ABSTRACT
Cognitive scientists have much to learn from Merleau-Ponty. This paper explicates two central, but rarely discussed, notions in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception: the intentional arc and the tendency to achieve a maximum grip. The intentional arc names the tight connection between body and world, viz. that, as the active body acquires skills, those skills are “stored,” not as representations in the mind, but as dispositions to respond to the solicitations of situations in the world. Maximum grip names the body’s tendency to refine its discriminations and to respond to solicitations in such a way as to bring the current situation closer to the optimal gestalt that the skilled agent has learned to expect. Neither of these “body-functions” requires that the body have any particular size or shape. However, if one tries to implement Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of skill acquisition in a neural network, one finds that, in order to learn to generalize input/output pairs to new situations the way human beings do, a network needs to share crucial aspects of the human body-structure.
