WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES THE BODY MAKE? 55mind theories in one of two types. In the first type, what he calls the special
contribution thesis, bodily difference would, in principle, yield cognitive
difference. According to this thesis, the specificity of sensorimotor dynam-
ics fixes, “with extreme sensitivity, the nature of our perceptual experience”
(52). In the embodied mind theory of metaphor, for example, the properties
of the human body shape the content of concepts in a predictable manner.
According to Mark Johnson and Tim Rohrer, for example, “Thousands of
times each day we see, manipulate, and move into and out of containers,
so containment is one of the most fundamental patterns of our experience.
Because we have two legs and stand up within a gravitational field, we ex-
perience verticality and up- down orientation. Because the qualities (e.g.,
redness, softness, coolness, agitation, sharpness) of our experience vary
continuously in intensity, there is a scalar vector in our world.... We are
subject to forces that move us, change our bodily states, and constrain our
actions, and all of these forces have characteristic patterns and qualities”
(2007, 32). What can be known about the world depends on the biophysi-
ology of the cognizer as well as the environmental circumstances that are
more or less characteristic for all of us.
Theories of enactive perception also suggest that perceptual information
is strongly shaped by a perceiver’s motor activity (Mossio and Taraborelli
2008). That is, the meaning of stimuli is not a priori and neutral with re-
spect to the body that receives it. Instead, meaning comes through the local
relevance of stimuli for the bodily systems that are at work in the world.
This view asserts, according to Clark, “a kind of principled body- centrism,
according to which the presence of humanlike minds depends quite di-
rectly upon the possession of a humanlike body” (2008b, 43; see also Glan-
non 2009). Or, as Noe puts it, “If perception is in part constituted by our
possession and exercise of bodily skills... then it may also depend on our
possession of the sorts of bodies that can encompass those skills, for only
a creature with such a body could have those skills. To perceive like us, it
follows, you must have a body like ours” (2004, 35, cited in Clark 2008a,
41). In this sense, the special contribution thesis can be thought of as a
humanist standpoint theory. The human body’s properties are assumed to
be both necessary and universal for cognition, and so the issue of cognitive
difference (between humans) is foreclosed.
Unstated in his description of the special contribution thesis — for Clark