ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author examines the nature of meaning and its ontogenesis by first exploring ontological and epistemological strategies that function as background to a broad understanding of the concept of meaning. The embodied mind has long been a fundamental feature—although only implicitly articulated as a theory of mind—of the cognitive developmental theories of Heinz Werner and Jean Piaget. Assimilation is the act of interpretation or meaning construction whether, as Langer points out, the resulting form of meaning is the embodied act of instrumental meaning, the embodied symbol of representational meaning, or the embodied symbol system of reasoned meaning. Embodiment theory, on one hand, rejects this split, as it rejects other splits, and claims that awareness or consciousness is a systemic property of mind as a whole; computational distinctions are characteristics of the inferential sphere of mental functioning; and the inferential sphere and the imaginative sphere simultaneously arise from an original relatively undifferentiated activity matrix termed the biocultural matrix.
