Chapter 21: Brain-Body-Environment Couplings

Authors Arne M. Weber and Gottfried Vosgerau utilize a foundational analogy regarding Galileo’s laws of falling objects to demonstrate that while real-world scenarios are complex and "messy," scientific explanation requires abstracting specific mechanisms rather than simply labeling the messiness. The text rigorously compares four distinct theoretical accounts—proposed by Shaun Gallagher, Elisabeth Pacherie, Mark Rowlands, and Frédérique de Vignemont—to assess how well they define their explanatory targets. The discussion critiques Gallagher’s broad expansion of embodiment, arguing that referencing factors like metabolism or cultural context (such as the impact of language on the "kick-pick-lick" study) without a specific target reduces embodiment to a vague description of homeostasis rather than a precise cognitive explanation. In contrast, the chapter analyzes Pacherie’s focus on motor intentionality and her critique of Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of the pathological case of Schneider; while she successfully addresses the interface problem between sensorimotor and conceptual levels using motor schemas, the authors question whether her reliance on strict criteria for representation is strictly necessary. The summary further explores Rowlands’s concept of intentionality as a "disclosing activity," illustrated by a blind person using a cane to access the world through empirical and transcendental modes of presentation. The authors argue that while Rowlands explains how information becomes available, this serves more as a precondition for cognition rather than explaining the flexible behavior that defines cognitive systems. The analysis then turns to de Vignemont’s work on bodily awareness and tool use, concluding that while tools extend action space, they do not directly extend bodily sensation, suggesting the body plays an indirect explanatory role. Finally, the chapter proposes a robust meta-theoretical framework for "grounded cognition" that distinguishes between acquisition conditions (where a bodily ability is necessary to learn a skill) and constitution conditions (where a bodily ability is necessary to possess that skill). This distinction supports a moderate thesis where motor systems are only partially constitutive of action-related cognition, offering a method to empirically test rival theories such as simulation theory, internal models, and the theory of event coding.