146 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2
16 This affirms embodied realism while putting pressure on it to make room for
epistemic difference. If common bodies create common knowledge, unusual
bodies create marginal but (Scully would argue) no less valid knowledge. This
could mean something like epistemic pluralism that includes non- pathological
“disability knowledge.” To make this case, however, Scully explicitly brackets any
discussion of cognitive or mental disabilities. But a broader sense of bodily vari-
ance could include brain variance, and thus, neurodiversity.
17 Given the concerns flagged by Martin, many readers might consider this fortu-
nate. The denial of epistemic difference, however, is objectionable on feminist
grounds, and it is also problematic from the point of view of disability studies.
18 This view disrupts a sense of disability as the property of any individual, and
therefore as a basis for fixed identity. Instead, disabled experience is a “process of
fluid encounter” between bodies and worlds, including other bodies (Price and
Shildrick 2002, 64).
Chapter 3. I Feel Your Pain
1 Methodological and interpretive critiques of mirror neuron research are ex-
tensive. For example, there is disagreement on whether and how much mirror
neuron activity is actually discernible in human brains (Welberg 2010). There is
a lack of agreement about what mirror neurons do in humans and what kinds of
actions are actually mirrored. Mirror neurons in humans are located in brain ar-
eas thought to be significant for language, yet the mechanisms by which language
and memory work with mirror neurons are far from clear (Damasio and Meyer
2008; Mahon and Carmazza 2008). Some critics have also pointed out that other
kinds of neurons are capable of higher- level representations addressing goals,
intentions, categories, and concepts (Hickok 2009), or, as I discuss, questioned
the idea of simulation as achieving empathy or intersubjectivity (Wahman 2008;
Jacob 2009). And compared with other multisensory neurons, “very little is
known” about their development and their individual and networked computa-
tions (Heyes 2010a, 789).
2 Malcolm Gladwell (2005) also discusses the Diallo case as an example of theory
of mind failure. Rather than attributing the case to racism, as many critics do,
he attributes the mistakes of the four police officers to what he calls “temporary
autism” caused by haste, stress, and physiological arousal. The use of autism as a
general term for cognitive (or precognitive) theory of mind failure is question-
able, made no less so by the fact that mirror neuron researchers are trying to ex-
plain autism through mirror neuron systems, as I discuss. Gladwell’s discussion
of race is also troubling. Having dispensed with the explanation that the officers
were overt racists, he writes: “They [the officers] are in the line of fire, and what
Carroll sees is Diallo’s hand and the tip of something black. As it happens, it is
a wallet. But Diallo is black, it’s late, and it’s the South Bronx, and under those
circumstances we know that wallets invariably look like guns” (243). Gladwell