maxine

4. The corporeal turn that corporeal matters of fact call for is not an "alternative" (Steele, par. 1) to the "linguistic turn." The linguistic turn in both anthropology and philosophy directed attention to the many ways language may structure or mediate human life. I noted at the beginning of ROOTS that the linguistic turn produced extraordinary insights and that "a corporeal turn would assuredly do no less" (1990, p. 19). I further noted at the end of the book that the corporeal turn, like the linguistic one, "requires paying attention to something long taken for granted" (1990, p. 382). It is clear from this perspective why "the debate about the dominance of the visual versus the tactile-kinesthetic modality" (Steele, par. 6) cannot even begin before one makes a corporeal turn. It is necessary first to begin fathoming the bodies we are.

-- http://www.cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?5.52

2. The thesis of this book is that in each case the living body served as a semantic template. Concepts were either generated or awakened by the living body in the course of everyday actions such as chewing, striding, standing, breathing, and so on. As everyday actions gave rise to new concepts, so new concepts gave rise to new possibilities, new possibilities to new ways of living, and new ways of living to the establishment finally of those revolutionary new practices and beliefs that are definitive of hominid evolution. The broad thesis of this book is thus that there is an indissoluble bond between hominid thinking and hominid evolution, a bond cemented by the living body.

-- http://www.cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?5.08

18. Of the six chapters of Part III, "Theoretical and Methodological Issues," the first two (Chapters 10 and 11) deal in turn with the two major forms of opposition to the thesis of the book. The first form of opposition may be succinctly identified with an all-encompassing, steadfast belief in cultural relativism, the second with the all-encompassing, steadfast practice of thinking dualistically and reducing biologically. With respect to the first, the notion of getting back to the conceptual origins of human thought goes against academically popular dogma. What is shown in detail in Chapter 10 is that the various theoretical obstacles placed in the way of getting back are all in a robust biological sense biodegradable. Given animate form and the tactile-kinesthetic body, and given bona fide evolutionary theory and sound reasoning therefrom, the obstacles disintegrate. With respect to the second, the division of life into "the mental" and "the physical" has a long Western history. The division is held in place by academic practice: minds are treated by philosophers, bodies are treated by scientists, and rarely do the twain ever meet. Since in the traditional divisional scheme of things bodies provide little more than a dumb show of movement and minds are privileged shrines vouchsafed to humans alone, any resemblance between ancestral hominids and present- day ones is purely physical.

-- http://www.cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?5.08

1. This book demonstrates the necessity of incorporating movement in our investigations of the animate world from the very beginning. It shows how this necessity derives from corporeal matters of fact that define our lives from infancy onward and that, in an evolutionary sense, define the lives of all animate forms. The book is about learning to move ourselves. It is about how movement is at the root of our sense of agency and the generative source of our notions of space and time. It is about how self-movement structures knowledge of the world--how moving is a way of knowing and how thinking in movement is foundational to the lives of animate forms.

-- http://www.cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?11.098

3. In conjunction with my critique of Merleau-Ponty in ROOTS, I showed how a "pathological body" yields something other than understandings of the normal insofar as pathology can add something, for example, rather than subtract.

-- http://www.cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?5.53

4. A further and intimately related source of puzzlement concerns Webster's theoretical jump to the social construction of cognition. Clearly, communication is social. But just as clearly, cognition is not necessarily a phenomenon grounded in sociality. What Webster recognizes as the basis of "symbol grounding with a vengeance" may perhaps indicate in advance where his priorities lie. An infant who is wholly other-dependent and who is at the same time sensorily locked into a world that is for all practical purposes devoid of others is first and foremost a "socio-tactile" (par. 9) infant; that is, its "tactile-kinesthetic action" (par. 9), its production of meaningful gestures, is wholly other-dependent. "Socio-tactile" infants cannot make sense of the world through tactility and kinesthesia in the way infants who are not sensorily disadvantaged make sense of their own bodies and of the world -- in babbling, for example, or in studying the movement and visual form of their fingers, or in exploring their crib, the face of their parent, a toy, and so on. Granted that human infants (more generally, hominid infants from their evolutionary inception) are dependent initially and for several years on others for food, shelter, and the like, there is no good reason to think that they are devoid of "thought, thinking, or abstract concepts without a certain form or matrix of joint engagement with others" (par. 9). Making sense of one's own body is not other-dependent. Neither is making sense of one's crib or a rattle. Granted that crib and rattle are cultural artifacts, hence products of a social world, there is no good reason to think that an infant -- all on its own -- would not equally well make sense of tree leaves, a wad of dirt, or a cluster of stones if it were living in wholly natural surroundings.

-- http://www.cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?5.53