cultural level of cognition. This thesis will be explored further in the following sections. 3.

Cultural conceptualisations: Cultural models, categories and schemas

Human conceptual faculties, which might be largely universal and innate, derive from various sources of experience, including bodily and environmental ones, that in turn enable new experiences to be made sense of and organized. Such experiences lead to the development of our conceptual knowledge, which is both complex and systematic. The units of organization in our conceptual knowledge, such as categories (e.g., Rosch 1978) and schemas (e.g., Arbib 1992; Bartlett 1932; Bobrow and Norman 1975; Mandler 1984; Rumelhart 1980), appear to be based on certain associations that may help us tell them apart from each other. Robinson (1997: 263) maintains that such associations reflect “regularities in an organism’s perception of and interaction with its environment”. He considers schemas and categories to be higher-level representational networks that store conceptual relationships rather than simple stimulus-response patterns. He notes that “all of these schemata, categories and other conceptual relationships are probabilistic functions which are not specific to any instantiations of the group they summarize” (Robinson 1997: 263).

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Categories include concepts that enter into x is a kind of y association. In the case of schemas, the basis for association is rather experiential in the sense that elements of a schema may have co-occurred in the same context or an event. In general, the relationships that hold between the elements of a schema may be thematic, temporal and/or spatial. As an example, “bill” and “food” are related schematically, as “food” may evoke the event schema of paying a bill in a restaurant (Schank and Abelson 1977). Here the relationship is more spatial and obviously experiential. On the other hand, “food” and “pasta” are related to each other categorically, as “pasta” is an “instance” of the category of “food”. Blewitt (1993: 104) makes a distinction between schematic representations and categorical representations, which she calls “taxonomic”, in the following way: Schematically organized representations preserve the temporal sequences and the spatial and functional relations among units of experience. For example, “spaghetti” and “bib” may be related in lexical memory, because they label categories of objects that have been functionally connected and thus experienced together in the same event. […] Taxonomically organized representations are based on similarities among the units being represented, that is, on shared meanings. For example, the nouns “apple” and “spaghetti” may be related in memory because they refer to categories of objects that are foods.

Conceptualisation of experience, of course, does not end in forming categories and schemas but also involves setting up mental models (Johnson– Laird 1980) mapping across concepts, with the end result of metaphors, and also perpectivizing what is being conceptualised (Verhagen forth.). A major focus in cognitive linguistics is identifying such conceptualisations and recruiting them when delving into people’s social experience (Dirven, Frank and Pütz 2003; Frank 2003 a). The following important point needs to be made regarding the nature of conceptualisations such as schemas and categories: they have been conceived differently by the various and sometimes competing paradigms in cognitive and social psychology, and naturally by scholars working in different (sub)disciplines. For example, generally speaking, earlier schools of psychology conceived of schemas as “structures” in the mind, while connectionists view schemas as patterns of activated knowledge (Rumelhart et al 1986). Regardless of what the status of conceptualisations, such as schemas and categories, is within the boundaries of an individual’s cognition, I would like to argue that these conceptualisations also largely emerge at the cultural level of cognition discussed above. People partly partake in similar

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experience and as such constantly negotiate and conventionalise the way they conceptualise their experience. Although, in all probability, no two individuals conceptualise experience in exactly the same way, it is often possible to perceive a collective cognition emerging from the interactions between the members of a cultural group. I refer to such conceptualisations as cultural conceptualisations (Sharifian 2003). The choice of “conceptualisation” over “concept” is meant to reflect and highlight the dynamic nature of such cognitive phenomena. As aspects of cultural cognition, cultural conceptualisations appear to be heterogeneously distributed across the minds of a cultural group. That is, these conceptualisations are not equally imprinted in the minds of the members in a cultural group at any given point in time. A cultural group is not a collection of a number of individuals who live in a certain area, but rather people who more or less conceptualise experience in a similar fashion. As such, the notion of a cultural group is not intended to convey rigid boundaries. Within the popular classifications of culture there are still those who conceptualise experience more closely and as such create a subculture within a culture. While one might object to the boundary fuzziness of such notions as “cultural group”, our realities appear to be largely characterized by “fuzziness” rather than by rigid boundaries and units. Cultural conceptualisations usually develop into complex, dynamic systems of knowledge, which are not totally and equally shared by the members of the target cultural group. Over time, such dynamic systems may act as major anchor points for people’s thought and behaviour and may even constitute a worldview. In other words, cultural conceptualisations enable the individuals across a cultural group to think, so to speak, with one mind. Often a simple clue or a gesture is enough to point to the cultural conceptualisations that are acting as the basis for a social interaction. The operation of such aspects of cultural cognition is often, but not necessarily always, salient to those who come from outside the cultural group. Stated differently, social interactions between the members of a cultural group may suggest the operation of some sort of a collective cognition to those who are not members of the cultural group, whereas the members of the in-group can be quite unaware that such cultural conceptualisation are being brought into play. It should be noted here that different cultural groups differ with regard to the coherence of their cultural conceptualisations. Some cultures, and some people within a given/single culture, develop more coherent conceptualisations.

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To make a distinction between different forms of cultural conceptualisation, imagine that in a given society people interact with each other in conceptualising and establishing systems of kinship. One aspect of kinship conceptualisation would be to use linguistic labels to categorize people into “mum”, “dad”, “aunt”, etc. Another would be to develop norms of conduct and responsibility towards each kin. These norms do not define the category but are associated with the category thematically and as such would need to be considered as schemas. A related notion that has been used in cognitive anthropology and more increasingly in cognitive linguistics is cultural model (e.g., D’Andrade 1995; D’Andrade and Strauss 1992; Frank 2003 b; Holland and Quinn 1987; Wolf and Simo Bobda 2001). The term, initially intended to be used instead of “folk models” (Keesing 1987), has also been employed in the sense of “a cognitive schema that is intersubjectively shared by a social group” (D’Andrade 1987: 112). D’Andrade constantly refers to the notion of “schema” in his explication of the term “cultural model” (D’Andrade 1987: 112) and he regards models as complex cognitive schemas. Strauss and Quinn (1997: 49) also maintain that “another term for cultural schemas (especially of the more complex sort) is cultural model”. Polzenhagen and Wolf (2007) have used the notion of “cultural model” as more general, overarching conceptualisations that would encompass metaphors and schemas that are minimally complex. For the sake of this writing I view cultural models as conceptualisations that hierarchically characterize higher nodes of our conceptual knowledge and that encompass a network of schemas, categories and metaphors. An example of such a model would be the cultural model of American Marriage (Quinn 1987). This cultural model includes conceptualisations such as GIVING AWAY schema, WEDDING GIFT category, and MARRIAGE AS JOURNEY metaphor. Returning to the hypothetical case of kinship mentioned above, then, we may refer to the “cultural model of Kinship”. The content and the relationship between these conceptualisations may be summarized as follows in Table 1. I would now like to make the observation that, although the locus of such conceptualisations may be the individual, eventually they “spread” among the group members and are then constantly negotiated and renegotiated. The dynamics of such group interactions eventually lead to emergent properties that may no longer be reduced to individual representations. What this means is that schemas and categories become the objects of interactions between the members of a given cultural group and as such emerge as aspects of distributed cultural cognition. It is at this level that I

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consider these conceptualisations to constitute cultural models, cultural categories and cultural schemas. Such conceptualisations become “cultural” not only because they may differ across different cultures but also because they are the emergent properties of the interactions between the members of a cultural group. Schematically, conceptualisations such as cultural models may be visually represented using the same diagram that was presented earlier in this chapter (see below). This is due to the fact that these conceptualisations constitute an integral aspect of emergent, distributed cultural cognition. Table 1. CULTURAL MODEL OF KINSHIP Kinship categories: categories such as “mum”, “dad”, “auntie”, “close relative”, “in-laws” etc. Kinship schemas: schemas that embody norms and values related to kinship, such as behaviour rules for every member of the family in view of their status, etc. An example of this would be RESPECT FOR PARENTS schema. Kinship metaphors: Conceptual metaphors that are used in relation to kin, such as Kwara’ae’s kin metaphor EXTENDED FAMILY MEMBERS ARE ALL ONE HEARTH (Watson-Gegeo and Gegeo 1999: 230).

Figure 2 is an attempt to visually render the locus of a cultural conceptualisation showing that such a cultural model has the two levels of abstraction. Again, the top part of the diagram represents the “global” level of the model, which emerges from the interactions between the members of a cultural group, while the lower section depicts the way in which the “local” level is instantiated in a distributed fashion across the individual minds composing the group. This explanation provides an account of the way in which some people know more than others about a given cultural model and also that two people might share more elements from a cultural model than some other members of the cultural group1. Factors such as age and gender might contribute to what people have in common and share with each other. One aspect of cultural development and, hence, the increased stability of the model/overall system is movement from a state where someone knows A to where the same person knows ABCD, for example, 1. See Borofsky (1994) for an account of intra-group diversity in cultural knowledge.

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from a cultural model. But of course, issues such as the extent to which one enters into interactions with the members of their cultural group would also determine how much a person knows from/about their cultural conceptualisations.

Figure 2. A distributed, emergent cultural model

A point that needs to be made here is that in the above figure the person who knows A and the one who knows CD do not appear to belong to the same cultural group. This is because the figure only represents one cultural model. In reality, those two people might share more from other cultural models, and as such still belong to one cultural group. This pattern of sharing from two cultural models, X and Y, is represented in Figure 3. The figure depicts how two members may share more elements from one cultural model than from another. This pattern of distributed cultural cognition accounts for “fuzzy” understandings that characterise our daily cultural interactions. As mentioned earlier, people coming from the same cultural background generally work on the basis of the assumption that they have shared cultural models, whereas in reality this might not be totally the case, as has been discussed here. This situation often leads to misunderstandings and can even create conflicts between people. The situation can of course get much more complex in intercultural communication contexts in which interlocutors may draw on different and even contrasting cultural models. In such situations, every interlocutor is

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likely to draw on the cultural models that characterise his/her “native” culture. However, there is often the case that even one interlocutor may draw on the elements of two or more cultural models to which they have been exposed during their life (Frank and Susperregi 2001; Frank 2003 a, 2005). Conflict and miscommunication often takes place in such contexts due to the assumption made by the interlocutors that they are all drawing on the same cultural models. It should however be noted that often durable contact between groups of individuals from different cultural backgrounds results in the emergence of new, and in a sense “blended”, cultural models.

CULTURAL MODEL X

CULTURAL MODEL Y Figure 3. Two distributed cultural models

4.

Emergent cultural cognition and language

Language is intrinsically related to distributed, emergent cultural cognition which has been discussed so far in this chapter. Cultural cognition is largely, but not solely, transmitted through language. It is also instantiated in the content and the use of language. Inherent within the system of every language are categories, schemas, conceptual metaphors and propensities

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for certain perspectives that reflect cultural cognitions of those who have spoken the language over the history of its existence. As Tomasello (1999: 169) puts it, […] in collaboration over historic time human beings have created an incredible array of categorical perspectives and construals of all kinds of objects, events and relations, and they have embodied them in their systems of symbolic communication called natural languages.

Indeed, the way and the degree to which these conceptualisations have been encoded in human languages appear to differ from one language to another (Palmer 1996). The following section gives examples of how various features of human languages may instantiate conceptualisations that have at one stage or another characterized the cultural cognition of their speakers. At the level of lexicon, lexical devices that are considered to be equivalent in different languages, or even language varieties, may signify different conceptualisation of experience for their speakers (e.g., Sharifian 2001). Sharifian (2005), for example, observed that many speakers of Aboriginal English and Australian English associate different conceptualisations with words such as “family” and “home”. For Aboriginal English speakers, the word “home” gives rise to conceptualisations that would be associated with the company of the extended family members whereas the Anglo-Australian speakers largely associate the word with a building that is being rented or owned by themselves or a member of their nuclear family. For an Aboriginal person, for instance, the word “home” may refer to the place of residence of one’s grandmother or aunt. The word “family” for Aboriginal English speakers is associated with the Aboriginal model of Family. This cultural model includes categories that go beyond those associated with the same word in the case of Anglo Australians. Family for an Aboriginal person includes members of the “extended” family and largely whomever one comes into frequent contact with. A word such as “mum” for an Aboriginal person may evoke a category that includes people who are described as “aunt” by an Anglo Australian. Also responsibilities, obligations and behaviour rules that are often observed between the members of an Aboriginal family would give rise to schemas that appear to be largely culture-specific. In some Aboriginal cultures, a person may not be allowed to converse with their mother-in-law or whoever is regarded as a member of the same category. Cultural conceptualisations may also be marked on morphosyntactic features of some languages. Aboriginal Australians have systems of con-

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ceptualisation of kinship that are often viewed as complex from the viewpoint of the Anglo-Australian culture. Aboriginal cultural conceptualisations of kinship are encoded in certain morphosyntactic features of Aboriginal languages. For example, Murrinh–Patha has various second person pronouns including those which categorise family members. These include nhi “you singular”, nanku “you two brothers and sisters” and nanku ngintha “you two who are not brothers or sisters and one or both are female” (Walsh 1993). In Arabana, there are pronouns which signify categories that highlight moiety as well as generation level, such as the following: Arnanthara = we, who belong to the same matrilineal moiety, adjacent generation levels, and who are in the basic relationship of mother, or mothers’ brother and child. (Hercus 1994: 117)

Another reflection of kinship conceptualisations in the grammar of a number of Aboriginal languages is in the use of collective suffix forms (Dench 1987). The suffix is described as “a morpheme deriving a new verb lexeme which requires a nonsingular subject and has the added meaning that the activity is performed together by the participants denoted by the subject NP” (Dench 1987: 325). However, there appear to be cases where the collectiveness denoted by the suffix is more of a marker of kinship rather than of any “collective activity”. Consider the following example: 1.

a. Nyiya karlpa-nyayi-ku wiya-larta panti-jangu karnti-ka –ku This clim-COLL-PRES see –FUT sit -REL tree -LOC-ACC This one is climbing up to see that one sitting in the tree. (Dench 1987: 326)

In the above example, the activity of “climbing up” does not appear to be “collective”, at least in the usual sense of the verb, and thus the collective suffix may perform a different function here. Dench maintains that in such cases “the appearance of the suffix indicates that the participants are in the same set of alternating generations [italics original]” (1987: 327). That is, the speaker who has uttered sentence (a) above knows that the person climbing up the tree and the one to be seen are relatives in the same set of alternating generations, or people in a “harmonious kinship”, as Hale (1966) would put it. Another area of language that encodes cultural conceptualisations of experience is the area of metaphor (e.g., Frank 2003 a; Kövecses 1999, 2000; Yu 2002, 2003 a, 2003 b, 2003 c, 2004, this volume). Yu, for example, gives numerous examples from Chinese where the metaphors involv-

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ing a body part somehow embody Chinese cultural conceptualisations of experience and also of the human body. He maintains the relationship between body, culture and metaphor as “conceptual metaphors are usually derived from bodily experiences; cultural models, however, filter bodily experiences for specific target domains of conceptual metaphors; and cultural models themselves are very often structured by conceptual metaphors” (2003 c: 29). Cultural conceptualisations also provide analytic tools for explorations of pragmatic aspects of language. First, the use of pragmatic devices, such as pragmatic markers, may be associated with culture specific conceptualisations (see Sharifian and Malcolm 2003: 335). Also, at the heart of the usage of terms such as “inferencing”, “implied meaning”, etc., lies the notion of “conceptualisation”. When we say the use of a certain linguistic device has a given implied meaning, we are in fact referring to conceptualisations that the speaker/hearer associates with the use of the device in a particular context. It is of course well-known in the area of pragmatics that different cultures may have different pragmatic norms and devices and thus it may be stated that across different cultures, different devices might be associated with similar or overlapping cultural schemas and in some cases similar devices may give rise to contrasting cultural schemas. For instance, in Persian, a speaker may use the phrase sharmandeh-am “I am ashamed” in achieving speech acts such as Offering Goods and Services, Making a Request, and Expressing Gratitude. In such cases, it appears that the formulaic expression is associated with a Persian cultural schema (Sharifian 2004). This schema encourages the speaker to consider the possibility that the action referenced by the speech act may give or has given some “burden” to the hearer, or the food that is being offered may not be tasty or correspond to the status of the guest. This schema then encourages the speaker to express the negative feelings that could arise out of such considerations in the form of an expression of “shame”. At the discourse level, both the content of discourse and its rhetorical organization may reflect cultural conceptualisations of experience (Malcolm and Rochecouste 2000; Malcolm and Sharifian 2002, 2005, 2007). Malcolm and Rochecouste (2000), for example, analysed excerpts of narrative produced by speakers of Aboriginal English and realised that the texts were largely governed by event schemas that reflected Aboriginal cultural experience. They named these schemas Hunting, Travelling, Observing and Encountering the Unknown, which encompasses the Spiritual experiences of Aboriginal people.

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As an example of how cultural conceptualisations may be instantiated in discourse, the following excerpt reveals the way in which three Aboriginal English speakers locate themselves and their interlocutors in terms of their kin: L: Armadale you know all the streets an you know where to go? EH: I’s It’s not like down the xxxx xxx too many big mob go that way M: I’ve got some um people live round Armadale EH: In Armadale? M: Ah no not Armadale at Perth L: [Perth] EH: In Perth, what’s the names down there? M: um Davises2 EH: Oh yeah M: an Coles EH: That’s on my Mum’s side, my Mum related to Coles M: Um do you know, do you know um, Shane Cole? EH: Yeah that’s my cousin. Mum’s cousin I think M: We’ ah yeah, thas my brother, cousin brother EH: Well there’s um there’s an older one as well isn’t there? M: Um Donny... and but they’re all sisters, um Marcia but we just call her Marce, Marcia Collins an um um Kate and um... um got some Davises um but only just um um from my niece, Jeanette Cole, she goes um horse riding every day um cos she lives with her Nan an Pop an her mother and father cos their mother an dad um lives with them, so she stays with them an, ‘cross the road there are these people who that um takes her horse riding EH: Oh yeah M: Um like on a station, an she just goes with em to um – cos um they signed her in so she could go with em, bout every other– every day EH: Yeah we – we were talking about Jim L__ (FAMOUS FOOTBALLER) and the boys said that’s your uncle, unna? L: mmm EH: xxx cos Jim’s my cousin xxx I got Elvis in there (laughs) they were saying that, someone was saying that Jim’s real name was Elvis (laughs) L: Well but e’s my uncle but I don’t know him, 2. The names used in the texts are pseudonyms.

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EH: Alright L: He’s just know Dad an ’e might be a second cousin or something EH: What’s your Dad’s last name? L: Um Gordon EH: Oh your Dad’s Gordon too what was your Dad’s first name L: Gavin Gordon, he was- Dad is um Ronnie Gordon and is brother is Ronnie and Nathan EH: I know that, I know that name L: Do you know Cherie and Lindy, they Gordon, that’s my Dad’s sisters EH: Alright. What cos my Dad’s related to old oh yeah, nah well my Dad – Jim’s Mum and my Dad are like brother and sister, an my Dad he got no sisters an they all first cousins L: Well what’s ya last name? EH: Um Haines (Y70, Yarning about Family) The above conversation, which is between Aboriginal speakers coming from some 400 kilometres apart, is a clear instantiation of the Aboriginal cultural model of Family. First, the text represents an Aboriginal schema that encourages the speakers to locate themselves and others with regard to their possible kinship links. This often seems to be necessary among many Aboriginal people in that it has implications regarding where they stand in relation to their interlocutor and what they should do or say. The text also reveals cases of instantiating Aboriginal cultural categories. For instance, speaker M refers to someone as “brother, cousin brother”. The category “cousin-brother” includes people who are biologically cousin to the speaker but who have the same cultural status as a brother and may simply be referred to as “brother”. Speaker L also refers to someone as “uncle” and then proceeds to say that he “might be a second cousin or something”. As mentioned earlier in Aboriginal cultures the categories that are labelled as “uncle” or “aunt” may include people who may be considered as “distant relatives” from the Anglo Australian perspective. As mentioned above, cultural conceptualisations may also be instantiated in the rhetorical organization of discourse. Carrell calls schemas that include knowledge relative to the rhetorical organisation of a text formal schemas (Carrell 1987: 461). She found that reading comprehension was easiest when the texts were familiar to the readers in terms of their cultural formal and content schemas. Some cultures draw on a formal schema that

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is tied to the linear conceptualisation of “time”. That is, people in such cultures largely narrativise their experience based on the chronological order of the happening of events. Not all cultures, however, follow such patterns of discourse organization (e.g., Kaplan 1966, 1987; Kintsch and Greene 1978). It has been noted, for example, that Kuna Indians of Panama do not construct their narrative structure based on temporal ordering (Sherzer 1987). In other words, the speakers do not seem to rely on temporal schemas in their narrativisation of experience. Palmer (1996) attributes this to the salience and valuation of the imagery in the narrator’s worldview. Aboriginal English speakers also do not appear to rely very much on the chronological sequencing of the events in their discourse production (Sharifian 2002). Rather, in Aboriginal English discourse, events may be ordered according to their salience and significance in the cultural conceptualisations that speaker is drawing on. It is to be noted finally that as an integral aspect of cultural cognition, language itself is a complex adaptive system (see also Frank this volume; Steels 1996, 2000) in the sense that it is a distributed, emergent, adaptive system. The knowledge of a language is heterogeneously distributed across the minds in a speech community. In a study of mass/count in Persian, for example, Sharifian and Lotfi (2003) employed a Preference task that measured the acceptability of a number of sentences by a group of native speakers of Persian. The data showed a high degree of variability in the degree to which participants rated the sentences as “acceptable”. For example, one of the sentences was rated as “fully acceptable” by 17.9%, “acceptable but not preferred” by 32.1% and “unacceptable” by 50%. This pattern of data shows how knowledge of language is heterogeneously distributed across the members of a speech community. Also, language is an emergent system in the sense that it evolves and hence results from the communicative interactions between the individual members of a speech community across time and space. If we map human commutative interactions onto a network that extends across the dimensions of time and space, then language is the emergent property of the network as a whole. It is to be noted that the interactions that characterise the network are not mirror images of one another, which makes language a dynamic system with unpredictable properties. In the terminology of complex adaptive systems, language is rarely in any long run equilibrium. Language is a dynamic adaptive system in the sense that it can be adapted to meet the communicative needs of its speakers. At one level, speakers often adapt their language in specific situations to express certain

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specific meanings. Also, studies in diachronic linguistics have shown that certain features of human languages may be adapted to express a wide range of new conceptualisations. It has been observed that a language implanted in new localities may be adapted and appropriated by its new speakers to express their own native worldview and culture. This has, for example, been observed in the case of Aboriginal people adapting English to clothe their own worldview and cultural conceptualisations (e.g., Sharifian 2006, 2007). 5.

Concluding remarks

In this chapter I have made an attempt to further expand the notion of cognition along the dimension of culture. From the perspective that is introduced in this chapter, cognition is viewed as a property of cultural groups, and not just the individual. In this sense, cognition is a heterogeneously distributed system with emergent properties that arise from the interactions between the members of a cultural group. An integral aspect of this view of cultural cognition is group-level conceptualisation. Conceptualisations such as models, schemas and categories have an individual basis as well as an emergent basis as the cultural level of cognition. These cultural conceptualisations are often instantiated in various cultural artefacts and activities. Language in this perspective is viewed as a distributed system as well as a repository for cultural conceptualisations. Various aspects of human languages may encode conceptualisations that reflect cultural experiences of their speakers. It is hoped that this chapter will contribute to the emerging integrative perspective that is reflected in the title of this volume, as well as in the other contributions. Acknowledgements I wish to thank Roslyn Frank and René Dirven for their generous, helpful comments on the earlier drafts of this chapter. Ian G. Malcolm also deserves my special thanks for his encouragement throughout the development of the ideas presented in this chapter and also for his helpful suggestions.

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Collective cognition and individual activity: Variation, language and culture1

Enrique Bernárdez

Abstract One of the most salient features of human language is its diversity; this begs for an explanation, as language has to be viewed as a “product” of human cognition, which is principally assumed to be inter-individually identical. As cognition is taken to be restricted to the individual, thus ignoring the existence and possibility of variation, the old problem of the Janus-like physiognomy of language and the relation between its social (external) and individual (internal) faces has to be posed anew. This paper will focus on the question of how to bridge the gap between an individual’s cognitive system (and, consequently, language), and linguistic diversity, i.e., the problem of the relationship between the individual and the collectivity. This problem is approached by introducing the concept of synergic cognition in relation to the study of similar problems in biology and complex systems theory. Language will be viewed as a “product” of a socially-conditioned, activity-driven cognition. The justification of this proposal will be based on both sociology (esp. Pierre Bourdieu) and psychology (esp. “activity theory”), and parallel results in the organisation of biological systems and especially the interplay between individual and social group among animals will also be considered. The similarities of my approach with others will be pointed out. Keywords: activity, embodiment, habitus, situated cognition, synergic cognition.

1. This paper is based on a plenary talk presented at the 8th ICLC, Logroño, 2003. I thank all those who offered me their comments and criticism. Special thanks go to R. Dirven, O. Lizardo, P. Quist, C. Sinha, and J. Zlatev, but especially to Roz Frank.

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1.

The inescapable reality of variation in language

Language exists only in variety: according to some estimates, between 150,000 and 500,000 languages have been spoken through the history of modern man. But even if the precise number of existing languages is impossible to ascertain, it seems obvious that linguistic variety is a consubstantial feature of human life in both the social and the individual sphere. Nonetheless, we usually prefer to talk about language in the singular so that the construct termed human language ends up representing the central concern of most linguists. It is, therefore, necessary to make an explicit distinction between language in general (French langage, Spanish lenguaje) and “a particular language” (French langue, Spanish lengua, idioma); many others, for instance Fuchs (1997: 6), have made similar observations. Chomsky (1986) proposed the terms I-language and Elanguage respectively and somehow this particular distinction still seems to be hanging around even among non-Chomskyans. I-language is the internalised, individual, mental side of human language, whereas Elanguage, in contrast, is its externalised, social side. I-language is somehow “inside the brain” whereas E-language is “out there in society”: examples are what we use to call English, Spanish, Ojibwa or Indonesian No such thing as I–language or “human language” is accessible to observation, of course, and human language as such is a mere construct. But it is just that supposed, hidden phenomenon, the I-language, which is usually assigned the primary value, whereas the directly observable phenomenon – the individual languages and linguistic varieties as they are really used by real speakers in real situations – is seen as a mere epiphenomenon of Ilanguage. As a result, there has been a widespread tendency to consider similar abstract constructs such as langue, competence or human language, as the primary object of research. Maybe this is a consequence of the folk theory of essences (Lakoff and Johnson 1999), or of the traditional tendency to see what is most abstract, less in direct touch with “reality”, as most important. Or perhaps it is a consequence of the theoretical reason, as defined by Bourdieu, which, through its exclusive interest in artificial constructs, annihilates its object of study, a problem even more serious if we are not conscious of it: [D]ans la mesure où elle engage un mode de pensée qui suppose la mise en suspens de la nécessité pratique et met en œuvre des instruments de pensée construits contra la logique de la pratique, [...] la vision scolastique s’expose à détruire purement et simplement son objet ou à engendrer de purs artefacts

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lorsqu’elle s’applique sans réflexion critique à des pratiques qui sont le produit d’une tout autre vision. Le savant qui ne sait pas ce qui le définit en tant que savant, c’est-à-dire le “point de vue scolastique”, s’expose à mettre dans la tête des agents sa propre vision scolastique; à imputer à son objet ce qui appartient à la manière de l’appréhender, au mode de connaissance.2 (Bourdieu 1994: 219)

Of course we always seek generalizations and, certainly, it is generalization that science is about, not the mere observation and subsequent description of directly perceptible phenomena, although there seems to be no reason (apart from philosophical preferences) for the rejection of whatever is immediately perceptible in exclusive favour of their assumed hidden reality. In order to reach valuable generalizations about human language, that is, in order to be able to understand what human language can be, we have to study the variety of human languages – in the plural. This does not mean, at any rate, that one should look back to induction as the only means for the scientific study of language. But even if introspection has to be accepted as one basic tool of linguistic and cognitive study (Gibbs and Matlock 1999), within a general epistemological framework based on abduction (Bernárdez 1995), introspection cannot be the exclusive tool, either: it has to be supplemented by the careful scrutiny of (real) language data. Cognitive and functional linguistics is a recognisably empirical discipline, and as our object, language, is multiple, our empirical study must equally be multiple, i.e., multilinguistic. 2.

Relating language(s) and cognition

Another undisputed fact about language is that it stands in very close relation to cognition. The problem, of course, is understanding and explaining 2. [In as far as it implies a way of thinking which suspends practical need and puts to work tools of thought which were built against the logic of practice, […] the scholastic point of view runs the risk of annihilating its object and engendering mere artefacts whenever it is applied, without a previous critical reflection, to practices which are the product of a completely different perspective. The scholar who does not know what defines him as a scholar, that is, who ignores the “scholastic point of view”, risks the danger of assigning his own scholastic view to the heads of his agents; of assigning to his object what belongs to the way of apprehending, to the way of knowing.] (All translations are by EB unless otherwise noted)

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the nature of such relation, as the answer depends, among other things, on how we choose to define language and cognition. As things now stand, in most varieties of Cognitive Linguistics (CL) it is an accepted fact that we can get to at least some knowledge of cognition through the study of language, and vice versa, i.e., that our knowledge of cognition, acquired by other, non linguistic, means, will improve our understanding of linguistic phenomena. Of course, the main question deals with the relation itself that has to be taken to hold between language and cognition. The different answers provisionally given to the question are responsible for the variety of approaches to language, cognition and their interrelations. It is assumed that through the study of language – standing as it does in such intimate relation to cognition, and therefore wired into our brains in some way or other – we can get to know more about cognition itself. We tend to see cognition as a merely individual phenomenon and more or less strictly determined by the human genome, which implies its universality and invariability throughout the human species. The metaphor COGNITION IS THE BRAIN could be formulated that would form the basis for this view (Bernárdez 2005). Interestingly, this looks much like a revised version of the Chomskyan view which keeps untouched the individual, innate, internal features that lurk in the I of I-language, although the scope of the innate component is quite different in Generative Grammar and the CL approach, as a consequence of their following the premises of “first generation” vs. “second generation cognitive science, as defined by Lakoff and Johnson (1999) In this context, variation seems principally impossible: one human cognition – one human language. A refined version of Noam Chomsky’s Universal Grammar? How could interlinguistic variation be explained, if interpersonal cognitive variation is precluded? In addition to its (probable) epistemological implausibility, this approach is methodologically dangerous. If the study of human language – the construct, realized in individual linguistic varieties – is a way toward the knowledge of cognition, we run the risk of unduly generalizing from one single language to the whole of human cognition. The relation between language and cognition could be understood, then, in an unjustifiable form: a particular language ≈ human cognition.3 The

3. Fuchs (1997: 6): It is quite risky “d’hypostasier cette langue, et de généraliser indûment de la langue aux langues, puis des langues au langage” [to hypostasise

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result of this kind of error could be summarized in the words of Bateson (2002: 2212) in his devastating review of Pinker’s (2002) The Blank Slate: “[W]hat Pinker happily calls human nature is in reality individual nature and depends critically on the circumstances of that person’s life”. It might be, too, that when we draw conclusions of (supposedly) universal cognitive validity we are in fact repeating the same error, viz. seeing as universally human what is restricted to the speakers of a particular language. A similar caveat has been recently expressed by others, e.g. in relation to such fields as evolutionary psychology (a field where Pinker is to be included), behavioural genetics (Ehrlich and Feldman 2003) and cross-cultural psychology (Ratner and Hui 2003). Studying language on the basis of one language or only a few languages is indeed dangerous, as we could tend to assign a universal value to a certain language-specific feature. Unless we are fully conscious of the danger implicit in undue generalizations on the basis of one or only a few – usually closely related – languages, our conclusions on human cognition will be misled: we shall be calling “human cognition” what is in reality individual cognition which depends critically on the circumstances of a particular social and cultural group and of a particular language. 2.1.

Language structures vs. language use

There exist several reasons for the preference toward one single language – English nowadays, while before it was Latin –, a preference both methodological and philosophical but also, much too frequently, simply cultural and ideological.4 Linguistics, including CL, needs to carry out an in-depth this particular language and unduly generalize from that language to languages, then from languages to human language]. 4. Without entering into the necessary details, which will be the object of a more detailed analysis to be published soon, the following can be briefly noted: (a) we run the risk to assign what is idiosyncratic, both linguistically and culturally, a general, universal status; a risk much too apparent and frequent to be ignored and which affects other approaches to human cognition, as we saw above in our quotation of Bateson 2002. (b) If such a wrong assignment takes place, we could be assigning to human cognition certain features which might be exclusive of the English language, as was the case in centuries past with Latin, whose grammar was not only seen as the model for the grammar of any other language, but was given the status of the “correct way of thinking”. (c) A trend can de-

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reflection on the rationale of our scientific endeavours, in line with Bourdieu’s proposal cited above. Indeed, among of the reasons for this type of preference is the fact that Language, human language, has been mainly associated with the structures of language as an abstraction from their real use. Although this perspective on language is often linked to the writings of Ferdinand de Saussure, in fact it has dominated the field since the very beginnings of the study of Greek, Latin and Sanskrit grammar. The structures of language – whatever they are taken to be – seem much simpler, stable and easier to define than the chaotic appearance of linguistic usage. In fact, since the beginnings of contemporary linguistics, we have tried to keep questions of use neatly separated from Linguistics (or Grammar) proper. There were a few attempts to overcome that situation, as in Textlinguistics (Bernárdez 1995, 1999). This neat separation of grammar and use/usage is being abandoned nowadays in CL, with the development of “usage based” models of grammar: A usage-based theory, whether its object of study is internal or external linguistic system, takes seriously the notion that the primary object of study is the language people actually produce and understand. Language in use is the best evidence we have for determining the nature and specific organization of linguistic systems. (Kemmer and Barlow 2000: xv)

These authors (Kemmer and Barlow 2000: viii–xxii) characterize usagebased models as sharing “a set of characteristic assumptions”: (a) The intimate relation between linguistic structures and instances of use of language; (b) the importance of frequency; (c) comprehension and production as integral, rather than peripheral, to the linguistic system; (d) focus on the role of learning and experience in language acquisition; (e) linguistic representations as emergent, rather than stored as fixed entities; (f) importance of usage data in theory construction and description; (g) the intimate relation between usage, synchronic variation and diachronic change; (h) the interconnectedness of the linguistic system with non-

velop to neglect the study of other, less well known languages because the results “would be there” at any rate in English (let's not forget that this was a charge much too frequently done to Generative Grammar). And (d) as a language – any language – is always accompanied by a certain culture and ideology, the excessive generalization of English as the point of reference brings about a similar expansion in the other fields: one more aspect of la pensée unique and cultural globalization.

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linguistic cognitive systems; (i) the crucial role of context in the operation of the linguistic system. Of course, such a view of language and grammar is not new, as most of these assumptions have been a familiar element in many functional models, as in most versions of textlinguistics, for quite a long time; but it does represent a significant shift in the “dominant trends” of linguistics. Be it as it may, there is no longer any need to justify the possibility and convenience of taking usage as a central element of language, including the much more restricted area traditionally called “grammar”. Now, instead of the traditional emphasis on form or the mere pairing of form and meaning in the absence of any context or conditions of use, it is this usage-based grammar that can serve as the focus of typological and variationist research, instead of the traditional, noncontextual, abstract models of grammar. The role of usage goes far beyond grammar, though, for its relevance permeates the whole of language, for instance in the study of metonymy, where the matter is not simply whether a certain type of metonymy is possible for human cognition; let us mention the – much too famous – metonymic expressions of the type The ham sandwich has left without paying. Perhaps it would be much more interesting to analyse why it is that some languages – some cultures – accept such metonymies whereas in others, certain conditions must hold for them to be possible, and why in still others, metonymic utterances like these would be rejected in all circumstances. In general, why do languages differ so widely in the type and extent of metonymic reference they are willing to accept: if it were just a matter of being cognitively possible, once we discovered that a FOOD FOR CUSTOMER metonymy is possible, or, instead, and more probably, a selection within the complete “restaurant script”, as proposed by Ruiz de Mendoza and Otal Campo (2002: 30–31, 54ff), there would not be much else to say. However, languages like Spanish impose considerable restrictions on certain types of metonymic usage, as e.g. reference to a human being through variable, non intrinsic or essential features; or the creation of verbs on the basis of an instrumental argument (as in English to finger); all this needs to be explained. At the same time this usage-centred perspective could permit an explanation of the existence of variation itself. Variation is the inescapable consequence of use. We could perhaps be willing to accept that human cognition is invariable, although absence of variation may be too strong a hypothesis, if due attention is paid to the reality of biological systems. This would prevent variation, but the constantly varying conditions of interac-

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tion, the basis of linguistic use, have variation as their immediate, inescapable consequence. Remember, by the way, that it was the acceptance of the role of variation that led to the redefinition and modernization of historical linguistics (the basic reference is Labov 1966), which had traditionally suffered from the same exclusive preference toward the mere study of structures. Another interesting point is that, whereas we could, perhaps, see cognition as an internal, individual phenomenon, and study at least some parts of language in that spirit, whenever we try to look at language use we enter into the arena of activity that is necessarily associated with interaction: between the individual and other individuals, between the individual(s) and the environment. 2.2.

Individual thinking, synergic action?

The distinction we have been dealing with is in the last term one between the individual and its inner states on the one hand and, on the other – as soon as language use, communication enters the picture – the collectivity, i.e., the individuals in interaction, in an active, externalised state. Or between thought, which we assume to be a purely individual matter, and action, which necessarily implies an outward movement of the individual: toward its environment and toward other individuals. We assume that individual cognition “produces” something, so to speak – of course, no conduit metaphor is intended here – which is then “put to action”: for instance, a certain grammatical construction which is then used in communicative interaction with other individuals; or the plan for an action, which is then carried out. Thinking would thus be an individual affair, whereas activity is necessarily interactive. But note that whereas the interactive character of activity is the direct result of observation, the purely individual character of thinking is merely hypothetical. We tend to assume that individual, “inward”, autonomous thinking enjoys some kind of pre-eminence over the supraindividual, “outward” activity; and over any kind of cognition directed towards immediate action or interaction, an idea, by the way, that has extremely old roots in Western thinking. This view is not necessarily right, however; see for instance Peter Harder’s (1999, 2003) comments on the limited autonomy of cognition and language; others have emphasized the importance of the collective, social component of human cognition, including its ontogenetical development

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(Geeraerts 1999; Semin and Smith 2002; Tomasello and Rakoczy 2003). Pierre Bourdieu’s (1980, 1994) emphasis on the “logic of practice”, as will be shown later, is in a very similar vein. Many philosophers and psychologists have also emphasized the social, active nature of the human psyche including its “higher cognitive functions”; and we should remember the inseparability of cognition and emotion, as demonstrated by Antonio Damasio (1994, 1999) and proposed much earlier by philosophers like Maurice Merleau–Ponty (1945) and psychologists like Lev Vygotsky (1934 [1962], 1978), among many others. Sinha (1999) proposed the term neural solipsism for the view of cognition as a purely neural issue, without any consideration of things external; i.e., for a view of cognition as a purely internal, individual phenomenon. 3.

Embodiment

In the last twenty years we have witnessed a significant widening in the scope of cognition: from a purely internal view as in first generation cognitive science, to the nowadays firmly entrenched view of cognition as embodied (for some recent discussions, see the contributions to Cognitive Systems Research 3 (2002) and Cognitive Linguistics 13: 3 (2002); Sinha and Jensen de López 2000; Kimmel this volume). Embodiment means that cognition cannot function without the physical reality of the body, which is open to the environment. Unfortunately, there seems to exist no clear and universally accepted definition of embodiment, as is shown in great detail by Chrisley and Ziemke (2002), Ziemke (2003) and Kimmel (this volume, see also Rohrer in BLM, volume 1). Certainly, it refers to the relation of cognition and the body, an issue that has worried Western philosophers since the beginning, as shown by Vesey (1965) in his historical review. But a basic concept like embodiment clearly needs sufficient clarification because, as Vesey himself pointed out (1965: 11), “[p]hilosophical problems arise from the inadequacy of the concepts in terms of which we think of things”. The term embodiment is so much in vogue nowadays in AI and the cognitive sciences that we have to try to determine as precisely as possible what is meant by the term. Unfortunately, a merely lexical analysis does not solve the problem. The verb to embody has the following main meanings, according to the Webster’s Dictionary (1971 s.v.):

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1: To give a body to (a spirit): invest with a body: INCARNATE. 2a: to cause to become material or sensual: deprive of spirituality b: to make concrete by expression in perceptible form […] 3: to cause to become a body or part of a body: INCORPORATE, ORGANIZE […] 4: to represent in human or animal form: PERSONIFY […]

It is a loan translation of the Latin incorporare (through its French counterpart), itself built on the basis of the word for body, thus meaning ‘to bring into a body’.5 The Latin word also appears in English as incorporate, albeit with a slightly different meaning, as the immediate reference to body is lost. According to the Webster’s Dictionary, the word means: 1a: to unite with or introduce into something already existent usu. so as to form an indistinguishable whole that cannot be restored to the previously separated elements without damage […] b: to admit to membership in a corporation […] 2a: to combine (ingredients) into one consistent whole […] b: to bring together in an association […] 3: to give material form to: EMBODY

Only meaning #3 coincides with that of embody, so that in English both terms are not synonymous.6 Embody occupies a special position in the group it forms together with incorporate and incarnate, as it includes a transparent reference to the body, so that the meaning can be reinterpreted – and, as in this case, changed into a (semi-)technical term – in a rather free way. That is, the technical meaning of embody is not necessarily closely related to its non-technical meaning. The problem is that no single precise definition seems to have gained widespread acceptance. A negative, collateral consequence of this complex semantic picture is the term’s correspondence in other languages and, hence, the problem of adequately translating the term itself. In the Romance languages, forms like incorporare have been in use for quite a long time,7 the translation of embody into these languages is not without difficulties, as incorporare and its 5. But originally in Latin body was understood, in the use of this verb, as a ‘military body’, a corps, not a physical one! 6. The electronic edition of the Oxford Dictionary has as definition 3a in embody the same as one of the definitions for incorporate, viz. “To cause to become part of a body, to unite into one body; to incorporate (a thing) in a mass of material, (particular elements) in a system or complex unity”. 7. In Spanish it is first attested in 1386, according to Corominas’ (1967) etymological dictionary; much earlier in French; the first English example is from 1398, while the first attested occurrence of to embody in the meaning that interests us is from 1601 (Shakespeare).

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derivatives are not always usable, and the same happens with the descendants of Latin incarnare, built on carnis ‘flesh’ (incarnate).8 In the opposite direction, some problems in the reception of Bourdieu’s concepts, especially that of the habitus,9 in US sociology and anthropology may be due to the lack of full correspondence between the French sociologist’s use of incorporer and incorporation and their English rendering as embody. To mention just one possible instance of such misunderstandings, Strauss and Quinn (1997: 45) seem to understand the habitus as an internal state of the individual, so to speak; they define the notion as “intrapersonal knowledge”, and its extrapersonal component is apparently separated from it. Their comments on the embodiment of the habitus refer thus to the notion of embodiment as current in most of American discussions, as something merely affecting the individual and his/her body. For Bourdieu, however, as I understand his writings, the separation of the intra- and the extrapersonal is just of very secondary interest, as the habitus is an essentially cultural and social object which is then incorporated in individuals; the habitus is acquired by an individual through explicit and implicit learning, but also through direct experience and imitation. Once acquired, the habitus is internalised, i.e., incorporated, ‘embodied’. Embodiment is thus the result, not the beginning, as Strauss and Quinn seem to imply.10 In fact, and in consonance with our observations above on the dangers of taking Eng-

8. In the framework of European Existential philosophy, Nicola Abbagnano (1942) used terms like corporeità, corporeizzazione, etc., which do correspond quite closely to present-day embodiment terms. For Abbagnano, knowledge, as the result of active “research” (ricerca) is only possible through the existence of the body which, so to speak, opens up our mind to the existence of other entities and, through it, to the knowledge of our own existence. 9. Bourdieu used the Latin term, habitus, which he always writes in italics, as a means to avoid confusion with habitude, a distinction that has not always been rightly understood. As Mounier writes (2001: 41), “Habitus but not habitude, in order to signify clearly that it is no automatic mechanism for the reproduction of preestablished schemas, but a generating principle for those products of action which cannot be mechanically deduced from the objective conditions of their production.” In this and other respects, Bourdieu’s habitus must not be confused – equated – with William James’ notion of habit, which is a simple means of (cognitive, but also sensorimotor) lowering of effort (cf. Moya Santoyo and García Vega 2001) 10. See also Lizardo (2003) on the problems of correctly understanding the cognitive character of the habitus.

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lish as the linguistic point of reference, some of the problems involved in the understanding and treatment of embodiment in other languages may be due to the uncritical acceptance of one meaning of the word in English, instead of the complete meaning of the word, as a whole. The same can hold, perhaps, for the indeterminacy in the uses of the term, which Ziemke (2003) analyses in detail. It would seem that what is sometimes sought is not so much the adequacy of a term+concept as its fit to the lexical meaning of an English word, which in turn is understood in a certain way. A problem that has been plaguing certain areas of linguistics at least since the onset of Generative Grammar. 3.1.

What is the body

Central to the comprehension of embodiment is its body part. Nothing apparently more obvious than the definition of body; but things are not so simple, as the problems of interpretation have shown. Burkitt’s (2002: 227) comments, on the background of his discussion of Bourdieu’s habitus, come directly to our point: [T]he body is not to be thought of as a discreet entity, for we can consider the bodily habitus only insofar as we also consider the technological means through which the body operates and turns itself into a self. This is also true for the moral dispositions that moral habits inculcate, for these are dependent on the social institutions in which people’s moral actions are located.

In fact, just as in the case of cognition, the body can be seen as an individual or a social reality. The body is socialized, it even reflects the social, economic and cultural groups an individual belongs to, as Bourdieu emphasized repeatedly. We can talk about the body as a physical object or we can choose to take into account also, in the first place, its functions: not only the physical, but also the social functions of the human body. Not just what the body is, but what the body does. And what the body does is also outward bound, directed toward others, i.e., social. And that activity carried out by the individual but in a social setting, modifies the body itself at the same time. The body, just like cognition – and rather counterintuitively, too – is also social, collective. And if cognition is unthinkable without the body, the opposite also holds: the activity – and the mere external and internal reality – of the body is directly linked to the activity of cognition. And if the architecture and organization of our brain is susceptible to modification by our experience of the world, and this experience necessar-

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ily has to include the individual’s activity, as in Edelman’s proposal (Edelman 1992; Thelen and Smith 1994), there is no way out of this indissolubility of body and mind. Taken in isolation and/or as limited to the individual, however, we know the many problems that this dichotomous perspective has caused throughout the history of Western thinking but also in the case of Cognitive Linguistics and Cognitive Science. Certainly, this view reminds us of Maturana and Varela’s (1987) theory of enaction (see also Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991): even a biological species is to be defined primarily by the perceptible enactions of its members, not only by their genetic endowment. In terms of activity, far from neural and even organismic solipsism, the body and the mind are undistinguishable: we can talk about one or the other, study them separately but just to make the analysis simpler. 4.

Situatedness

But we have to widen our understanding of cognition even further. We have to include situatedness in cognition. I am not going to enter into the historical details of this view which, interestingly, goes back to some much older proposals, especially those of the Soviet school of psychology of the 1930’s as represented mainly by Vygotsky, Luria, Voloshinov and Leont’ev (for recent evaluations and a review of its historical background, see Luria 1976–2003; Frawley 1997; Cole et al. 1997; Ratner 2000; Bedny, Karwowski and Bedny 2001); but also to Dewey’s theory of action (Garrison 2001), or the French philosopher, Merleau-Ponty (Burkitt 2003; Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991, passim) and, more recently, Pierre Bourdieu (see Burkitt 2002 for a brief comparative analysis of his and Merleau-Ponty’s ideas in this respect; for a much more detailed introduction, Mounier 2001). Similarly, as Zlatev (2003: 306) points out, certain ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s are in a similar vein: The conceptual framework of situated embodiment […] incorporates the principle of embodiment […] emphasized within cognitive semantics, but complementing it with Wittgenstein’s (1953) view of language as “forms of life” embedded, or situated, within socio-cultural practices.

The notion of situatedness is a great step forward, for it now incorporates the need to consider the specific, concrete sociocultural situation in which the individual’s cognitive activity is to take place. Even in the traditional views of embodiment, it is the individual alone who is referred to, in isola-

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tion from (a) other individuals, (b) the activities to be carried out, and (c) the sociocultural component of the environment. In contrast, situatedness leads directly to interaction, to interindividual contact, because practically any possible sociocultural environment includes interaction with other individuals. Thus, complex forms of non-individualistic cognition enjoy a longranging tradition which can fruitfully be made use of in CL. In this view, cognition is impossible to dissociate from interaction, understood as social activity. That is, cognition is not just “something that takes place” inside the individual’s brain, or only in relation to the individual body’s active perception, or apperception, of the environment, i.e., embodiment, but something that is done, enacted in relation with the individual’s whole activity in a particular social and cultural setting or situation. As this view of cognition implies collective activity and interaction, it can be seen as a collective form of cognition (cf. also Sharifian, this volume) Similarly, Michael Tomasello’s recent work (1999, 2000a, 2000b, Tomasello and Rakoczy 2003) points in this same direction when considering the phylogenesis and ontogenesis of human cognition: Following the lead of Vygotsky […], Bruner […], Cole […], and other cultural psychologists, my view is that what makes human cognition unique, more than anything else, is its collective nature (Tomasello 1999). That is, all of the many artifacts that enable and empower human cognition […] are the joint product of many people working over many years, combining and accumulating skills and knowledge. (Tomasello 2000a: 357)

In fact, Tomasello’s view of imitation, attention to other people’s actions and development of a “theory of mind” as the central element in the acquisition of language by children, also as opposed to the shortcomings of those same social activities in apes, witnesses the extraordinary importance of social, i.e., collective activity, for the development of individual cognition. Similarly, palaeontologists point to the richness of the social interaction of Homo sapiens in contrast to that of Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) as the main reason for the prevalence of the former (Arsuaga 1999, 2001; Arsuaga and Martínez 1998), instead of some – impossible to demonstrate – pre-eminence of any a priori cognitive abilities (after all, Neanderthals had a bigger brain!). In Cognitive Linguistics, mainly but not only when we are dealing with the multiplicity of human languages and their nearly limitless variability,

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we need to pay particular attention to the situatedness of cognition. According to the school of situated cognition, behavior can only be understood in the context of complex real-world situations. An important focus of research should therefore be the relationship between people and the external world (and how the behavior of people is coordinated with the external world) without the mediation of mental planning (i.e., without explicit inferencing over descriptive models of the world and human behavior). (Mandelblit and Zachar 1998: 253)

5.

Beyond situatedness

In situated cognition special attention has to be paid to collective forms of behaviour and activity. The individual’s cognition bears the imprint of the types of social activity an individual can be expected to carry out in the sociocultural group(s) s/he belongs to. And the individual’s cognition will heavily depend on the conditions of the activity itself (see León 2002; Semin and Smith 2002; Hirose 2002; Alterman and Garland 2000; Ratner 2000; Clark 1999). But what is more, the (individual) cognition of all the individuals participating in similar collective activities will develop in similar directions, in accordance with the needs imposed by those activities: a process of self-organization takes place. We can say that in relation to a particular activity, all the participating individuals will collaborate in such a way that one can speak of distributed or collective cognition. As the action in question is carried out through the common activity of a number of collaborating individuals, the term synergic cognition can be proposed. It is to be understood as a special form of distributed cognition where the interaction itself plays a prominent role, also over time, as a collectively (and therefore synergically) established and socially accepted cognitive activity; it is the result of a historical process (see also Musolff this volume). Mandelblit and Zachar (1998: 254) make these comments on distributed cognition: Cognitive activity may involve processes internal to the single individual, the individual in coordination with a set of tools, or a group of individuals in interaction with each other and a set of tools […]. The different individuals and tools constitute the unit of cognition rather than merely modifying or amplifying the internal structures of a single mind.

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Now, these observations fit human activity and cognition, but also language. In fact, this view is the modernization and further development of the paradigm of the study of language as (social) activity (in connection with the Soviet psychological school, see Leont’ev 1969). We may summarize things as follows: 1) Human languages exist only in the form of social activity 2) Linguistic activity is essentially collective, cross-individual, i.e., it is not simply carried out inside a (social) group, rather the reasons for its realization, the form of its realization and the results of the activity itself are collective, social in nature; in other words, the process of linguistic activity cannot be understood solely in terms of the individual. At the same time, language is a part of each individual's cognitive system and the link between the individual and the collective aspects has to be the centre of our research. 3) As a direct consequence of its social aspect, language is an inherently historical phenomenon. Only if exclusive attention is paid to the individual aspect can history be forgotten. But, at the same time, due attention has to be paid to the apparent atemporality of an individual's cognition and language. The tension between both inseparable aspects of the same phenomenon was in part the object of study of the Soviet school of psycholinguistics in the 1920's and 1930’s, which was able to show that even at the level of the individual, change is inescapable: individual cognition was in fact affected by changes that were primarily social in nature. Phenomena that are nowadays usually examined solely at the individual level, like metaphor and metonymy (but see Yu, this volume, for an alternative non-individualistic view of metaphor), when examined in historical depth, show the extent to which most of our individual, contemporary metaphors and metonymies are in fact the result of social, historic crystallisation. This tension between the historical and the ahistorical, apart from its philosophical and methodological interest, is also the object of research by those investigating theories of complex systems. 4) Linguistic activity (linguistic use) determines linguistic forms, i.e., linguistic structures. In a double process: a. as in any form of activity, a number of alternatives exist; one (or more) of them are selected as the preferred form(s) of activity in stipulated contextual conditions; and

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b. these preferred forms of activity are then integrated in the whole life of the individual: they can correspond to Bourdieu’s habitus. Being “incorporated” – or embodied, in this sense –, they become a part of that individual’s cognitive abilities for action. 5) Through cognitive integration in the individual mind, those preferred forms of language activity, of language use, are then gradually entrenched in the individual’s mind, up to a point where their originally immediate relation with activity is lost, and they become a part of what we like to see as “cognition” tout court, i.e., individual cognition. Many examples could be introduced in order to show that this is how things probably work. Let me refer to a single case in very brief terms. Metaphor and metonymy are usually analysed in terms of the individual, as if they were the instantaneous or, better, atemporal application of certain cognitive mechanisms. However, in most cases the metaphors and metonymies accepted and used in/by a sociocultural community are the historical product of the synergic cognitive activity of the community,11 which determines – in the way that it is done with other habitus – the structure of the metaphoric fields. In the case of metonymy, it is the synergically established and allowed or disallowed forms of reference which determine the forms, use and structure of metonymical reference. The individuals, in the vast majority of cases, limit themselves to taking up and using socially established “labels” and applying them without the need for any special cognitive activity on their part. As is the case with all forms of distributed and synergic cognition, the participation of the collectivity brings about a significant decrease in the individuals’ cognitive effort (for more details, Bernárdez 2005; and in a similar vein, in this volume, see also Kimmel, Kristiansen, Yu and Zinken, Hellsten and Nerlich). 6.

Is language variation possible at all?

In our view, linguistic variation is the direct result of the character of language as a social activity, under the effect of the contextual conditions of 11. Sharifian (2003) clearly implies that his “cultural conceptualizations” are susceptible to historical change, as everything social. This can be interpreted in the sense that metaphorical conceptualization, metaphors, change over time. The same can be said of Zinken, Hellsten and Nerlich’s discourse metaphors (this volume). See also Frank (this volume).

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linguistic activity itself and of those imposed by the participation of a number of individuals, over time, in a common activity. This is also the origin of our current construct language as opposed to real languages: language would be what is left after peeling away everything that is directly related to social cognition and activity. Apparently, what is left is very little indeed. According to Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch (2002), the only element in human language that seems to satisfy this condition is recursivity. 7.

The habitus: A tool for the study of collective, situated, embodied cognition and language

In addition, we propose integrating Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus into CL and situated Cognitive Science. Although the habitus, as all of Bourdieu’s basic concepts, has been the object of constant modification by its author, the following can be used as its basic definition; the habitus are systèmes de dispositions durables et transposables, structures structurées prédisposées à fonctionner comme structures structurantes, c'est-à-dire en tant que principes générateurs et organisateurs de pratiques et de représentations qui peuvent être objectivement adaptées à leur but sans supposer la visée consciente de fins et la maîtrise expresse des opérations nécessaires pour les atteindre, objectivement “réglées” et “régulières” sans être en rien le produit de l'obéissance à des règles et, étant tout cela, collectivement or12 chestrées sans être le produit de l'action organisatrice d'un chef d'orchestre. (Bourdieu 1994: 88)

The habitus is simultaneously social and individual; it produces socially established forms of practice, i.e., individual behaviours that agree with the social preferences; the habitus is acquired by the individual through learning, experience and social practice, which leads necessarily to interpersonal variation: no two individuals can have exactly the same background, 12. [Systems of durable and transposable dispositions, structured structures ready to function as structuring structures, i.e., as generative principles and organisers of practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their goal but without the conscious knowledge of the means and the mastery of the operations needed to reach that goal, objectively ‘ruled’ and ‘regular’ without being at all the result of the following of rules and, being all that, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the organising action of a conductor.]

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so their set of habitus will always be partially different, as will any individual form of carrying out any activity, i.e., an individual habitus. At the same time the constant process of feedback and individual reelaboration of the available habitus will insure that a high degree of similarity does arise, especially among the members of a particular cultural, economic, professional or, in general, social groups. And this, in turn, brings about social differentiation (Bourdieu 1979). Carl Ratner’s comments (2000: 11) on this issue are especially enlightening: The habitus is a set of expectations, assumptions and dispositions to react which result from particular forms of social experience with particular social conditions. Therefore, people’s actions are not freely constructed, rather they are guided by the socially built-up habitus. […] Social experience is profoundly embedded in the habitus and in ensuing psychological functions and behavior. Social experience is not only internalized intellectually; it becomes inscribed in our bodies.

The habitus, then, gets entrenched (embodied) in the individual’s mind, and its functioning is mainly unconscious, although the individual can become conscious of his/her realization of a particular habitus in certain conditions, mainly when confronted with some anomalous circumstance or when unexpected results are observed. But habitus is also firmly entrenched in the body: [L’] importance du corps et de la posture, cette “géométrie dans le monde sensible” […] l’analyse structurale la néglige totalement par préjugé intellectualiste, […] parce qu’elle n’est pas pensée, mais simplement agie. Dans la mesure en effet où le structuralisme s’intéresse avant tout aux représentations mentales et aux opérations logiques qui y sont inscrites, il ne peut penser le corps que comme représentation du corps, en ignorant la physique corporelle qui découle de sa matérialité.13 (Mounier 2001: 25–26)

Interestingly, recent studies on the consciousness and awareness of actions realized by oneself or by other individuals (Frith 2002) have shown that we carry out our actions without much or any previous conscious planning and 13. [The importance of the body and its position, this “geometry in the sensitive world” […] was neglected by structural annalists due to intellectualistic prejudice […] because it is not thought, but simply done. As structuralism is especially interested in the mental representations and the logic operations inscribed in them, this school cannot think of the body but as a representation of the body, while ignoring the bodily physics derived from its materiality.]

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in a basically automatic fashion. Only when unexpected results or consequences arise does awareness reappear. In fact, the speed of our actions is too high for us to be able to really “feel” what we are doing, and we simply assume what is happening: we do not “feel”, even less instruct the movement of our arm when grasping something: What we are aware of must be based on predicted rather than actual sensations. We are very surprised if the actual sensations do not match those we predicted, as when we pick up an object that is much lighter than we anticipated. (Frith 2002: 483)

Similarly, the habitus must not be confused with the “habit”. Indeed, it was to avoid this confusion that Bourdieu selected the Latin term from the beginning. Nonetheless, precisely that cognitive aspect of the term, its confusion in English with the concept of “habit”, was what led to the widespread misinterpretation and consequent rejection of the concept in US sociology, according to Lizardo (2003). On the other hand, a recent proposal (Roos and Rotkirch 2003) opened up the possibility of having some habitus genetically established in human beings, rather in the vein of evolutionist psychology: [W]e could treat habitus as something between nature and culture, as a meeting point of the two in the sense that habitus contains both extremely permanent elements of human nature and the variability brought about by cultural and social adaptation. (Roos and Rotkirch 2003: 4)

According to their proposal, the following would have to be added to Bourdieu’s characterization of the habitus: 1. The fact that lots of our bodily functions and emotions are based on evolved characteristics 2. The fact that the ways in which habitus-based actions (instincts) function and work back in the society are to some extent biologically bounded and determined. (Roos and Rotkirch 2003: 5)

The notion of the habitus will prove fruitful as it can provide a unified account of other recent cognitive concepts which, although in different ways and with different goals, also try to link cognition and linguistic activity, as Sharifian’s (2003) cultural conceptualizations and schemas, Werth’s (1999) megametaphors,14 Zinken, Hellsten and Nerlich’s (this 14. “[M]etaphors can also be sustained, as a kind of undercurrent, over an extended text, which allows extremely subtle conceptual effects to be achieved” (Werth 1999: 323).

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volume) discourse metaphors and cultural metaphors, Kristensen’s (this volume) idealized cultural models, or Kimmel’s (this volume) notion of cultural embodiment. Much remains to be studied about the habitus in relation to cognition, activity, the human body and language. For example, Quist (2002) approaches the concept of the linguistic standard in terms of the habitus, while Mounier summarizes the importance of the habitus as a mediator between the individual and the social: L’agent est donc comme la monade leibnizienne, à la fois individu singulier et reflet d’une totalité à laquelle il appartient. Guidé dans sa vie quotidienne, dans sa confrontation à l’événement même le plus inattendu par “un ensemble de dispositions durables” inscrites en lui, ses actions ne se définissent ni comme le pur produit de sa volonté consciente […] ni comme des réponses automatiques à des stimuli, mais comme un processus continu d’invention limité par les conditions objectives “appréhendées à travers les schèmes socialement constitués qui organisent sa perception”.15 (Mounier 2001: 41)

8.

The lessons from biology

Our proposals can find confirmation outside linguistics and cognitive science proper in two areas: the study of collective animal behaviour and the physiological means for collective interaction. Remember that one of the main methodological tenets of the Cognitive Linguistics enterprise is that confirmation has to be sought from different, independent sources and, hence, converging lines of evidence. Some very brief notes will have to suffice here. First, animal behaviour. It is clear that animals – not only apes, or even primates – are able to coordinate among themselves in order to carry out an activity (Conradt and Roper 2003; Rands et al. 2003; Visscher 2003; Susi 15. [The agent is thus similar to Leibniz’s monad, at the same time a single individual and the reflection of the whole he belongs to. Guided in his everyday life, in his confrontation with even the most unexpected event, by “a set of durable dispositions” inscribed [or: embodied!] in him, his actions are defined neither as the mere result of his conscious will nor as the automatic response to stimuli, but as a continuous process of invention, limited by the objective conditions “apprehended through the socially constructed schemas which organize his perception.]

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and Ziemke 2001). Human beings dispose, thus, of an extremely old mechanism for the coordination of behaviour among individuals. Furthermore, this type of coordination needs to be studied through recourse to the tools of analysis afforded by theories of self-organization (Thelen and Smith 1994; Bernárdez 1995; Kelso 1995). Second, the physiological apparatus. Apart from other points of interest, the so-called Mirror Neuron System identified first in apes, then in humans (Stamenov and Gallese 2002; Kohler et al. 2002; Ferrari et al. 2000; Iacoboni et al. 1999; Rizzolatti and Arbib 1998) shows that we dispose of a special system of neurons, situated in close vicinity to the brain areas involved in language functions, specialized in the (visual or acoustic) identification of our own actions and those carried out by other conspecifics. These neurons are activated not only when the action is fully carried out, but also when it is simply intended.16 We are thus pre-wired for social interaction, for identifying ourselves in other people’s actions. The existence and development of what has been called “theories of mind”, which are now seen by many as one of the basic features of human cognition (Tomasello 1999), and the proposal to see much of our cognition in terms of “cognitive simulation” (Hesslow 2002), are just two extremely significant aspects of the importance of social interaction for the functioning of human cognition. Both sets of facts point in the same direction: that of a basic gapless continuity between the body and the mind, the individual and the social group. In all these areas, including imitation, understanding of others, etc., it is always necessarily the external, perceivable element that has to be at the forefront: enaction, interaction, linguistic activity and usage. 9.

Conclusion

From time to time it is necessary to look back at what we are doing and try to discern what might be wrong or, perhaps, simply less inadequate. From this general perspective I have identified a couple of significant problems that should be solved in the future developments of Cognitive Linguistics. Both correspond to two types of reductionism.

16. Recall, by the way, what was said above about our awareness of our own actions: it is our intention, not the action per se, that is the object of awareness.

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Firstly, there is the tendency to take one language as fully representative of human language in general and draw general conclusions on language and cognition from that single language – or from a very limited sample of languages. The main reason for this tendency is the idea that any single human being is fully representative for the whole of mankind. Secondly, there is the tendency to limit the scope of our study to individual cognition and language, abstracting away from both the element of cognition as activity and the social settings in which all activity, and hence most linguistic and cognitive processes, take place. Both tendencies go back to Chomskyan principles, which tried to see all of language and cognition in the mind of the individual. Through the years a number of shifts in perspective have taken place leading to a much broader and more open view of cognition. These shifts correspond to trends set up in certain non-dominant areas of linguistic study (mainly functional and textual linguistics); thus, nowadays cognition is seen as embodied, i.e., as taking place not only in the mind or the brain but in the whole body, including its functions, activities and contact with the individual’s environment. However, as we have seen, the notion of embodiment still needs much refinement and clarification, as it is frequently used in a rather intuitive, non-critical manner. In a further step forward, cognition is also seen as situated, i.e., as implying activities carried out by the individual under certain socioculturally given conditions. This enables us to go even further and break the limits of the individual, even in contact with the environment. In this paper I have tried to show that it is also necessary to include a form of cognitive activity carried out collectively by a group of individuals, which might be termed synergic cognition, and which implies forms of interindividual collaboration for the solving of problems with the least individual cognitive effort. I have briefly shown that similar advances have been made both in the study of animal behaviour and in the understanding of our brain functions, especially with the discovery, in apes and humans, of what is called the mirror-neuron system (Rizzolatti and Craighero 2004). This proposal is also very close to a number of recent approaches such as that of distributed cognition and most of the papers in this volume, especially those by Kimmel, Kristiansen, Yu, Zinken, Hellsten and Nerlich who approach a number of significant issues in cognitive linguistics using sociocognitive approaches. Finally, I have tried to show the potentiality of Bourdieu’s theory of practice for the type of cognitive and linguistic study approached here.

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Section B The sociocultural situatedness of scientific discourse

Entangled biological, cultural and linguistic origins of the war on invasive species Brendon M. H. Larson

Abstract The language of invasion biology reflects its sociocultural situatedness with three metaphorical elements: fears of invasion, an emphasis on competition, and prevalent militarism. These elements incorporate salient emotionally laden themes, which help to convince biologists and their audience that invasive species (IS) are a problem. I show that conceiving IS as invaders draws upon two congruent fears: that our bodies will be invaded by disease and our nations by foreigners. Once IS occur on a landscape, invasion biologists disproportionately perceive the interaction between IS and native species as competitive – a bias that is common in biology and alludes to the power of the competition metaphor. Finally, in concert with prevailing militaristic approaches to problem-solving, invasion biologists use militaristic language and actions to defend native landscapes and their species by exterminating IS. While biologists may not consciously manipulate public opinion about IS by using metaphors of invasion, competition and war, their uncritical use naturalizes an antagonistic way of relating to the natural world that may be counterproductive for conservation. Keywords: competition, conceptual metaphors, CONTAINER image schema, evolutionary biology, invasion biology, invasive species, militarism, rhetoric.

1.

Introduction

Helicopters recently flew over Anacapa Island, one of the California Channel Islands, so that pellets of a deadly anti-coagulant could be dropped along precise GPS gridlines to exterminate resident rats (Faulkner, Howald and Ortega 2001). Because the rats were non-native,1 abundant, and had 1. Non-native species – also known as alien, exotic, introduced or non-indigenous species – have been introduced by humans to “new, often distant, ranges”

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been observed eating the eggs of rare (and native) seabirds, invasion biologists who oversaw the project could justify its $1 million cost. Invasion biology was founded on concerns about species such as these rats, defined as invasive species (IS) because they spread and become problematic after humans introduced them. Only a small percentage of introduced species become IS. However, these IS tend to have great effects on the pre-existent community (see Mack et al. 2000; Baskin 2002 for reviews), so conservation biologists2 classify them as the second greatest threat to biodiversity (Wilcove et al. 1998). They also have tremendous economic costs (Pimentel 2002). In their influential review of biotic invasions, Mack et al. (2000) advised that Failure to address the issue of biotic invasions could effectively result in severe global consequences, including wholesale loss of agricultural, forestry, and fishery resources in some regions, disruption of the ecological processes that supply natural services on which human enterprise depends, and the creation of homogeneous, impoverished ecosystems composed of cosmopolitan species.

Consequently, invasion biologists feel justified in eradicating IS; the rats, for example, could gradually “homogenize” endemic communities of Anacapa Island. Another classic case of an invasive species – the ruddy duck in Europe – shows how invasion biologists justify the removal of a species. The ruddy duck is native to North America, but escaped from wildfowl collections in the U.K. in the 1950s and began to spread through Europe (Milton 2000). They weren’t considered a threat until the early 1990s when they entered Spain and began to hybridize with the rare, native white-headed duck. Since hybridization with the ruddy duck could lead to extinction of the white-headed duck, Spain began to kill its ruddy ducks. Trials to eliminate ruddy ducks from the U.K. began in 1999, and were overseen by a euphemistically named White-headed Duck Task Force. If ruddy ducks are not removed from Britain, the argument goes, there will always be a source for continued spread into neighboring European countries.

(Mack et al. 2000: 690). In contrast, native species occur in an area “naturally”, having either evolved there or dispersed there from somewhere else. 2. Invasion biology is a major subdiscipline of conservation biology, which is concerned with the more general issue of how to maintain biodiversity.

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As a biologist I sympathize with these concerns, but I am also skeptical because of how IS are framed.3 In the words of Takacs (1997: 8), How can one feel about the natural world as strongly as I do, and as do the biologists whose exploits I narrate, and not believe that those feelings approach the truth in some sense? How can I balance my healthy skepticism about conservation biologists’ proselytizing on behalf of biodiversity against my fervent hope that they succeed?

Invasion biologists derive substantial funding for and prestige from their cause, but numerous critics have questioned whether this is warranted (e.g., Sagoff 1999; Subramaniam 2001; Chew and Laubichler 2003). Invasion biology relies upon a narrative of native versus non-native that is seldom questioned by invasion biologists. In a recent critique of my research on potential implications of a metaphorical war against IS, for example, a well-known conservation biologist wrote: “The bottom line for me is that, given the abundant, massive, and seemingly insurmountable global conservation problems that we face, the semantics of dealing with invasive species is a low priority.” This comment belies a scientistic view that overlooks the extent to which this issue is inextricable from pre-existent cultural lenses. These lenses force us to think primordially in terms of “us” and “them”, which is reflected in the use of linguistic categories such as “native” and “invasive”, respectively. There is extensive evidence that ecologists do not see the world “as it is”, but through the eyes of their professional culture. These cultural influences have been documented by numerous historical studies (e.g., Fine and Christoforides 1991; Journet 1991; Barbour 1995) and specific attention to the over-representation of the notion of competition4 in ecological research 3. In a sense, conservation biologists have created IS, regardless of their effects. Humans are inscribed within IS, not only because we introduced them, but also because conservation biology itself is a human activity (Milton 2000). While cultural and linguistic features partly constitute IS, they do have effects (just as some native species do). Nonetheless, social problems only come about through communication, and one of my primary concerns is with the transformations that occur during this process. 4. Biologists classify competition, mutualism and predation as the three main types of biotic interaction. Competition is defined as an interaction where both partners are harmed by their interaction, whereas both benefit in mutualism (e.g., pollination systems, where insects derive nectar and/or pollen as “rewards” for enabling sexual reproduction between plants), and one (the predator) gains and the other (the prey) loses under predation.

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(Boucher 1986; Keller 1991). The ecologist Keddy (1989: 163), for example, proposed that: “Scientists can only draw models from the possibilities of which they are aware, and perhaps ecology has been hampered by restricted access to individuals (and ideas) offering co-operative models for society and nature.” Related arguments have been made about the bias towards militaristic metaphors in environmental science (Glotfelty 2000). A recent paper in Science concluded that “we should be concerned about what the frequent use of ‘natural enemies’5 (and the notable absence of ‘natural allies,’ describing an equally familiar set of ecological interactions) reveals about the ways in which we interpret nature through metaphorical lenses, especially in the current historical situation” (Chew and Laubichler 2003: 53). Here, I argue that invasion biology unduly adopts competitive and militaristic metaphors because of the cultural context in which invasion biologists are situated. Specifically, invasion biology reflects three aspects of its sociocultural situatedness: contemporary fears of invasion; a bias towards a competitive view of life; and the habit of applying militaristic metaphors to nearly every challenging situation. Invasion, competition and war are large-scale metaphors that circulate nomadically between segments of society, including science and society (Bono 1990; Maasen, Mendelsohn and Weingart 1995). They also reinforce one another, as small-scale individualistic competition is consistent with largerscale political militarism, which is often motivated by fears of invasion. I employ the tools of Cognitive Linguistics to analyze these metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), while also attending to their rhetorical (persuasive) effects (Eubanks 2000). The Lakoffian view of metaphor underscores the extent to which our metaphors influence how we conceptualize and act (Schön 1993). Bono (2003: 228) calls them “material metaphors: embodied metaphors-in-action”. As an example, the invasion biologists Davis, Thompson and Grime (2001: 3–4) observed that “ecologists during the past few decades […] have focused on the headline invaders, a small group of plants and animals that are not representative of the very large group of species that are currently colonizing new areas of the globe [in part because] funding and publication pressures prompt ecologists to promote new and exciting research themes”. However, they neglect the possibility that the allure of “battling against invaders” itself creates the emotional excitement of this field and its focus on dramatic cases and narratives. 5. “Natural enemies” are species that harm invasive species, but one of the points made by Chew and Laubichler (2003) is that the phrase is often used vaguely.

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I will not simply claim that biologists use these metaphors rhetorically to convince the public of a problem; rather, in the spirit of Cognitive Linguistics I will utilize examples from within the flagship journal of invasion biology, Biological Invasions, to show how this “rhetoric” operates within the field itself, revealing endemic patterns of thought. My approach follows Fine and Christoforides’ (1991: 377) study of the Great English Sparrow War6: “Our claim is not that the proponents of attacks on sparrows cynically manipulated nativist rhetoric in order to inflame passions, but rather this set of nativist beliefs made sense in explaining the dangers of a foreign interloper to the community of American birds.” While it may be somewhat natural for invasion biologists to invoke prevailing metaphors and narratives – discourse metaphors, as they are called by Zinken, Hellsten and Nerlich (this volume), this militaristic language not only restricts the possibility of seeing their problem in other ways, but also links it to large-scale political trends. 2.

The conceptualization of “fears of invasion”

The term “invader” is culturally resonant because of its embodied basis; that is, physiologically and mentally experienced fears that our bodies will be invaded by disease and our nations by foreigners. These two issues affect interpretation of IS because all three types of invasion are congruent, particularly in their reliance on the CONTAINER image schema (see Rohrer 1995: 124–125; Chilton 1996: 197–198). Because of this schema, it is easy to interpret the invasion of natural landscapes, simultaneously, as the invasion of a metaphorically projected “person” and a “nation”. I will demonstrate the first point by providing evidence for the conceptual metaphor NATURAL LANDSCAPES ARE PERSONS, which allows IS to be understood as a disease, and the second by considering linkages to NATION IS A PERSON, where IS are interpreted as human invaders. In combination, these metaphors mutually reinforce one another and strengthen the case of invasion biology within an unquestioned ontological framework.

6. English sparrows were introduced into North America from Europe in the early 1850s to control insects, but when they began to spread they were vilified and attacked, just as IS today.

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2.1.

The image schemata structuring the conceptualization of invasion biology

The notion of boundaries evoked by the CONTAINER image schema contributes to fears of invasion, whether by disease, human invaders, or IS. This schema derives from the experience of embodiment, which differentiates our interior and exterior across a boundary (Johnson 1987). There is a range of opinion within Cognitive Linguistics concerning the extent to which image schemas are innate and individualistic versus developmentally – and culturally – conditioned. In light of numerous critiques of the former view (e.g., Gibbs 1999; Bono 2003; Zinken, Hellsten and Nerlich, this volume), I will follow Santibáñez (2002), who defines image schemata as “pervasive organizing structures in human cognition which emerge from our bodily and social interaction with an environment at a preconceptual level”. However, I will assume that cultural conditions during the ontogeny of most biologists I am referring to (as well as Westerners in general) are relatively consistent so that the schema is conventional even though it is socioculturally situated. That is, this schema makes sense both to biologists and those they try to reach out to rhetorically because it is so consistent with everyday expressions and ways of relating. The CONTAINER image schema distinguishes between inside and outside, a distinction that can be projected onto the world as a means to structure and understand it (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 32, 117, 380). In the case of IS, this schema provides a powerful basis for reifying the boundary between native and non-native species. Milton (2000: 242) employed a case study of an IS, for example, to argue that “conservation [is] a boundary maintaining exercise. In order to conserve the things that constitute nature, the boundaries that separate them must be maintained, and in order to conserve nature’s ‘naturalness,’ the boundary between the human and the non-human must be preserved”. In some cases, these boundaries may correspond with national boundaries, but they may also occur at smaller scales, such as individual states, counties, biogeographic regions, national parks, or local vegetation communities (see Figure 1). Even though ecologists currently doubt that communities are integrated wholes (see Soulé 1990: 234; Woods and Moriarty 2001: 172), invasion biologists continue to metaphorically enforce their boundaries, which indicates how compelling this schema has become for understanding biological systems.

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Nesting of self within biogeographic region within nation. Each of these levels depends upon an experiential CONTAINER image schema, which is metaphorically projected in the case of biogeographic regions and nations.

Invaders do not just equilibrate with their surroundings – they spread and expand. This conceptualization derives from two additional kinesthetic image schemas, PATH and FORCE, which depend on the CONTAINER schema and contribute to the ease with which IS are associated with other kinds of invaders. IS can expand into a predefined CONTAINER by expansion of their own CONTAINER via the addition of a PATH schema. This schema “involves structural elements such as starting point (origin), obstacle, destination (endpoint), path and directedness toward the endpoint” (Chilton 1996: 199). The prevalence of this schema in invasion biology is indicated by references to the “spread” and “expansion” of IS in 42 and 22 papers in Biological Invasions, respectively.7 Typically, this is in terms of range expansion, such as the “rapid expansion of this species’ range since its arrival in North America” (Shurin and Havel 2002). As their perimeter spreads, IS also exert a metaphorical force on natural landscapes. The underlying schema of FORCE dynamics is constitutive of 7. I conducted an analysis of Biological Invasions because it is the only journal solely dedicated to invasion biology. I searched for keywords within the first five volumes (1999 through 2003) using the online Kluwer search engine. The search captured occurrences of terms within abstract text, titles and keywords, with each article counted only once in the totals given herein. A few matches were deleted from the total if their usage was distinct from the examples cited. There were a total of 166 substantive papers in the volumes covered here.

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the field of invasion biology, as shown by use of the term “impact” in the journal Biological Invasions.8 The first substantive article in the journal was entitled “Impact: Toward a framework for understanding the ecological effects of invaders” (Parker et al. 1999). In archetypal scientific prose, the authors attempt to use unbiased language and to work objectively from the evidence to conclusions. In this case, however, the authors reverse the usual logic when they foreground the word “impact” (a negative effect) by setting it off with a colon. Thereafter they refer to the potential “effects” of invaders. The unstated enthymeme is that invaders exert a negative force, and there is little need to discuss whether this is actually the case. Subsequently, another 37 papers refer to impacts of IS, and the term “impact” constitutes fully 6% (13/219) of the words in one abstract (Forrest and Taylor 2002).9 Invasion biologists created the journal Biological Invasions in part to address their concerns about the expansive force of IS. 2.2.

Invasive species conceptualized as disease

To understand IS as a disease, landscapes must first be personified. The metaphorical projection NATURAL LANDSCAPES ARE PERSONS is supported by two main lines of evidence. First, humans have utilized body-landscape metaphors for millennia. As explained by Porteous (1986: 10): The human body is the first landscape we encounter and explore. It is likely that we carry the cognitive imagery in our heads as well as the actuality of our own bodies as we approach the external environment. Landscape is our second major encounter. For both practical and magical reasons, the application of notions of the self to the environment of non-self makes sense. In this way we humanize our environment, reduce its primeval unknownness and terror, make it ours.

8. In the first five volumes of Biological Invasions there were two direct references to species exerting pressure, and an additional three in the first issue of volume 6. In some cases, however, native species exerted this pressure on invasive ones. 9. In other places, force dynamics take a militaristic twist. For example, in a book in the Worldwatch Environmental Alert Series on IS, Bright (1998: 24) reported that “there is little consolation in the fact that 90 percent of these impacts are ‘duds,’ and only 1 percent of them really detonate. The bombardment is continual, and so are the detonations.”

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But the strongest support for the NATURAL LANDSCAPES ARE PERSONS mapping is invasion biologists’ use of the ecosystem health metaphor and its entailments (for discussion, see Ross et al. 1997). Three papers in Biological Invasions referred to health, including the claim that “‘ecosystem management’ strategies promoting healthy, undisturbed sites will not always be effective against invasive pest species” (Parker 2001) and two papers by Bonneau, Shields and Civco (1999) that analyzed “the health of hemlock forests infested by the hemlock woolly adelgid”. Also, Mack et al. (2000: 693) discussed “community vulnerability to invasion”, which bespeaks the idea of an integrated personified community. In each case, healthy sites are relatively free of IS, and it follows that invasion biologists can restore health and balance10 by removing them. As examples, nine papers referred to “restoration”, and Alpert and Maron (2000) entitled their article, “Carbon addition as a countermeasure against biological invasion by plants”. Even though invasion biologists may sometimes decry health and balance metaphors they still help to define the field. By extension from notions of human health, an ecosystem is considered healthy if it contains few IS: IS ARE A DISEASE. Chilton (1996: 197; and see Otis 1999), for example, observed that “[d]iseases are typically imagined as invading the body from outside, a notion which rests both on the CONTAINER schema and the warfare script”. The editor-in-chief of Biological Invasions invoked this metaphor explicitly in his one page opening editorial for the journal: “The resulting scale of hourly inoculations has led to a proportional increase in successful introductions. The Earth is now virtually itching with new invasions” (Carlton 1999, italics added). A total of seven papers in the journal called IS an “infestation”, a term often used to refer to parasitic disease, and Mack et al. (2000) included a section on the “epidemiology of invasions”. By invoking the language of human health and disease, invasion biologists lend support to the operation of NATURAL LANDSCAPES ARE PERSONS, which provides one source domain for preferring landscapes that are free of IS.

10. Implying the operation of the BALANCE image schema. Another abstract states that introduced mammals have “pushed the competitive balance from native to exotic species” (Holmgren 2002).

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2.3.

Invasive species conceptualized as human invaders

To understand IS as human invaders, biogeographic regions must first be understood as nations. This is a natural association, since invasion biologists have been educated amidst realist political discourse, which presumes the individual ‘in’ the state; […] the state itself with its containing and protective perimeters; and […] the outside world, the domain of the anarchic international system. These elements, the inside, the boundary, and the outside, derive from a powerful and pervasive spatial image, that of an impermeable container. (Chilton 1996: 195)

Rohrer (1995: 125) has elaborated the resultant NATION IS A PERSON metaphor and its entailments in the context of political “rape”, which can be applied to IS. Just as he observes that “The ‘rape of Kuwait’ is the rape of the body of a metaphorically projected person via the ‘NATION IS A PERSON’ metaphor,” I claim that for invasion biologists the invasion of natural landscapes is the invasion of a metaphorically projected nation. Although biologists may not be patriotic in the usual sense, their active defense of biogeographic boundaries suggests that these are partly conceptualized in terms of the culturally-prevalent NATION IS A PERSON metaphor. As Smart (1996: 276) has observed, “[t]he body of the nation is its land, and this is often the object of national piety”. In the German context, for example, Eser (1998: 102) explains that Historically […] the idea of nature conservation has been part of the broader concept of the conservation of ‘Heimat’. ‘Heimat’ means the place, where people feel at home. It is not pure nature but a place where humans and nature live together in harmony, dependent on each other. […] Spreading nonindigenous plants are not a part of ‘Heimat’ in every sense of the word. They are ‘aliens’, they ‘don’t belong’, they are unfamiliar to the people. They seem to change the landscape more rapidly than humans are able to adapt to [these changes]. Thus, they afflict the major function of Heimat: to guarantee stability, safety and identity.

Once natural landscapes have been personified as nations, they can come under threat from others: IS ARE HUMAN INVADERS. Numerous similarities between IS and human invaders support this biological-political mapping (Table 1), and thus encourage repeated use of the term “invader” within

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invasion biology.11 This term ascribes purposiveness to the movement of IS, which is enhanced by explicit personification. Because IS are “invaders”, they are given malicious intent, even if unconsciously, which makes them to some extent guilty simply by their name. Table 1.

Mapping between the concept of a human invader and that of a biological invader.

Human invader soldier or invader originate from another country cross national boundary expand within new country overcome citizens threaten native culture

Biological invasion species originate from afar cross biological boundary expand within new biological range overcome native species threaten native ecosystems

The term “invader” is culturally resonant because of fears that nations will be literally invaded. Davis, Thompson and Grime (2001: 3) posit that the founder of invasion biology, Charles Elton, was influenced by Britain’s vulnerability to invasion: There is another reason why the war may have transformed Elton’s perspective on invasions. Throughout the war years, British people were much more concerned about a very different kind of invasion, one far worse than a rodent infestation. They feared invasion by Germany. For Elton, invasion was at the center not only of his work but also of his country’s psyche.

These authors demonstrate that Elton increasingly distinguished invading species from normal ecological processes over the middle decades of the 20th century, which reflected his nationalistic concerns. Given concerns about a “world without borders”, Mack et al. (2000: 689) raise this fear in the present day when they claim that the spread of IS could create “homogeneous, impoverished ecosystems composed of cosmopolitan species”. Fears of invaders have only intensified since September 11, 2001, which may increase the appeal of the anti-IS campaign for many people. 11. Note that the cultural model of human invasion adopted here is that of Asiatic hordes overflowing Europe in the sixth century or Spanish or Anglo immigrants massively settling in the Americas and taking Indians’ territories, but it is not compatible with the model underlying World War II type of invasions (R. Dirven, personal communication).

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Fears of invasion are reinforced in the journal Biological Invasions by the intentional choice of metaphors whose entailments are potentially frightening to the reader. The second article in the journal, for example, was entitled “Positive interactions of nonindigenous species: Invasional meltdown?” (Simberloff and Von Holle 1999). It reviewed beneficial interactions among invaders that could “well lead to accelerated impacts on native ecosystems – an invasional ‘meltdown’ process”, which invokes images of nuclear disaster. While this rhetorical ploy is clearly aimed at instilling fear, it also functions as a “clever diversionary tactic […] for social control” (Rediehs 2002: 76). Whether patriotism attaches itself to a nation or to biogeographic regions, when people identify with these bounded spaces their own human vulnerability is exaggerated. Militaristic language may help draw attention to an issue that is initially invisible to non-biologists. However, it may also exaggerate the emotional intensity of the situation. Finally, since “immigration” is often portrayed as another form of “invasion”, numerous writers have critiqued IS policy as having xenophobic tendencies (Pollan 1994; Sagoff 1999; Subramaniam 2001; but see Simberloff 2003). Fine and Christoforides (1991: 388) demonstrate that “the sparrow issue ‘piggy-backed’ on the larger issue of how to protect the American community from the presence of outsiders”. Given that the U.S. media commonly invokes the metaphor IMMIGRANTS ARE ANIMALS (Santa Ana 1999), it should not be surprising that the reverse mapping (ANIMALS ARE IMMIGRANTS) can be interpreted as xenophobic. Xenophobic people have a dislike for “other” people that is somehow rationalized. Similarly, the ultimate cause of concern about IS is a dislike of what they do to native species (including humans). Although the strength of the charge that biologists are xenophobic is limited by the analogy between IS and people, it is supported by the ease with which this association can be made. 3.

The conceptualization of a competitive bias within biology

Competition is a prevalent organizing metaphor within both contemporary culture and invasion biology. Keddy (1989: 161–165) hypothesized that its frequency in biology may result from cultural factors, i.e. its ability to provoke drama, conflict and excitement, the dominance of male researchers, a taxonomic bias, and ultimately, the level of competitiveness found among scientists themselves. While each of these is probably a contributing factor,

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competitive views of life partly derive from evolutionary thought, which naturalizes them. Numerous scholars have discussed how Darwinism – particularly through the metaphor of a “struggle for survival” – became associated with competitiveness and militarism in both popular culture and science (e.g., McIntosh 1992; Maasen, Mendelsohn and Weingart 1995; Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 557–561). According to Keller (1991: 87), these implications derive from how “much of contemporary evolutionary theory relies on a representation of the ‘individual’ […] [whose] first and foremost need [is] the defense of its boundaries”. Because of the affinity between invasion biology and evolutionary theory (see Ludsin and Wolfe 2001 for review), invasion biologists are prone to emphasize competitive interactions resulting from the occurrence of IS in a given region. To demonstrate the embedding of competitiveness within the culture of modern biology, I surveyed12 three contrasting groups of biologists: the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE, evolutionary biologists), the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES, evolutionary psychologists)13 and the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT, American biology teachers). I asked members to respond to two questions about an array of metaphorical statements:14

12. I administered a web survey in November-December 2003 using the email distribution lists of four organizations (one of which is excluded here; additional details about my protocol are available upon request). I was unable to survey ecologists or invasion biologists directly. There were 1892 respondents in the final data set, with minimum response rates of 16% (NABT), 33% (SSE) and 44% (HBES). For further details on methodology and results, see Larson (2004, 2006). 13. In contrast to evolutionary biologists, who predominantly restrict their studies to evolution among non-human species, evolutionary psychologists search for evidence of why humans are the way they are now because of their evolutionary history. 14. In this chapter I present their response to two statements – concerning struggle for survival and cooperation – that I claim are metaphorical based on extensive historical evidence (e.g., Maasen, Mendelsohn and Weingart 1995; Ruse 1996). The actual survey contained numerous metaphorical statements about competition (and progress), and the results of a preliminary factor analysis suggests that these statements reflect conceptual metaphors EVOLUTION IS A COMPETITIVE PROCESS and EVOLUTION IS A PROGRESSIVE PROCESS. My brief discussion here is consistent with overall results presented elsewhere (Larson 2004).

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1. Do you believe this statement to be factually true? In your opinion, has biological research provided sufficient evidence to support it? 2. Do you believe it would be beneficial if applied within society? Would it be a good thing if people were to use this statement as a guide for social practices?

Figure 2. This figure shows responses to the statement “A struggle for survival characterizes evolution”. The mean values along the left axis correspond to response options in the survey: 1 = strongly disagree, 2= disagree, 3= neutral, 4 = agree, 5 = strongly agree (that is, higher means greater agreement). The mean response (with standard error) is given for both question 1 (pale bars) and question 2 (darker bars). The organizations are all statistically different from one another (p