46 CHAPTER TWO
scientific assumptions of objectivity but also to challenge universalizing
claims about human experience. As Helen Longino summarizes, “with the
embodiment of the subject, experience must be rethought, as it can no lon-
ger be understood as the parade of sense data whose character is the same
for all perceivers” (2010, 734).
By contrast, naturalized perspectives commonly assume “a model of the
body that is more or less universal, leaving bodies and bodily behaviors
that differ from this model to be considered abnormal, pathological, or less
developed in some way” (Pitts- Taylor 2008, xxii). The embodiment that
often appears in neurocognitive, naturalized philosophy is tied to a generic,
ideal model of the body, or its difference is treated as a special case that can
put normal embodiment into relief. If embodiment is to be a solution to
neuroreductionism, as is being widely proposed, I argue that embodied
mind theories cannot assume the uniformity of the body and bodily ex-
perience, but rather must pay attention to discrepancies and dissonances
in how minded bodies and worlds fit together. The task demands rethink-
ing the universalizing tendencies of naturalized models of the embodied
mind, while also resisting the essentializing tendencies of early feminist
epistemologies. In this chapter I address these conflicts and explore what
epistemic differences having a body can make. I use an assemblage theory
of disability to try to conceptualize examples of epistemic multiplicity and
cognitive dissonance in relation to the body. If the “history of disabled peo-
ple in the Western world is in part the history of being on display, of being
visually conspicuous while being politically and socially erased” (Garland-^
Thomson 2002, 56), the multiplicity of embodiment for persons deemed
disabled is both readily apparent and also too readily ignored.
The Embodied Mind in Naturalized Philosophy
The embodied mind paradigm is a diverse family of theories that describe
cognition as variously embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended, as
well as emotional or affective. I introduce a few of these concepts below,
which can collectively be referred to as “embodied” because each in some
way presents cognition in terms of bodily experience, highlighting, for ex-
ample, the body’s sensorimotor capacities, action in and felt engagement
with the world, or embeddedness in the environment. In these respects the