WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES THE BODY MAKE? 47theories can be seen as an extension of the American pragmatist tradition
(Johnson and Rohrer 2007). Pragmatism articulates an alternative to Carte-
sian rationalism, the idea that knowledge is derived from reason rather than
experience. Against this view, early pragmatists, including John Dewey and
William James, defined cognition as practical, problem- focused, ongoing
action in the world. From evolutionary theory, they discerned that cogni-
tion could not be understood outside of the bodily and environmental con-
text. That is, “everything we attribute to mind — perceiving, conceptualiz-
ing, imagining, reasoning, desiring, willing, dreaming — has emerged (and
continues to develop) as part of a process in which an organism seeks to
survive, grow, and flourish within different kinds of situations” (21 – 22). The
purpose of consciousness, then, is not the creation of internal representa-
tions that mirror external reality. Instead, consciousness “is about acting —
it emerges through processes that make the world available to those sys-
tems that allow us to select behavioral means to our ends” (Prinz 2008,
434; see Prinz and Clark 2004). The pragmatists also held that the so- called
higher- level functions of language and consciousness are not ontologically
distinct from “lower”- level unconscious and immediate sensory experi-
ences. The former, as Dewey put it, “grow out of organic activities, without
being identical with that from which they emerge” (1938, 26, cited in John-
son and Rohrer 2007, 23). This means that there are not strict divisions
between thinking, feeling, and perceiving.
Emotions are felt throughout the body — the gut, the hands, the heart-
beat — and in the neopragmatic view they are not the effects of thoughts
but perceptions of bodily states that shape the content of cognition. An-
tonio Damasio’s (1996) well- known somatic marker hypothesis, for exam-
ple, describes the physiological states that accompany stimuli, such as the
raised blood pressure, sweating, and muscle tension that accompany fear,
as marking experience not through conscious memory but through em-
bodied feeling. These “somatic markers,” he claims, are partially reenacted,
or simulated, in future experiences of encountering the same or similar
stimuli. This lends new stimuli somatic valence that is biographically spe-
cific. Jesse Prinz (2004) calls emotions embodied appraisals because they
not only somatically mark experience but because, he argues, they in and of
themselves amount to judgments of the world. As valenced apprehensions
of the body’s changing relation with the environment, they “represent situa-