54 CHAPTER TWO
Like embodied mind theories in naturalized philosophy, each of these
feminist perspectives addresses the inadequacy of abstract, universal Reason
through attention to the body. But unlike them, they also suggest that the
commonality of consciousness, phenomenological experience, and affective
life cannot be presumed. In fact, they insist on epistemic or experiential dif-
ferences due to variations in embodied lives, which are affected by but irre-
ducible to social patterns and inequalities. They also raise the question of
alterity, the recognition of differences that “cannot be known in advance,” but
which “brings us to the limits of our own self- certainty and certainty about
the world” (Weil 2010, 15). If cognition, perception, and consciousness are
enacted through bodies, and if embodiments are heterogeneously lived, what
differences do variances in bodies, embodied experiences, and worlds make?
Multiple Realizability
How embodied mind theories in naturalized philosophy come out on the
question of epistemic multiplicity is a complicated question. On the one
hand, some of these theories conceptualize both cognitive processes and
knowing agents as radically relational. For example, in arguing that cogni-
tion occurs without representation — that is, without an internalized cache
of symbols that represent the world — Varela et al. (1991) posit that the en-
tanglement of body- minds with environments opens up transient “micro-
worlds” that are temporally and spatially specific. The argument is not only
that perception is generated relationally, but that body- minds and worlds
are too. For Varela, the breakdown of cognitive boundaries suggested a
mind/body with no self, but rather a “multiplicity of micro- identities”
(Protevi 2013), which are historicized through the traces left by previous
cognitive events, or couplings of body- minds and worlds. This multiplicity
is also possible in theories of extended cognition. For example, cognitive
economies can be conceptualized as fixed or durable, but they can also be
softly assembled, situational, and malleable. On the other hand, the effort
to explain cognition at the phylogenetic level can have the effect of obliter-
ating such onto- epistemic multiplicity. One can see this in the debate over
multiple realizability, or whether the same mental state can be achieved
through variant processes.
In a critical review of the literature, Clark (2008a) categorizes embodied