It has taken me many years to learn enough to state outright that using Embodied Cognition as an epistemology is premature and probably wrong. Therefore, all of the work that uses Lakoff and Johnson in the fields of theatre history and performance studies does not dismantle semiotics or theories of mental representation as claimed by McConachie and others.
The prejudice of the embodied cognition hypothesis is to have never seriously considered, let alone tested and then rejected, an alternative hypothesis about the format of concept representation. And when we look at the type of evidence that one would want to be in place, minimally, to reject the view that concepts are represented in an amodal format, there is no decisive evidence. What would a nonembodied view of concepts predict about sensorimotor activation during conceptual processing? It all depends on one’s theory of activation dynamics— or information exchange— among representationally distinct processes.
There are no theories of conceptual processing that deny that activation spreads from concepts to input/output or sensorimotor systems. Therefore, all extant theories that maintain a strict representational separation between concepts and input/output systems would also predict that input/output systems can be active during conceptual processing and that the state of input/ output systems can affect cognition. It is absolutely the case that we would not be compelled to expand theories of amodal concept representation in this way were it not for the many elegant findings that can be referred to collectively as the “phenomena of embodiment.” However, I would argue that phenomena of embodiment actually have nothing to do with whether cognition is embodied. The substantive issue at stake is not whether the format of concepts is modality specific but the dynamics of activation flow in the system. This is not a dour conclusion—it means that the phenomena of embodiment can be repurposed as clues about how abstract concepts interface with the sensorimotor systems.
The prejudice of the embodied cognition hypothesis is to have never seriously considered, let alone tested and then rejected, an alternative hypothesis about the format of concept representation. And when we look at the type of evidence that one would want to be in place, minimally, to reject the view that concepts are represented in an amodal format, there is no decisive evidence. What would a nonembodied view of concepts predict about sensorimotor activation during conceptual processing? It all depends on one’s theory of activation dynamics— or information exchange— among representationally distinct processes.
There are no theories of conceptual processing that deny that activation spreads from concepts to input/output or sensorimotor systems. Therefore, all extant theories that maintain a strict representational separation between concepts and input/output systems would also predict that input/output systems can be active during conceptual processing and that the state of input/ output systems can affect cognition. It is absolutely the case that we would not be compelled to expand theories of amodal concept representation in this way were it not for the many elegant findings that can be referred to collectively as the “phenomena of embodiment.” However, I would argue that phenomena of embodiment actually have nothing to do with whether cognition is embodied. The substantive issue at stake is not whether the format of concepts is modality specific but the dynamics of activation flow in the system. This is not a dour conclusion—it means that the phenomena of embodiment can be repurposed as clues about how abstract concepts interface with the sensorimotor systems.
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