Body

This chapter examines various dimensions of the “embodied turn” that was initially made by phenomenologists in the first half of the twentieth century, but which has recently been taken up in a more empirically oriented way by proponents of 4e cognition, sometimes expressly drawing on the work of classical phenomenologists. Although I ultimately aim to defend such views, both of these embodied turns confront a dilemma pertaining to the strictures imposed by a commitment to naturalism. My diagnostic claim is that the arguments for irreducibility—of embodied know-how to knowledge-that, of Leib with regard to Körper, etc.—tacitly appeal to something like emergence. And whether it concerns properties or laws/principles, emergence is marked as more or less problematic (“spooky”) for orthodox (reductive) construals of naturalism. One response is to undermine the conception of nature/naturalism that the charge itself presupposes. Another strategy that I will pursue here, however, is to elaborate less necessitarian construals of the arguments about irreducibility and the kind of emergence at stake in embodied cognition, as well as to give greater credence to empirical considerations rather than the more abstract metaphysical worries associated with physicalism. In conclusion, I also use these analyses to reconsider the relationship between embodied cognition and predictive processing accounts of the mind and present a case that the twain may not meet (contra Andy Clark), with the argument returning to the issue of emergence, the role of the first-person perspective, and the kinds of explanations (reductive or otherwise) that are thought to be required for any cognitive science worthy of the name.