Chapter 7

Embodied Rationality

Shaun Gallagher

Abstract Recent developments in embodied cognition in the field of cognitive

science support an expanded notion of rationality. I attempt to explicate this
expanded notion by introducing the concepts of embodied rationality and enactive
hermeneutics. I argue that bodily performance is rational and that there is continuity
between the rational movements of the body and reflective thinking understood as a
skill.

Introduction

The well-known existential philosopher, Gabriel Marcel, proposed a distinction

between the concepts of mystery and problem. Marcel defined a problem as
something that could be identified as objectively distinct from the subject or agent—
something that one could get a perspective on from a distance. One may be able to
solve problems using science or instrumental rationality. In contrast, Marcel defined
a mystery as something that so involves the subject or agent that gaining an objective
perspective on it is not possible. It is not something that can be solved by scientific or
instrumental rationality, not because it’s a difficult problem, but because it is
something different from a problem. The defining feature of a mystery is the inex-
tricable involvement of the existential subject.
A problem is something which I meet, which I find completely before me, but which I can
therefore lay siege to and reduce. But a mystery is something in which I am myself involved,
and it can therefore only be thought of as a sphere where the distinction between what is in
me and what is before me loses its meaning and initial validity. (Marcel 1949, 117)

S. Gallagher (&)
University of Memphis, Memphis, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
S. Gallagher
University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018 83

G. Bronner and F. Di Iorio (eds.), The Mystery of Rationality,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94028-1_7
84 S. Gallagher

Marcel suggested that being in love is a good example of a mystery. But also,
one’s own existence, and one’s own body (not the body as a biological object, but
the body as it is lived or experienced by the embodied subject) are mysteries in this
sense.
Marcel is not the only philosopher to suggest such a distinction. Noam Chomsky
made a very similar one with respect to the study of language and the mind, indeed,
using the same terminology (1976, 281).
I would like to distinguish roughly between two kinds of issues that arise in the study of
language and mind: those that appear to be within the reach of approaches and concepts that
are moderately well understood — what I will call “problems”; and others that remain as
obscure to us today as when they were originally formulated — what I will call “mysteries.”

Although Gadamer (2004, 301) did not use the term ‘mystery’, his characteri-
zation of the ‘hermeneutical situation’ involved a similar structure to what Marcel
called a mystery—the inextricable involvement of the interpreter. Likewise, Dewey
(1938) defined the concept of ‘situation’, not as equivalent to the external envi-
ronment, but as inclusive of the agent (or the organism) as it is coupled to the
environment. The distinction between the ‘geographical environment’ and the
‘behavioral environment’ (Koffka 2013, 27–51) is similar in so far as the latter
concept includes the comporting agent. Along these lines, and I think in the same
spirit, Aristotle (350 BCEa, I, 3) famously noted that although in many subject
areas problems could be addressed by theoretical or scientific knowledge, in the
area of ethics, where human action is at stake, issues are not as well ordered, and
one would have to be satisfied with a precision ‘just so far as the nature of the
subject admits’.
Faced with these different suggestions and distinctions, there are at least two
possible stances. Either one takes the ‘mystery’ (to stay with Marcel’s term) to be
irrational; or one widens the definition of rationality to include mystery. Aristotle’s
notion of phronesis (practical wisdom), Dewey’s pragmatism, Gadamer’s
hermeneutics, and Marcel’s existentialism are attempts to expand the notion of
rationality beyond the instrumental or strict natural scientific conceptions. I’ll argue
in this paper that recent developments in embodied cognition in the field of cog-
nitive science also support this expanded notion of rationality. I’ll attempt to
explicate this expanded notion by introducing the concepts of embodied rationality
and enactive hermeneutics.

Enactivist Approaches to Embodied Cognition

There are a number of different approaches to embodied (or situated) cognition

(EC). Some approaches attempt to remain close to the standard cognitivist con-
ception of the mind based on computational models and mental representations.
One such approach, so-called ‘weak’ EC (Alsmith and Vignemont 2012), is worked
out in terms of internal body (B-) formatted representations. Goldman (2014), for
7 Embodied Rationality 85

example, takes the role of the body to be fully accounted for in terms of neural
processes in which sensory-motor representations get reiterated for purposes other
than sensory-motor function. For example, B-formatted simulations may be
important for language and concept processing (e.g., Glenberg 2010; Meteyard
et al. 2012; Pezzulo et al. 2011; Pulvermüller 2005). Extended functionalist
approaches, like the extended mind hypothesis (Clark and Chalmers 1998; Menary
2010), also remain tied to computational rationality even as they minimize the role
of mental representations. On this model, some of the work of the mind is taken up
through an embodied engagement with tools, instruments and artifacts in the
environment.
A more radical break with computational models is made by enactivist
approaches, which call for a radical change in the way we think about the mind and
brain. These approaches emphasize dynamical, non-linear self-organizing systems
that constitute cognition from the bottom up, where cognition is defined in terms of
responses made by autopoietic biological organisms to environmental conditions
(Thompson 2007; Varela et al. 1991). Human cognition obviously involves the
brain, but the brain is considered part of the larger system of
brain-body-environment. In this dynamical intertwinement of brain and body with
the environment, the brain is not computing across representations. It’s not repre-
senting or creating an internal model of the world. It’s not taking the world as a
problem to be solved.1 It’s rather contributing to the ongoing responses made by the
embodied agent to physical, social and cultural environments, in ways that allow for
the enactment of meaning.
The enactivist approach can be summarized by the following background
assumptions.2
(1) Cognition is not simply a brain event. It emerges from processes distributed
across brain-body-environment;
(2) The world (meaning, intentionality) is not pre-given or predefined, but is
structured by cognition and action;
(3) Cognitive processes acquire meaning in part by their role in the context of
action, rather than through a representational mapping or replicated internal
model of the world;
(4) The enactivist approach has strong links to dynamical systems theory,
emphasizing the relevance of dynamical coupling and coordination across
brain-body-environment;
(5) In contrast to classic cognitive science, which is often characterized by
methodological individualism with a focus on internal mechanisms, the

1
Enactivism, however, may be viewed as consistent with predictive models of brain function as
long as the relation between brain, body and environment is properly conceived (see Gallagher and
Allen 2016).
2
See Gallagher (2017). These assumptions are drawn from the following sources: Clark (1999), Di
Paolo et al. (2010), Dominey et al. (2016), Engel (2010), Engel et al. (2013), Thompson and
Varela (2001), Varela et al. (1991).
86 S. Gallagher

enactivist approach emphasizes the extended, intersubjective and socially sit-

uated nature of cognitive systems;
(6) Enactivism aims to ground higher and more complex cognitive functions not
only in sensorimotor coordination, but also in affective and autonomic aspects
of the full body;
(7) Higher-order cognitive functions, such as reflective thinking or deliberation are
exercises of skillful know-how and are usually coupled with situated and
embodied actions.
Enactivist versions of EC emphasize the idea that perception is for action, and
that action-orientation shapes most cognitive processes. Actions and bodily
responses are not mindless, however. Some claims by Dreyfus (2007), a proponent
of a version of enactivist EC, might be taken as suggesting that the organism’s
intelligent coping with its environment is in some way mindless. In a recent debate
with John McDowell, for example, he rejects what he calls the ‘myth of the mental’,
and holds that perception and action most often occur without mental intervention.
McDowell (2007), in response, argues that perception (and agency) and embodied
coping are conceptual and rational, and therefore not as ‘mindless’ as Dreyfus
contends. McDowell explains, however, that rationality does not have to be situ-
ation independent, and this can be seen in the Aristotelian notion of phronesis as a
model for situated rationality—one that Dreyfus himself takes as a model for
embodied coping. For McDowell, phronesis involves an initiation into conceptual
capacities. Dreyfus (2005, 51), however, takes phronesis to be ‘a kind of under-
standing that makes possible an immediate response to the full concrete situation’.
McDowell, influenced by Gadamer on this point, contends that ‘the practical
rationality of the phronimos [the person with practical reason] is displayed in what
he does even if he does not decide to do that as a result of [explicit, deliberative]
reasoning’ (2007, 341). Rationality is built into action insofar as we can think of
reasoning as the ability to differentiate which affordances to respond to, and how to
go about responding to them. McDowell argues that the fact that we are able to give
reasons for our action, even if we did not form deliberative reasons prior to the
action, suggests that our actions and embodied copings have an implicit structure
that is rational (or proto-rational) and amenable to conceptuality.
This question about the nature of rationality becomes central to the debate between
Dreyfus and McDowell. On the one hand, for Dreyfus, the concept of rationality is
not something inherent in life or action. In this regard, he thinks of rationality in terms
of giving reasons for our actions, which involves detached, reflective thoughtful
processes associated with language—propositional discourse, the space of reasons, or
conceptual articulation. On the other hand, for McDowell, rational language use is
closely tied to the situation in which it occurs. Our openness to the world involves a
situated categorial aspect, which allows us to register it linguistically (even if we
don’t always do so). Even if we are not ‘ready in advance’ to put a word to every
aspect of experience, we have an anticipatory understanding that conceptually shapes
our experience, and allows us to “step back” to reflectively identify the rationality of
our actions. To this Dreyfus responds:
7 Embodied Rationality 87

I agree with McDowell that we have a freedom to step back and reflect that nonhuman
animals lack, but I don’t think this is our most pervasive and important kind of freedom.
Such stepping back is intermittent in our lives and, in so far as we take up such a ‘free,
distanced orientation’, we are no longer able to act in the world. I grant that, when we are
absorbed in everyday skillful coping, we have the capacity to step back and reflect but I
think it should be obvious that we cannot exercise that capacity without disrupting our
coping. (Dreyfus 2007, 354).

Here the notion of affordance (Gibson 1977) offers some explanatory help. The
concept of affordance is defined as having the same relational structure as Dewey’s
notion of ‘situation’. That is, it does not signify something about an objective
structure in the environment; it’s defined in terms of the relation between a certain
type of organism or agent, which has a certain skill level, and the particularities of
the environment. Dreyfus distinguishes affordances as facts (or as Rietveld and
Kiverstein 2014 put it, affordances relative to a way of life) from affordances as
specific solicitations, here and now. ‘Although when we step back and contemplate
them affordances can be experienced as features of the world, when we respond to
their solicitations they aren’t figuring for a subject as features of the world [in
McDowell’s sense]’ (2007, 358). McDowell, according to Dreyfus, assumes that
the world is already a set of facts that are determinate and that can then be named,
and thought, and fit into rational concepts. In contrast, for Dreyfus, the world is
indeterminate, ‘not implicitly conceptual and simply waiting to be named. Our
relation to the world is more basic than our mind’s being open to apperceiving
categorially unified facts’ (2007, 359). This fits well with the enactivist idea that,
rather than finding meaning pre-formed, we enact meaning in our ongoing actions.

Embodied Rationality

The notion of embodied rationality splits the difference between Dreyfus and
McDowell. On the enactivist view, the world is laid out in perception, not in terms of
a conceptual, or proto-conceptual meaning, but first of all, in terms of differentiations
that concern my action possibilities or affordances—the object is something I can
reach, or not; something I can lift, or not; something I can move or not. One’s ability
to make sense out of the world comes, in part, from an active and pragmatic
engagement with the world. If we can then turn around or step back to discover that
our world or our experience has an inherent rational or proto-conceptual structure,
that’s because that structure has already been put there by our pre-predicative
embodied engagements. Dreyfus may reject this as a form of rationality because he is
thinking of rationality in the standard way. As Zahavi (2013) points out, both
Dreyfus and McDowell continue to retain and share an overly intellectualized
(conceptualized, “languaged”) conception of the mind. In contrast to this traditional
conception (which is the concept of mind that Dreyfus rejects and McDowell
accepts), the alternative is to think of mental skills such as reflection, problem
solving, decision making, and so on, as enactive, non-representational forms of
88 S. Gallagher

embodied coping that emerge from a pre-predicative perceptual ordering of differ-

entiations and similarities (Gallagher 2017).
Consider, that there is a rationality that is implicit in the hand. This kind of
hand-related rationality has been recognized in a long tradition of philosophy that
goes back to Anaxagoras’ observation (located on the Dreyfus side of the debate)
that we humans are the wisest of all beings because we have hands—human
rationality derives from human practices. Aristotle turns that claim around to make
it less enactivist and more consistent with McDowell’s view: “Man has hands
because he is the wisest of all beings”—human practices derive from human
rationality.
Now it is the opinion of Anaxagoras that the possession of these hands is the cause of man
being of all animals the most intelligent. But it is more rational to suppose that his
endowment with hands is the consequence rather than the cause of his superior intelligence.
For the hands are instruments or organs, and the invariable plan of nature in distributing the
organs is to give each to such animal as can make use of it…. We must conclude that man
does not owe his superior intelligence to his hands, but his hands to his superior intelli-
gence. (Aristotle 350b)

Still, in the Aristotelian tradition the hand is raised to the level of the rational by
considering it the organum organorum.3 For the enactivist, hands (as part of a
complete system that includes the brain and the rest of the body) are action oriented.
As an agent reaches to grasp something, the hand automatically (and without the
agent’s conscious awareness) shapes itself into just the right posture to form the
most appropriate grip for that object and for the agent’s purpose. If I reach to grab a
banana in order to take a bite, the shape of my grasp is different from when I reach
to grab a banana in order to pretend it’s a phone. Differences in my grasp reflect my
intention so that if I grasp the fruit to eat it, the kinematics of my movement are
different from when I grasp it to offer it to you, and different again from when I
grasp it to throw at you (Ansuini et al. 2006, 2008; Jeannerod 1997; Marteniuk et al.
1987; Sartori et al. 2011). Hands are integrated with visual perception (via the
dorsal visual pathway), so that I see the fruit as graspable for specific purposes. The
brain evolved to do what it does in this regard only because it had hands to work
with—hands that evolved with the brain in a holistic relation with other bodily
aspects.
It is sometimes the case that very smart hand-brain dynamics take the lead over a
more conceptual, ideational intelligence. For example, a patient with visual agnosia
who is unable to recognize objects, when shown a picture of a clarinet, calls it a
‘pencil’. At the same time, however, his fingers began to play an imaginary clarinet
(Robertson and Treisman 2010, 308). The hands, and more generally, the body and
its movement in this regard are rational and perform a kind of ‘manual thinking’
(Bredekamp 2007) that integrates its action across all perceptual modalities. Thus

3
Beyond the Aristotelian view, Newton suggested that the thumb is good evidence of God’s
existence (see Dickens 1908, 346), and Kant (1992) used his hands (the fact that hands are
incongruent counterparts, e.g. a left hand doesn’t fit properly into a right-hand glove) to prove that
Newton was right about space being absolute.
7 Embodied Rationality 89

we have a rationality involved in touch and haptic exploration, hand-mouth coor-

dination, hand-eye coordination, shading the eyes; cupping one’s ears, or holding
one’s nose.
The hand facilitates perception and action; it also transforms its movements into
language (via gesture) and into thinking. Empirical studies suggest that there are close
relationships between gesture, speech, and thinking—they are part of the same sys-
tem, which David McNeill calls the hand-language-thought system (Cole et al. 2002;
McNeill et al. 2008; Quaeghebeur et al. 2014). Gesture adds to cognitive ability, and
does so without requiring distance, discontinuity, or a ‘stepping back’ that comes
between this kind of movement and spoken language—nor between manual thinking
and thinking proper—they are part of the same performance system.
In this precise sense, bodily performance is rational and demonstrates a conti-
nuity between the rational movements of the body and reflective thinking.
Reflective thinking is a skill as much as physical coping is. Even if it is a step back
from action, it is itself a form of action or performance. Reflection need not be
disconnected from an expert performance, but can be integrated as part of that
performance—a dimension of the flow rather than something different from it. It
could be the type of reflection that can occur during musical performance even as
the musician stays in the flow (Høffding 2015; Salice, Høffding & Gallagher 2017).
In some circumstances the expertise of the teacher or the musician is just this ability
to do both at once, and it would be odd to claim that this kind of performance is not
expert performance because one is able to reflect as one is engaged in the perfor-
mance. Such reflections are likely different in each case, but nonetheless nuanced
and integrated with physical actions.4
Things in the environment that count as, and that we perceive as, salient or
significant affordances are laid out along affective, hedonic lines that are tied to
other agents and their actions. Our perception of objects is shaped not simply by
bodily pragmatic or enactive possibilities, but also by a certain intersubjective
saliency that derives from the behavior and emotional attitude of others. Both
Dreyfus and McDowell make use of the concept of phronesis as a practiced
excellence in knowing what to do. Phronesis is closely tied to the particularities of
each situation. It can be intuitive/automatic (Dreyfus) and/or it can involve
reflective/deliberative skills (McDowell). Most importantly, however, phronesis is

4
An anonymous reviewer suggested that “we have still to give a place in this very framework to
abstraction, generalization, theory and formalization as useful tools—for planning coordinated
actions, for extending previous methods to new situations and new domains, for making revisions
in order to restore coherence in a belief base, etc.” I agree. We can argue for a kind of continuity
between embodied practices and reflective practices even if the former are considered more
concrete than the latter. We do not have to conceive of the continuity as hierarchically organized.
Consider the suggestion made by Goldstein and Scheerer: “Although the normal person’s beha-
viour is prevailingly concrete, this concreteness can be considered normal only as long as it is
embedded in and codetermined by the abstract attitude. For instance, in the normal person both
attitudes are always present in a definite figure-ground relation” (Goldstein and Scheerer 1964, 8;
see Gallagher (2017), for more on this gestalt view of the relations between embodied and
reflective practices.
90 S. Gallagher

intersubjective. As Aristotle tells us, phronesis is something we learn through being

with others. In developmental terms, we learn it in very basic, intersubjective
interactions—seeing things as others see them, imitating, doing what others do,
valuing what others value—in processes that involve embodied rationality, social
norms, situated reflection, etc. Phronesis, even if it sometimes involves situated
reflective thinking, is continuous with and cut from the same fabric as embodied
coping, which involves interaction as much as action.

Enactivist Hermeneutics

On the enactivist EC view, the world (meaning, intentionality) is not pre-given or

predefined, but is structured within the dynamical processes of situated action, and
shows up as an affordance space (Brincker 2014).5 An affordance space consists of
the range of possibilities provided by the dynamical relations between body and
environment. A change in affordance space is generated by any change in this
relation. ‘An individual’s occurrent affordance space is defined by evolution ([e.g.,]
the fact that she has hands), development (her life-stage—infant, adult, aged), and
by social and cultural practices (and their normative constraints)—all of which
enable and constrain the individual’s action possibilities’ (Gallagher 2015, 342). In
evolutionary terms, the human affordance space differs from a non-human animal’s,
defined, for example by the fact that humans have hands and capacities for specific
kinds of movement. A child’s affordance space differs from an adult’s due to
differences in development. Humans learn to move or think in specific ways across
ontogenetic parameters. Likewise, one’s individual affordance space differs from
another’s due to differences in prior experience, skill level, education and cultural
practices, etc. Across these parameters humans are enabled or constrained to move
and to think in particular ways due to their prior experiences, and due to plastic and
‘metaplastic’ (Malafouris 2013) changes in both brain and body, but also within the
constraints of their environment.
If, as Merleau-Ponty suggests, traditional conceptions of rationality presuppose
“a universe perfectly explicit in itself” (2012, 44), embodied rationalism, in con-
trast, lives with ambiguity—the kind of ambiguity that comes from the fact that we
cannot extricate ourselves from the situation, but rather, as embodied, we are
necessarily involved in an intentional arc that cuts across brain, body, and envi-
ronment. Ambiguity here means an incompleteness or lack of coincidence that
describes the situated first-person perspective. Again, similar to Marcel’s concep-
tion of mystery, Dewey’s notion of situation captures the point. ‘In actual experi-
ence, there is never any such isolated singular object or event; an object or event is
always a special part, phase, or aspect, of an environing experienced world—a

5
Rietveld and Kiverstein (2014) use the term ‘landscape of affordances’ and define it relative to a
form of life.
7 Embodied Rationality 91

situation’ (Dewey 1938, 67). For Dewey, it is not the organism that is placed in a
situation. Rather the situation is constituted by organism-environment, which
means that the situation already includes the agent or experiencing subject. In this
regard, for example, I cannot strictly point to the situation because my pointing is
part of the situation. I cannot speak of it as some kind of distanced objective set of
facts because my speaking is part of it. My movement is a movement of the
situation. My reflection, and even my stepping back, is likewise part of the situa-
tion. Situated coping does not mean simply to rearrange objects in the environment,
but to rearrange oneself as well. Indeed, any adjustment one makes to objects,
artifacts, tools, practices, social relations or institutions, is equally an adjustment
one makes to oneself.
An enactivist hermeneutics is, accordingly, a hermeneutics of affordances and
ambiguities. An agent interprets the world in terms of what Husserl (1989) called
the ‘I can’. The ‘I can’ expresses the idea that agents perceive their world in
pragmatic terms of what they can do with things, or how they can interact with
others. Another way to say this is that an enactivist hermeneutics involves the
acknowledgement that interpretation is always in and of a hermeneutical situation
where ‘situation’ (as both Dewey and Gadamer suggested) includes not only the
historical and horizonal limits of interpretation, but the interpreter him- or herself,
understood as an agent, and the affordances (physical, pragmatic, social and cul-
tural) that are relative to that agent.
The very idea of a situation means that we are not standing outside of it; hence we are
unable to have any [purely] objective knowledge concerning it. We always find ourselves
within a situation, and throwing light on it is a task that is never entirely finished. This is
also true of the hermeneutic situation (Gadamer 2004, 301)

What then is rationality for an enactivist hermeneutics in which body and envi-
ronment are co-relational; and in which this co-relationality shapes our interpreta-
tions of what things mean and what value they may have? It’s not an observational or
spectatorial stepping back that detaches from the situation to frame the world in
abstract concepts. This latter form of rationality, traditionally characterized as the
primary or highest form of knowledge—theoretical knowledge (as in Aristotle), or
scientific knowledge (as in the positivists)—may in fact be derived or secondary, and
limited. Limited insofar as, even if it does aspire to encompass, epistemologically or
formally, everything there is (as in Leibniz’s conception of divine rationality6), and
to do so from an objective (view-from-nowhere) perspective, it fails to capture the

6
‘God is that which perceives perfectly whatever can be perceived’ (Leibniz, cited in Nachtomy
2008, 74). Nachtomy (2008, 80) summarizes Leibniz’s ‘hard’ conception of rationality as a ‘divine
combinatorics’: ‘The combinatorial nature of concepts serves as the formal and universal structure
of all concepts by stipulating a calculus of all the consistent combinations among all simple forms
in God’s mind. The combinatorial nature of concepts applies to human thought as well. However,
humans must substitute the variables – and the simple elements and the combinatorial rules – with
notations, including the “alphabet” and the syntax of actual sciences, practices, and applications,
such as written languages, geometry, music, chemistry….’ See the related notion of a mathesis
universalis.
92 S. Gallagher

ambiguity intrinsic to the relational dynamics of the agentive situation; and sec-
ondary because it may be the product or outcome of abstracting from and inter-
nalizing the more basic (pragmatic, and in Marcel’s sense, ‘mysterious’) rationality
that characterizes the worldly engagements of participants in embodied situations,
and operates as its shaky and imperfect ground.

Acknowledgements Research on this paper was supported by the Australian Research Council
Discovery Project “Minds in Skilled Performance” (DP170102987), and by the Humboldt
Foundation’s Anneliese Maier Research Award.

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