92 CHAPTER THREE
embodied simulation, I mean to make a similar gesture. The use of the neuro-
biological body to define theory of mind and empathy as forms of simula-
tion has, in the dominant model discussed here, the effect of normalizing
intersubjectivity as a natural and reliable outcome of social encounters.
Further, the use of theory of mind and empathy to define what mirror neu-
rons do has the effect of limiting their functions entirely to prosocial roles.
But embodiment can be understood as marked by inequality; affected by
race, class, gender, and other patterns of social difference; and enmeshed
in suffering and violence, as easily as it can be viewed as a common thread
that unites. Embodiment is not exactly the same for everyone, and simu-
lation cannot guarantee sociality or empathy. The potential for conflict, mis-
understanding, and violence should not be set aside, nor acknowledged
only as clinical pathology, but rather understood as part of embodied real-
ity in contexts of persistent inequality.
If imagination is a “fundamentally embodied capacity of mind,” Scully
argues, “having/being a particular kind of body places real constraints on
our capacities both to imagine ourselves otherwise and to imaginatively
put ourselves in the place of others” (2008, 55). On Scully’s view, bodily
variance may disallow a shared manifold that guarantees understandings
across boundaries of self and other. But it is not only physical dis/ability
that affects phenomenological and functional experiences in the world.
Social environments enable differing practical competencies, provide
varying affordances, and require greater and lesser effort to “match” or fit
with the surroundings. They invite (and disinvite) styles of bodily being,
provide varying levels of safety and risk, and expose persons to different
opportunities and constraints. Some bodies, for example, are subjected to
daily surveillance and stop- and- frisk policing, whereas others are given
free range to go about as they please. These differences surely complicate
intersubjectivity. They probably mean that we cannot rely on simulation,
whether propositional or neural, to do the work of knowing the other and
of relating to them and feeling for them in nonviolent ways.
The need to recognize such differences is why social workers Karen
Gerdes et al. qualify social empathy as “the ability to understand the cir-
cumstances of other people’s living conditions in the context of broader
educational, health, and socioeconomic structures and institutions” (2011,
85). Others describe critical empathy, where felt connections to another