The As If in Cognitive Science, Neuroscience and Anthropology A Journey among Robots, Blacksmiths and Neurons Mauro Adenzato and Francesca Garbarini University of Turin Abstract. In recent years, neurophysiological and psychological research has highlighted a pragmatic version of the theory of knowledge, a version in which the concept of simulation has been found to play a crucial role. In fact, research on canonical and mirror neurons has shown that an as if simulative schema is required to perceive, categorize and understand the meaning of the external world. The present study compares the cognitive paradigm of embodied cognition with Pierre Bourdieu’s practice theory. Specifically, cognitive processes and cultural mechanisms are described as phenomena that emerge from the dynamic interaction that exists between people’s practical abilities and the structure of the local environment in which they act and live. A pragmatic conception of knowledge has also emerged in the field of ethnological investigation. Indeed, the concepts of resonance and empathy have proven to be essential instruments for ethnological knowledge. Key Words: anthropology, Bourdieu, cognitive neuroscience, embodied cognition, expert systems, mirror neurons, resonance, simulative schema, theory of practice
The Emergence of the Paradigm of Embodied Cognition in the Cognitive Sciences The founding principle of the cognitive sciences was that of a clear distinction between function and organ. This conceptual approach has found its most well-known expression in the philosophical current of functionalism, which holds that although a process may be carried out by a biological substrate system (such as the brain) or by an electronic substrate system (such as a computer), this does not necessarily imply any difference between the two processes. This is the principle of multiple realizability, which rests on the assumption that the brain is a syntactic information processor, equivalent to a digital calculator or to any other physical system that can be described in computational terms (Johnson-Laird, 1988). In Theory & Psychology Copyright © 2006 Sage Publications. Vol. 16(6): 747–759 DOI: 10.1177/0959354306070515 www.sagepublications.com
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recent years, the cognitive sciences have progressively gone beyond the functionalist metaphor by acknowledging that cognitive processes are rooted in the neuroanatomic substrate and by describing the mind as an emerging property of the brain. The paradigm of embodied cognition has increasingly asserted itself among this second generation of cognitive sciences, with ‘embodied cognition’ referring to both the embedding of cognitive processes in brain anatomy and the origin of these processes in an organism’s sensorymotor experience (Clark, 1997; Garbarini & Adenzato, 2004; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991). The embodied cognition perspective views the mind no longer as a set of logical/abstract functions, but as a biological system, which is rooted in body experience and interwoven with action and interaction with other individuals. Action and representation are no longer interpreted in terms of the classic physical–mental dichotomy, but have proven to be closely interlinked. Specifically, embodied cognition means that acting in the world, interacting with the objects and individuals in it, representing the world, perceiving it, categorizing it and understanding its meaning are merely different levels of the same relationship that exists between an organism and its environment. One historical antecedent of the modern paradigm of embodied cognition is undoubtedly the concept of affordance, a neologism created by James Gibson (1979) to refer to the opportunities that objects in the environment offer (‘afford’) for interaction to an organism’s various sensory-motor capacities. The concept of affordance played a crucial role in the ecological perspective proposed by Gibson. In fact, a key point was that his theory explicitly rejected the action–perception dichotomy and the underlying dualism between physical and mental capacities. Perception and action were thought to be directly coupled, with no processing of sensory information and no subsequent conversion into motor input. The motor interaction schema was considered to be specified already in the content perceived, that is, as an integral part of it. Recent discoveries in the neurophysiological domain have provided decisive evidence for Gibson’s hypothesis and have experimentally confirmed the existence of a mechanism by which an object’s shape and function are coupled and perceived directly by an observer. In a series of studies conducted over the course of the last 20 years, Rizzolatti and colleagues (see Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004, for a review) have discovered the existence of two distinct groups of neurons in the premotor cortex of monkeys and humans, both of which fire when specific actions are executed. The two neuron groups differ in the sense that, even if there is no active execution of a given action, one neuron group is activated by the mere observation of an object towards which the action may be directed. The other neuron group is activated by observing another person executing that action with the object. Therefore, both neuron types are bimodal, that is,
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motor as well as perceptual, because they fire when motor programs are activated, but also during purely perceptual recognition tasks. The activity of these two groups of bimodal neurons can be conceptually captured by referring to a simulation mechanism. Specifically, when an object is under observation, a motor schema appropriate to the characteristics of that object is activated (e.g. for shape, size and spatial orientation) as if the observer were interacting with it. Similarly, when observing another individual executing an action with an object, the observer’s neural system is activated as if he himself were executing the same action. In both instances, motor activation is only virtual, and the action is not actually carried out, but neurally simulated. The first type of neurons are called canonical neurons, because they are activated by an object’s physical features. The neurons in the second group are called mirror neurons, because they induce a specular reaction in an observer’s neural system. In light of this as if neural simulation mechanism, the motor system’s function in the entire cognitive system can now be reinterpreted. Researchers used to attribute an exclusively action planning and execution role to the motor system, but the discovery of the above-described bimodal neurons in the premotor cortex (and more recently also in the posterior parietal cortex, Buccino et al., 2001) has provided strong evidence for their implication in high-level cognitive processes, especially in the perceptual recognition, categorization and meaning comprehension of objects and actions.1 Hence, in agreement with Gibson’s theory, the neurophysiological approach has confirmed a dynamic dimension in perception and underscored an intrinsic link with the sphere of action. In fact, both perspectives consider interaction with an object a constituent part of the perceptual representation of the object itself.
The Anthropology of Practice The hypothesis of the as if schema can be collocated in a constructivist paradigm, which underscores the role of subjective anticipation in the construction of a perceived object. It is important to note that, in agreement with the embodied cognition view, these schemas are not theoretical and abstract categories, but pragmatic schemas, which are incorporated in an individual’s practical activities. This same type of pragmatic constructivism has also emerged in the social sciences, where an interpretive model of culture based on the theme of practice has been proposed. This model proposes a view underscoring how cultural patterns depend on both the biological and social environments in which individuals act and interact physically and mentally. A constructivist paradigm has also prevailed in the field of anthropology, which views both cultural and cognitive categories as being not as a set of symbolic and
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arbitrary impositions onto reality, but grounded in people’s practical capacity and in their dynamic interaction with the structure of the local environment in which they act, think and live. It is in this sense, then, that we can contextualize Bourdieu’s practice theory, which adopts an idea from the existentialist tradition proposing that knowledge of the world is not abstract, conceptual and theoretical, but derives from existential preconditions. These preconditions are rooted in the experience of being immersed in the world of objects and other individuals with whom to act and interact. The conceptual core of practice theory is the notion of habitus, intended as second nature, or as structured and structuring body, which incorporates immanent structures in itself, but also structures our perception of the world and guides our actions through it. With its constant reference to the ideas of ‘body’ and ‘embodied’, Bourdieu’s practice theory shares a common background with the paradigm of embodied cognition, that is, the analysis of body concept conducted by Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception (1945/1962). Indeed, Merleau-Ponty intended ‘body’ as both a physical structure (the biological body) and an experiential structure (the living, moving, suffering and exulting body). Hence, the dual meaning of embodied cognition refers to the embedding of cognitive processes in the neuro-anatomical substrate of the brain as well as the derivation of these processes out of our day-to-day experience. Moreover, the concept of habitus shares the same dual constructivism with the sensory-motor schemas of embodied cognition: experience of the external world is based on an individual’s pragmatic structures; at the same time, these structures are constructed starting from experience of the world and action within it. Lastly, both practice theory and the embodied cognition perspective pursue a third way between objectivism and subjectivism: Practice theory, as opposed to positivist materialism, strongly reaffirms that the objects of knowledge are constructed and not passively registered; moreover, and contrarily to idealist intellectualism, practice theory maintains that there is a system of structured and structuring tendencies at the base of this construction—the habitus—which is formed through practice and is always devoted to practical functions. (Bourdieu, 1980/1990, p. 52)
Similarly, the embodied cognition paradigm follows a third way between idealism and objectivism: Contrarily to idealism, we do not impose arbitrary concepts and structures onto a malleable reality; contrarily to objectivism, we do not believe that we are mirrors of a nature that univocally determines our concepts. Rather, our structured experience is an organism–environment interaction in which both poles are altered and transformed over the course of an historical process. (Johnson, 1987, p. 47)
This middle course of knowledge is the same that Varela et al. (1991)
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specified in their concept of enaction—that is, that knowledge is not a representation of the world, but the production of worlds through the structural coupling of an organism and its environment. The present paper uses the term ‘constructivism’ to refer to the Kantian theory of knowledge (which holds that knowledge is constructed by means of subjective categories) and the term ‘pragmatic’ to refer to Bourdieu’s practice theory. We argue that Bourdieu’s theory represents, in and of itself, a sort of constructivism, which is non-’theoretical’, but ‘pragmatic’. In fact, although practice theory holds that categories ‘construct’ the world in a Kantian way, it does not refer to theoretical categories (which are determined a priori independently of experience) but to pragmatic categories derived from mutual co-determination between organism and environment: our ability to apply categories to phenomena is made possible by the fact that these categories have evolved under the selective constraints of the environment itself (intended as the natural environment and social environment, or, better yet, the natural and social environments together). In Bourdieu’s words: The world is comprehensible, immediately endowed with meaning, because from the very beginning, the body has been exposed to its regularities. Having thereby acquired a system of dispositions that are coherent with these regularities, the body finds itself predisposed and ready to anticipate them practically through behavior that activates a type of knowledge through the body, which ensures practical knowledge of the world . . . . In other words, if the agent has an immediate understanding of the familiar world, this depends on the fact that cognitive structures, activated by the agent himself, are the product of an incorporation of the structures of the world in which he acts and on the fact that the instruments used to know the world are constructed by and through the world. (Bourdieu, 1997/2000, pp. 142–143)
Expert Systems and Emerging Phenomena In Practical Reasons, Bourdieu (1994/1998) affirmed that social agents have strategies, but do not have strategic intentions. This difference between strategies and strategic intentions can be traced in temporal terms to the distinction between anticipation and project: having a strategic intention corresponds to having a plan (intended as tension towards the future), which an individual pursues as an aim and attempts to achieve as such. Conversely, implementing strategies (e.g. game strategies) requires that an agent anticipate specific moves based on something that is not immediately perceived and available, and yet it is as if this ‘something’ were somehow already present. In fact, Bourdieu (1994/1998) maintained that good players do not work out explicit game plans, but manage to anticipate the flow of a game, because they already have its immanent tendencies incorporated in
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their own bodies. He also maintained, however, that the behavior of agents is frequently interpreted in terms of conscious planning that transforms a route (a distance to cover) into a project. Indeed, this is exactly the same criticism Emergence Robotics makes of classical artificial intelligence theory. Bourdieu himself authorized this transition from his practice theory to robotics: ‘These issues, which I raised twenty years ago in Outline of a Theory of Practice, are emerging today with the construction of expert systems and with artificial intelligence’ (Bourdieu, 1994/1998). Bourdieu’s intuition that an agent’s behavior in a context does not consist in a project but in a route provides an interpretive key for understanding the emergence program of new robotics. The concept of emergence can be illustrated by the example Andy Clark cites in Being There (1997) of a robotic agent that must position itself between two magnetic poles in order to recharge itself. How does the robot manage to position itself between the two poles? A classic, non-emergentist solution would be to equip the robot with sensors revealing its position relative to the two poles (each indicated by a light) and with a sub-routine calculating the trajectory between the two poles. In this case, the route the robot would cover in order to recharge itself would be the outcome of an explicitly calculated project. An alternative, emergentist solution would be, rather, to endow the robot with two simple behavioral systems (a phototaxic system producing a zigzag movement toward any type of light and an obstacle-avoidance system causing the robot to move away from whatever object it bumps into). The interaction of these behavioral systems with the environment would give rise to a selfpositioning between the poles as a sort of side-effect and would allow the desired behavior to emerge uniformly and regularly. The robot would be attracted by the light and would start zigzagging toward it, but as soon as it touched a pole, it would move away. Attracted once again by the light, the robot would move again, starting this time from another angle. After several attempts, it would find itself in the only position where its behavioral systems could remain in equilibrium: near the lights, but without touching either of the two recharging poles (thus, in the middle of the two poles, as desired). In this case, the robot’s route would imply the implementation of no type of project whatsoever. In Clark’s words, ‘the pole-orienting behavior counts as emergent because no actual component computes a pole-centering trajectory—instead, phototaxis, obstacle avoidance and local environmental structure (the location of the light source) collectively bring about the desired result’ (Clark, 1997, p. 109). Clark maintains that we can use the term ‘emergence’ in two ways: (a) when we are dealing with non-centrally controlled behavior resulting from the interaction of multiple internal system components (e.g. the physical phenomenon of the flow of convection as an emerging property of a set of molecules); and (b) when (as in the case of the robotic agent) the noncentrally controlled phenomenon emerges from an interaction between the
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system’s internal and external components (e.g. between the robot’s behavioral systems and the structure of the local environment). We encounter this second type of emergent phenomena when we are dealing with expert systems whose form of knowledge eludes propositional representation (to know that), but is best expressed in the procedural terms of an implicit to know how. For example, we might ask, ‘how do children manage to become expert walkers?’ An emergentist answer, cited in Clark (1997), is derived from studies on child psychomotor development. In fact, as suggested by Thelen and Smith (1994), a motor ability such as walking, for which numerous learning variants can be observed from one child to another, can be described not as the mere application of previous (genetically codified) instructions, but, rather, as behavior emerging out of the continuous interaction among neural, bodily and environmental factors. In agreement with Thelen and Smith, the anthropologist Tim Ingold (2000) maintains that bipedal locomotion could not exist in any other form than the various ways in which people actually walk and that walking could be described as a way of moving, but also as a way of learning about the environment. Ingold is undoubtedly adopting Gibson’s idea that an organism’s perception depends on its locomotion through the environment. Yet, whereas Gibson held that there an organism directly surveys the affordances that the environment itself provides, here Ingold proposes that meaning is constructed on the basis of an organism’s pragmatic categories. Specifically, he believes that meaning is not the form the mind imposes onto the flow of purely perceptible data, through innate or learned schemas, but that it is continually generated in the relational involvement contexts that people pursue in their surrounding world. This is where Ingold diverges from Gibson, for whom meaning was never constructed, but directly perceived as pertaining to the object in and of itself. Hence, the ecology of culture rejects theoretical constructivism, but adopts the pragmatic constructivism implied in Bourdieu’s practice theory. Ingold, moreover, believes that all of these considerations have had crucial repercussions on the generational transmission of culture-specific techniques and abilities. In fact, although traditional models of social learning have always separated the transmission of ability-learning mechanisms from the practical context in which they are experienced, the ecological approach, conversely, holds that there is comprehension in practicing any type of ability, which requires, however, that action and perception abilities be fine-tuned with repeated trials in a context (Ingold, 2000). The idea that an open system is not based on a fixed motor program but requires a continuous readjustment, or tuning, of movement was formulated years ago by Nicholai Bernstein in a study on blacksmithing cited by Ingold (2000). Bernstein, a Russian scientist, observed the movements of expert blacksmiths as they hammered hot iron on their anvils. He gradually noticed that although the hammer’s trajectory tended to be constant over the course of
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many blows, the movements of the blacksmiths’ limbs were never precisely the same, blow after blow. Bernstein concluded, therefore, that the secret of dexterity lay not in applying a fixed motor program, but in the continuous adjusting of movement, based on the constant perceptual monitoring of a task in progress. Bernstein’s intuitions anticipated the current neurophysiological sensory-motor concept, which holds (as mentioned previously) that there is no separation between the perception and execution of an action, but that both are inevitably coupled in the bimodal structure of neurons endowed with perceptual as well as motor functions. Ingold (2000) referred to Bernstein’s observations of expert blacksmiths in his reflections on apprenticeship—a cultural phenomenon allowing for the generational transmission of techniques and abilities. According to Ingold, this type of apprenticeship should no longer require preliminary observation of the execution of a task and its subsequent imitation. He holds that observation does not consist in the construction of internal mental representations of observed behavior, any more than imitation represents the conversion of these representations into practice. Observation and imitation are therefore closely coupled in apprentices’ practical and perceptual involvement as they observe and execute a given task simultaneously, and the secret to imitation lies in the perfect coordination between apprentices’ attention to their instructors’ movements and to their own. We can therefore say that a mirror-type mechanism is activated in apprentice behavior; in other words, observing another person’s action already implies simulation of it. Thus, the discovery of the mirror system also allows for a neural description of the mechanisms that are activated during apprenticeship. Anthropological and neurophysiological analyses have found common ground in arguing for the crucial role played by simulation in learning processes. Yet neither of these perspectives holds that simulation consists in the a posteriori application of a previously represented motor program based on the observation of other people’s movements. Rather, simulation is considered the virtual activation of observers’ perceptual and motor processes, which enables them to establish an immediate resonance with the observed person’s motor schemas. In Bourdieu’s terms, the simulation schema consists not in the execution of a project (a strategic intention), but in a learning strategy that helps apprentices anticipate their instructors’ movements as they observe them. Reflections on the concept of emergence and on the characteristics of expert systems are essential to a type of anthropology which (like Tim Ingold’s) aims at examining the concept of culture through the lens of an ecological perspective. This is where cultures lose their reified meaning as autonomous entities functioning in terms of predetermined programs, independently from the context of development. Rather, cultures are captured in their procedural dimension, as phenomena emerging from a dynamic interaction between people’s practical abilities and the structure of the
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local environment in which they act and live. Hence, by assuming the ecological perspective, not only does the concept of culture as the subject of anthropology undergo alteration, but so does ethnographical methodology as well. Resonance in the Ethnographer’s Travel Kit The discovery of the mirror system showed that an observer’s neural system is activated as if it were the observer herself executing the action she is observing. This mechanism has been described as a ‘resonance’ system, which allows us to harmonize other people’s actions with our own and to attune our own actions with those of other people, thereby establishing empathetic understanding between the observer and the observed (Rizzolatti, Fadiga, Fogassi, & Gallese, 1999). It is also interesting to note that Gallese (2003a, 2003b) has based his recently proposed concept of ‘embodied simulation’, as closely linked with the term ‘resonance’, on neuroscientific research results concerning the mirror system. He maintains that there are three fundamental levels of interpersonal relations—imitation, empathy and mind reading (the ability to explain and predict other people’s behavior by attributing independent mental states to them; Walter et al., 2004)—and that these depend on the constitution of a shared manifold space which is functionally characterized by automatic, unconscious embodied simulation routines. Therefore, in this perspective, embodied simulation represents a distinctive functional feature of the brain/body system which . . . enables models of real or imaginary worlds to be created. These models are the only way we have to establish a meaningful relationship with these worlds, because these worlds are never objectively given, but always recreated by means of simulated models. (Gallese, 2003a, p. 524)
The concept of resonance has also emerged in ethnological research conducted in Bali by the Norwegian anthropologist Unni Wikan (1992), who translated the Balinese term keneh as ‘resonance’. In conversations with Balinese intellectuals (a priest-philosopher, a professor-poet and a physician), this anthropologist heard herself being told time and time again that she should first create keneh with people and with their problems if she wanted to be able to write a text that establishes resonance with her readers. Keneh is a way of feeling/thinking that is not unilateral but implies reciprocity, and which refers not to linguistic and conceptual comprehension but to those aspects of being in the world and acting in the world, by which only concepts are born living (Wikan, 1992). Thus, Wikan considers keneh to be a deep-rooted concept, embedded in concrete action. Keneh is the cornerstone of a theory of being together in the world and understanding each other, which, in Western thought, can find its equivalent in the concept of empathy. As Leonardo Piasere (2002) suggests, Balinese resonance
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consists in ‘an ability-will to latch onto other people’s experience and to adopt it with involvement’ (p. 148). In agreement with Wikan and her Balinese intellectuals, Piasere identifies this ability-will as the most useful ‘instrument’ available for ethnography today. In other words, resonance as a mechanism for empathetic understanding should be ‘the ethnographer’s primary instrument, the one for which men are all, with the exception of [their various] languages, intercultural’ (Piasere, 2002, p. 149). The Balinese were suggesting that the Western ethnographers’ problem was that they did not feel resonance with the Balinese—and not because the ethnographers did not speak their language (Wikan, 1992). By going beyond all na¨ıve relativism, the concept of resonance therefore makes it possible to surpass differentialist culturalism and implement a cosmopolitan approach to culture: ‘Resonance is what unites men, culture is what divides them’ (Piasere, 2002, p. 148). Moreover, Piasere (2002) raised a criticism of the negotiation of meaning paradigm (predominant in North American, Geertzian anthropology) by reminding us that the Balinese intellectuals were not telling the anthropologist, Unni Wikan, ‘you have to negotiate with us’, but that what they were saying was, ‘if you want to understand us, you have to create resonance with us’. In fact, Geertz’s interpretive anthropology adopts the metaphor of culture as a text and equates ethnographic understanding with the hermeneutic tradition of text interpretation. From this point of view, meaning is not a given that is immediately and objectively available from the context and it’s also not immediately and objectively available in philosophical or literary texts. On the contrary, meaning is constructed through dialogical interaction among individuals (and thus also through the special type of dialogical interaction that is established between anthropologists and natives). The construction of culture as a text therefore consists in the negotiation of meaning. Specifically, although a given meaning refers to practices that are actually carried out and represented in various contexts, the practices themselves must also be traced back to an arbitrary symbolic framework of reference (where Geertz maintains a culture is imposed on reality) if every culture is to recognize these practices as meaningful (Geertz, 1964). Piasere’s position on interpretive anthropology is quite similar to Ingold’s, who, in criticizing Geertz’s idea of culture as the imposition of an arbitrary symbolic framework on reality, did not disparage the concept of construction of meaning, but aimed to substitute the abstract theoretical categories of this construction with the pragmatic categories incorporated in the acting body. Moreover, he was criticizing not the idea of constructing ethnographic experience, but, once again, the categories that ethnographic experience makes use of. Indeed, he held that, far from corresponding merely to a negotiation of arbitrary and symbolic meanings, ethnographic experience should be restored to an interactive know-how that is implemented through
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‘a cognitive and empathetic disposition to accept the unknown’ (Piasere, 2002, p. 166).
Conclusions A pragmatic dimension of the theory of knowledge has emerged from the present interdisciplinary analysis of the as if concept—an analysis involving the neurosciences, cognitive sciences, anthropology and ethnology. This pragmatic dimension underscores the role of action, and especially simulation and interaction, in the knowing process. The paradigm of embodied cognition has gradually asserted itself in the cognitive sciences, a domain that views this type of interdisciplinarity as its strong point. The embodied cognition paradigm views the mind as a biological system rooted in bodily experience and action and representation as closely interlinked and inseparable. Indeed, research on canonical neurons and on mirror neurons has proven to be highly useful for overcoming the mind–body, thought–action dichotomy, and the results of these studies have led to a reinterpretation of the motor system’s role throughout the entire central nervous system. The new proposal is that the motor system allows not only for the planning and execution of actions, but for their representation as well. Based on a principle of cognitive economy, the same mechanism that leads to the explicit execution of an action also allows for its representation (and for the representation of its underlying objects) when the action is only virtually activated. Hence, representing objects and actions implies a simulative process, an implicit as if action. Assuming this perspective makes it possible to maintain a representational conception of the mind, without adopting, however, the model of abstract representations of formal logic and the linguistic/propositional format in which they are expressed. Representing the external world therefore means corresponding virtual interaction schemas. People can then construct representations of their world based not on theoretical categories, as traditionally assumed, but on pragmatic categories, derived from the dynamic interaction of living organisms with their adaptive environments. This same type of pragmatic constructivism has also emerged in the social sciences, where an interpretive model of culture has developed around the theme of practice. This model proposes that cultural patterns can be described as strongly dependent on the cultural context (both biological and social) in which individuals act and interact, physically as well as mentally. With this new view of the relationship between mind and body and between culture and nature, there are now greater opportunities for conducting interdisciplinary research in the natural sciences and social sciences, research aimed at reconstituting the fracture that has existed for far too long now between humans as biological and cultural beings.
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Note 1. As Jacob and Jeannerod (2005) observed, the mirror neuron system is well designed for representing an agent’s motor intention, but not the agent’s prior intention to execute an action. A discussion on the theoretical distinction between motor intention and prior intention goes beyond the aims of the present work. We refer to Becchio, Adenzato and Bara (2006) for a more exhaustive analysis of the issue. References Becchio, C., Adenzato, M., & Bara, B.G. (2006). How the brain understands intention: Different neural circuits identify the componential features of motor and prior intentions. Consciousness and Cognition, 15, 64–74. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1980.) Bourdieu, P. (1998). Practical reasons: On the theory of action. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1994.) Bourdieu, P. (2000). Pascalian meditations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1997.) Buccino, G., Binkofski, F., Fink, G.R., Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L., Gallese, V. et al. (2001). Action observation activates premotor and parietal areas in a somatotopic manner: An fMRI study. European Journal of Neuroscience, 13, 400–404. Clark, A. (1997). Being there. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Gallese, V. (2003a). The manifold nature of interpersonal relations: The quest for a common mechanism. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, B, Biological Sciences, 358, 517–528. Gallese, V. (2003b). The roots of empathy: The shared manifold hypothesis and the neural basis of intersubjectivity. Psychopathology, 36, 171–180. Garbarini, F., & Adenzato, M. (2004). At the root of embodied cognition: Cognitive science meets neurophysiology. Brain and Cognition, 56, 100–106. Geertz, C. (1964). The transition to humanity. In S. Tax (Ed.), Horizons of anthropology (pp. 37–48). Chicago, IL: Aldine. Gibson, J.J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. London: Erlbaum. Ingold, T. (2000). Evolving skills. In H. Rose & S. Rose (Eds.), Alas poor Darwin (pp. 225–246). London: Cape. Jacob, P., & Jeannerod, M. (2005). The motor theory of social cognition: A critique. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9, 21–25. Johnson, M. (1987). The body in the mind: The bodily basis of imagination, reason and meaning. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Johnson-Laird, P.N. (1988). The computer and the mind: An introduction to cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. New York: Basic Books. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception. London: Routledge. (Original work published 1945.) Piasere, L. (2002). L’etnografo imperfetto: Esperienza e cognizione in antropologia. Rome/Bari: Laterza.
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Rizzolatti, G., & Craighero, L. (2004). The mirror-neuron system. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 27, 169–192. Rizzolatti, G., Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L., & Gallese, V. (1999). Resonance behaviors and mirror neurons. Archives Italiennes de Biologie, 137, 85–100. Thelen, E., & Smith, L. (1994). A dynamic systems approach to the development of cognition and action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Varela, F.J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Walter, H., Adenzato, M., Ciaramidaro, A., Enrici, I., Pia, L., & Bara B.G. (2004). Understanding intentions in social interactions: The role of the anterior parancingulate cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16, 1854–1863. Wikan, U. (1992). Beyond the words: The power of resonance. American Ethnologist, 19, 460–482.
Acknowledgements. This work was supported by MIUR of Italy (protocols no. 2003119330_008 and 2005119758_004) and by Regione Piemonte (Bando regionale per la ricerca scientifica 2004, cod. A239). Mauro Adenzato is researcher at the University of Turin, Italy. His papers have appeared in psychology and neuroscience journals and he is co-editor with Cristina Meini of Evolutionary Psychology (Bollati Boringhieri, 2006). He is currently working on the neural correlates of social cognition. Address: Center for Cognitive Science, University of Turin, via Po, 14–10123 Turin, Italy. [email:
[email protected]] Francesca Garbarini is a Ph.D. student in neuroscience at the University of Turin, Italy. Her work explores how theoretical perspectives and neuroscientific evidence are converging towards the current paradigm of embodied cognition. Address: Center for Cognitive Science, University of Turin, via Po, 14–10123 Turin, Italy. [email:
[email protected]]
