WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES THE BODY MAKE? 45context” (173). Embodied mind theories, which include theories of emotion
and memory, extended cognition, and enactive perception, are material-
ist and physicalist, but they are also nonreductive. In contrast to the idea
that the mind is wholly reducible to the brain, embodied mind theorists
draw from phenomenology and pragmatism to insist the mind is depen-
dent on, and even constituted by, the actions of the body as a whole and
on the environment. Embodied mind theories remain somewhat marginal
in neurocognitive science, but they have been hugely influential in the so-
cial sciences and humanities, where they inform contemporary material-
ist, biosocial, and affective social theories. To recognize embodiment as
an inescapable feature of perception, thought, and consciousness offers a
powerful rejection of neuroreductionism, while at the same time contest-
ing rationalism, the idea that knowledge is based on abstract reason. If
the mind is neither the abstract processing of symbols, nor exclusively the
workings of neural networks, but rather is embodied, it can be understood
only in terms of lived experience (Fuchs 2009). A mind that is embodied,
potentially, can mean it is immanent (tied to the capacities and worlds in
which it is enacted); relational (affected by its position to and interaction
with other minds, bodies, and objects); affective (shaped by feeling and
emotion); and situated (tied to specific places, needs, and circumstances).
This discovery of embodiment resonates to some degree with feminist
insights. Such ideas have since the 1980s been central themes of feminist
epistemologies, which have argued in various ways that “our direct embod-
ied experience of the everyday world [is] our primary ground of knowledge”
(Smith 1991, 22). Thus Miriam Solomon (2007) argues that feminist and
neurocognitive ideas of the embodied mind are not merely compatible but
rather can be counted as part of a broad transdisciplinary intellectual move-
ment advocating situated cognition. But while they do share phenomeno-
logical and pragmatic orientations, Solomon obscures a serious rub: In fem-
inist thought, bodies and embodiments are heterogeneous. Because bodies
are differently located in the social world, and social hierarchies affect the
experiences of body-^ subjects, embodiment is as much a site of difference as
it is a site of commonality. Epistemically, embodiment in feminist thought
amounts to some kind of difference, or, better, multiplicity, the idea that
there are multiple truths and ways of knowing. Feminists have argued that
an embrace of epistemic multiplicity is valuable not only as a corrective to