48 CHAPTER TWO
tions as matters of concern” (74). Many social theorists have embraced such
theories of emotion, arguing that they can be used to interrelate cognition
with external structures that influence personal, felt experience, such as the
negatively valenced experiences of stigma, and to address intercorporeal
and prepersonal dimensions of experience that do not depend on repre-
sentation or language.^2
Embodied mind theories also draw from phenomenology to address
cognition in terms of the enactment of perception. Enactivism depicts the
mind as involving the whole body and its motor and perceptual systems,
and understands cognition as actively experiencing or “enacting” — not
contemplating — the world. This view has roots in the seminal work The
Embodied Mind, by Francisco Varela et al. (1991), which uses dynamic sys-
tems theory along with pragmatism, phenomenology, and cognitive science
to depict cognition as an event of the minded body “structurally coupling”
with the world. Enactivism argues that cognition proceeds without the need
of representation. Instead, cognition is a constant, multidirectional, intra-
causal interaction between the embrained body and environment. This
claim depends on a strong view of sensorimotor action as constitutively
contributing to cognition. Moving about in the world, perceiving it, and
acting in it provide the context and the shape of what we cognate. Alva Noe
(2004), for example, describes perception not as the passive reception of
stimuli, but rather the activity of unconsciously (but nonetheless skillfully)
selecting and organizing the features of the world that are relevant to us.
To understand what is relevant to us at any given time, enactivists point to
cognition’s embeddedness in the environment. For Noe, perceptual content
is both factual (dependent on how things are) and relational (dependent on
the vantage point of the perceiver). Arguing that perception is as haptic as
it is visual, Noe describes the blind person who perceives by touch, “not all
at once,” but over time, with “skillful probing and movement,” as the ideal
example of enactive perception (1). This reference to disability as a model
of embodied cognition needs attention.
If physical embodiment shapes the mind, what kinds of limits do bodies
provide? George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s (1999) embodied metaphor
theory explains how, as they see it, the motor and perceptual systems are
largely responsible for the content of cognition.^3 They define metaphors
as cognitive abstractions (or combinations) of brain activity in the sen-