I FEEL YOUR PAIN 79other — because (goes the argument) our bodies really are the same, and really
do act in predictable ways. There is no explanation for “wrong” action un-
derstanding outside of pathology. Embodied simulation cannot account, for
example, for the sort of fear that attaches to bodies through racialization. To
grasp such wrongs, we have to understand not only how propositional beliefs
can be racialized but also how racism and other forms of power and inequal-
ity work with bodily capacities and perceptions, generating mis- attunements
and foreclosing the possibility of intersubjective knowledge.
Shared Embodiments
Gallese emphasizes the significance of bodily action in accounting for
mirroring. Mirror neurons are special, he argues, in part because they can
integrate sensory and motor activity within the motor system, which is
involved in bodily agency. “Far from being just another species of multi-
modal associative neurons in the brain, mirror neurons anchor the multi-
modal integration they operate to the neural mechanisms presiding over
our pragmatic relation with the world of others” (Gallese 2009a, 522). In-
dividuals use the same or overlapping neural circuits for processing their
own embodied actions and for processing the observed experiences of
others. Contrary to classical “top- down” models that see interpersonal
understanding as based on cognitive mind reading, where one rationally
theorizes about another person’s intentions, on this view understanding
the other moves from the bottom up, allowing no less than “a direct expe-
riential grasp of the mind of others” (Gallese et al. 2004, 396). This work
contests the idea that “the sole account of intersubjectivity consists in ex-
plicitly attributing to others propositional attitudes like beliefs and desires,
mapped as symbolic representations... before and below mindreading is
intercorporeality as the main source of knowledge we directly gather about
others” (Gallese 2014, 4).
This claim is grounded in the experimental research mentioned above,
but it also draws from established ideas about perception and motor
schema. It assumes first that objects have affordances for us — that is, we
see them through the lens of how we might act in relation to them (Gibson
1966) — and second, that motor intentionality involves typical series of ac-
tions. When I see a chair, I do not see a wooden sculpture but a place to sit.