56 CHAPTER TWO
is after something else — is that it necessitates drawing lines around what
“possessing a human- like body” means. Do such bodies, for example, have
two arms, two hands, two legs, and two feet? Are any of these vestigial, para-
lyzed, or amputated? Do bodies stand, bend, and walk, and all in the same
way, and with the same effort or speed? Do they have equivalent haptic,
optical, and auditory capacities? Do they have similar motor capacities? Do
they require the same prostheses? In her critique of embodied mind theory,
Emily Martin notes the pathologizing implications for disabled people by
following the theory to its logical conclusion. If neural structures are gener-
ated through actions in the world that require universal capacities, Martin
asks, “will abnormal individuals, for example those who are not able to ‘go
about the world constantly moving’... be unable to form the same cogni-
tive structures as normal people, and hence be unable to participate in rea-
son?” (2000, 572). Noe defends enactivism on this point by showing how
various disabilities, for the most part, do not negatively affect perception.
While “the enactive view requires that perceivers possess a range of perti-
nent sensorimotor skills,” he reassures readers that even quadriplegics have
such skills (Noe 2004, 12). For example, they can move using a wheelchair,
and can understand the relation between movement and sensory stimula-
tion. “Paralyzed people can’t do as much as people who are not paralyzed,
but they can do a great deal,” he argues, and thus they have the necessary
resources for enactive perception (12).
The parsing of the sorts of disabilities that do and do not lead to cogni-
tive impairment is motivated by the aim of achieving a normative, singu-
lar, universalized model of cognition. In Disability Bioethics (2008), Jackie
Leach Scully takes a very different tack. Scully finds it plausible not only
that, as embodied realists and enactivists argue, “cognition is mediated
through sensorimotor pathways laid down by the body interacting with the
environment,” but also that “this happens differently when anomalous in-
teractions are involved” (103). Bodily difference yields cognitive difference.
Like feminist epistemologists, Scully sees epistemic difference as a basis for
critique of the normative and universalizing assumptions of philosophy.
Taking a disability twist on embodied metaphor theory, she argues that
common concepts reflect dominant morphologies, sensory experiences,
and perceptive capacities, and are thus exclusionary. For example, concepts