The Person Model Theory and the Question of Situatedness of Social Understanding

Humans are hyper-social beings, highly dependent on others and on successfully interacting with them. Which theory can adequately describe our ability to understand others? In the literature we have an intense debate among proponents of theory-theory, simulation theory, and interaction theory. I argue first that none of these accounts is adequate but that we need to go in the direction of what I call the “person model theory.” The second important question is which types of embodiment (or further aspects of 4E) are systematically relevant for social understanding according to the person model theory? I argue that there are clear cases of embodiment of social understanding, while extendedness and/or enactment seem to be only clearly implemented in early infancy. Furthermore, 4E features of being embodied, enacted, extended, or embedded can only be ascribed to an implementation, a token of a specific type which makes the 4E features intensely context-dependent.

Critical Note

Having introduced situated affectivity, I locate the contributions to this section within this new framework: Carr and colleagues argue that embodied emotional processes strongly (though not indispensably) influence cognitive and motivational tasks. Bypassing the debate on causal dependency (embeddedness) and co-constitution (extendedness), I propose the category of environmental affective scaffolding as the one Hobson’s contribution fits in. He stresses the essential impact an infant’s capacity for social-affective relatedness has on her cognitive development. The enactive approach, as introduced by Colombetti, accounts well for the dynamical couplings between two or more emoters (or an emoter and her environment). If more persons are involved, they constitute a case of distributed rather than extended affectivity, since no single individual is the hub of such an affective process. The contribution of Zahavi and Michael promises to apply the 4E approach to empathy. Considering environmental scaffolds to empathy might enrich it.

Critical Note

This chapter provides a brief review and commentary on the account of cognition offered in Di Paolo and Kiverstein. It notes that Rietveld, Denys, and van Westen do not say much about cognition per se. Instead, they are concerned with skilled action. Finally, it notes how Hutto and Myin apparently pursue the view that cognition is behavior, though decline to provide reasons for the view.

Critical Note

I offer some critical thoughts on some philosophical issues touched upon in the four papers in the section on Cognition, Action, and Perception. I highlight these issues because, apart from revealing some problematic aspects of the arguments presented therein, they illustrate a general concern about some prominent debates in the context of 4E approaches to cognition: that at some times we are so excited that we can bring philosophy in close touch with empirical results that we forget our core business as philosophers—the argument—while at other times we can’t stop overdoing it with our philosophical concept-mongery and thereby fail to see important lessons empirical results have to teach us. In addition, I want to draw attention to a topic that one might have expected to be covered in a handbook on 4E cognition, in particular in the section on Cognition, Action, and Perception, but that isn’t addressed: the topic of self-control.

Embodied Aesthetics

Although great art frequently revers the body, bodily experience itself is traditionally excluded from the aesthetic realm. This tradition, however, is in tension with the experience of expert dancers who find intense aesthetic pleasure in the experience of their own bodily movements. How to resolve this tension is the goal of this chapter. More specifically, in contrast to the traditional view that denigrates the bodily even while elevating the body, I aim to make sense of dancers’ embodied aesthetic experience of their own movements, as well as observers’ embodied aesthetic experience of seeing bodies move.

Embodied Resonance

Mental simulation was claimed to provide a distinctive way of gaining knowledge about others’ actions and thoughts since the late 1980s. A decade later, the discovery of mirror neurons in macaque monkeys and the evidence of mirror brain areas in humans presented a new angle on this claim, suggesting also an embodied approach to simulation. The aim of the present chapter is to introduce and discuss this embodied approach and its role in basic social cognition. In doing this, we shall start by characterizing the distinctive features of embodied simulation (ES), especially in relation to its its motor aspects. Then, we shall provide evidence for the claim that ES may be critically involved in understanding others’ actions. Finally, we shall explore the conjecture that ES might involve a common ground for action execution and observation not only at the functional but also at the phenomenological level.

The Embodiment of Concepts

We characterize theories of conceptual representation as embodied, disembodied, or hybrid according to their stance on a number of different dimensions: the nature of concepts, the relation between language and concepts, the function of concepts, the acquisition of concepts, the representation of concepts, and the role of context. We propose to extend an embodied view of concepts, by taking into account the importance of multimodal associations and predictive processing. We argue that concepts are dynamically acquired and updated, based on recurrent processing of prediction error signals in a hierarchically structured network. Concepts are thus used as prior models to generate multimodal expectations, thereby reducing surprise and enabling greater precision in the perception of exemplars. This view places embodied theories of concepts in a novel predictive processing framework, by highlighting the importance of concepts for prediction, learning and shaping categories on the basis of prediction errors.

Going Radical

E-approaches to cognition—enactive, embodied, ecological—conceive of minds as fundamentally relational and interactive. They are often heralded as offering a new paradigm for thinking about the mental. Yet only the most radical versions of E-approaches—those that seek not to complement but to replace traditional cognitivist accounts of mind—have any prospect of ushering in a truly revolutionary rethink of the nature of cognition. This chapter considers whether such a conceptual revolution might really be in the cards. It identities the major options proposed by E-theorists, rating each in terms of degree of radicality. It reminds readers of the hard problem of content and reviews the range of options for handling it. It argues that “going radical” is one of the most attractive ways of dealing with the hard problem of content and that it is worth exploring the positive research program that going radical opens up.

Interpersonal judgments, embodied reasoning, and juridical legitimacy

A particular branch of the embodied cognition (EC) research program explicates abstract concepts and metaphors as grounded in particular domains of bodily experience. This chapter explores conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) and some recent behavioral and neuroscientific research that appears to offer some support for it. While this research indicates that bodily states exert non-negligible influence on cognition and behavior, the influences appear to occur in a way that is insensitive to reflectively endorsed norms. Assuming that the experimental findings extend to real-life situations, the findings raise a number of questions. The chapter offers reflections on particular questions and concerns in the legal realm and explores whether the findings present potential challenges to juridical legitimacy.

Embodiment of emotion and its situated nature

Social functioning requires emotion. We must be able to recognize, interpret, and generate emotions across a variety of social contexts. But how are emotions conceptually represented in the mind? Embodiment (or grounded cognition) theories propose that processing of emotional concepts is partly based in one’s own perceptual, motor, and somatosensory systems. We review evidence for this account across a variety of domains, including facial expression perception, interpretation of emotional language, somatic involvement in affective processing, and “mirroring” of others’ actions. We also contrast embodiment theories with more traditional “amodal” frameworks, which represent emotional information as abstract language-like symbols in cognitive networks. Overall, we argue that a comprehensive account of emotion concepts requires considering their embodiment. Simultaneously, we highlight that embodiment is flexible and dynamic, especially within the social environment. This means that when and how emotion concepts are embodied critically depends on situational cues and current representational needs.