How the Body Shapes the Mind is an interdisciplinary work that
addresses philosophical questions by appealing to evidence found in
experimental psychology, neuroscience, studies of pathologies, and
developmental psychology. There is a growing consensus across these
disciplines that the contribution of embodiment to cognition is
inescapable. Because this insight has been developed across a variety of
disciplines, however, there is still a need to develop a common
vocabulary that is capable of integrating discussions of brain
mechanisms in neuroscience, behavioral expressions in psychology, design
concerns in artificial intelligence and robotics, and debates about
embodied experience in the phenomenology and philosophy of mind. Shaun
Gallagher's book aims to contribute to the formulation of that common
vocabulary and to develop a conceptual framework that will avoid both
the overly reductionistic approaches that explain everything in terms of
bottom-up neuronal mechanisms, and
inflationistic approaches that explain everything in terms of Cartesian,
top-down cognitive states.
Gallagher pursues two basic sets of questions. The first set consists of
questions about the phenomenal aspects of the structure of experience,
and specifically the relatively regular and constant features that we
find in the content of our experience. If throughout conscious
experience there is a constant reference to one's own body, even if this
is a recessive or marginal awareness, then that reference constitutes a
structural feature of the phenomenal field of consciousness, part of a
framework that is likely to determine or influence all other aspects of
experience. The second set of questions concerns aspects of the
structure of experience that are more hidden, those that may be more
difficult to get at because they happen before we know it. They do not
normally enter into the content of experience in an explicit way, and
are often inaccessible to reflective consciousness. To what extent, and
in what ways, are consciousness and cognitive processes, which include
experiences
related to perception, memory, imagination, belief, judgment, and so
forth, shaped or structured by the fact that they are embodied in this
way?