WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES THE BODY MAKE? 51theories should be considered alongside feminist epistemologies as part
of a transdisciplinary movement advocating situated cognition.^7 Situated
cognition, according to Solomon, overturns classical ideas of cognition as
general and universal, abstract, and symbolic. Instead, meaning emerges
from the interaction of the minded body with its environment. Rather
than abstracting what is common in all cognition, situated cognition is
best suited to examine “the epistemic significance of particular routes to
cognitive accomplishment” (413).^ And rather than reducing the mind to
the brain, situated cognition minimally sees mind as dependent on the
body as a whole, or maximally as a fluid assemblage of brain, body, and
world. On these points the two traditions resonate. Yet in feminist thought
the situated character of knowledge results in multiple truths and ways of
knowing. Despite their roots in radical empiricism, I argue that some of
the most prominent embodied mind theories in naturalized philosophy
elide or outright refuse epistemic multiplicity, seeking instead to explain
cognitive universals. A rush to assimilate neurocognitive and feminist epis-
temologies would obscure this key distinction. It would also gloss over the
difficulties of how to articulate the specificity that embodiment brings.
Epistemic and Embodied Multiplicity
Although they are extremely (and necessarily) vast and diverse, feminist
and queer writings on embodiment that address gender, sexuality, race, and
dis/ability, on my reading, offer a collective sense that there are differences
and contradictions in embodied experiences that lead to diverse epistemic
outcomes. They indicate that, to use N. Katherine Hayles’s phrasing, “Em-
bodiment can be destroyed but it cannot be replicated” (1993, 91). This is
not only to say that every embodied life is in some way unique, but also to
suggest that the embeddedness of individuals in social patterns and his-
torical contexts generate varied epistemic conditions and create multiple
ways of perceiving (and enacting) the world. Feminist standpoint theorists,
for example, adopt the phenomenological claim that embodiment shapes
perception, but for them this is not a universalizing insight; instead it ex-
plains how knowledge is tied to conditions of experience that are socially
differentiated, such as the gendered organization of labor and reproduction
(Smith 1988, 1991, 1992; Young 1990).^8 Intersectionality theory describes