If this is right, then meaning is something totally different from [a given] definitional model ... If meaning is based on experience with the world—the specific actions and percepts an individual has had—then it may vary from individual to individual and from culture to culture. And meaning will also be deeply personal—what polar bear or dog means to me might be totally different from what it means to you. Moreover, if we use our brain systems for perception and action to understand, then the processes of meaning are dynamic and constructive. It’s not about activating the right symbol; it’s about dynamically constructing the right mental experience of the scene.
Furthermore, if we indeed make meaning through simulating sights, sounds, and actions, that would mean that our capacity for meaning is built upon other systems, ones evolved more directly for perception and action. And that in turn would mean that our species-specific ability for language is built up from systems that we actually share in large part with other species.
Of course, we use these perception and action systems in new ways. We know this because other animals don’t share our facility with simulation…The capacity for open-ended simulation is something much more human than ursine, not just in language, but pervasively throughout what we do with our minds. You can simulate what you would look like if you covered your nose with your hand, just as easily as you can simulate what you’d look like if you had two heads or if you had a pogo stick in place of your right leg. If simulation is what makes our capacity for language special, then figuring out how we use it will tell us a lot about what makes us unique as humans, about what kind of animal we are, and how we came to be this way.
One of the important innovations of the embodied simulation hypothesis—and one way in which it differs from the language of thought hypothesis [Mentalese]—is that it claims that meaning is something that you construct in your mind, based on your own experiences. If meaning is really generated in your mind, then you should be able to make sense of language about not only things that exist in the real world, like polar bears, but also things that don’t actually exist, like, say, flying pigs. So how we understand language about nonexistent things can actually tell us a lot about how meaning works.
Let’s consider the case of the words flying pigs. I’d wager that flying pigs actually means a lot to you, even without thinking too hard about it. Over the years, I’ve asked a lot of people what flying pigs means to them, informally. (One of the luxuries of being a university professor is that people tend to be totally unsurprised when you ask questions like How many wings does a flying pig have?) According to my totally unscientific survey, conducted primarily with the population of individuals with time on their hands and a beverage in their glass, when most people hear or read the words flying pigs, they think of an animal that looks for all intents and purposes like a pig but has wings. The writer John Steinbeck imagined such a winged pig and named it Pigasus. He even used it as his personal stamp. What do you know about your own personal Pigasus? It probably has two wings (not three or seven or twelve) that are shaped very much like bird wings. Without having to reflect on it, you also know where they appear on Pigasus’ body—they’re attached symmetrically to the shoulder blades. And although it has wings like a bird, most people think that Pigasus also displays a number of pig features; it has a snout, not a beak, and it has hooves, rather than talons.
There are a couple things to draw from this example. First, flying pigs seems to mean something to everyone. And that’s important because there’s no such thing as an actual flying pig in the world. In fact, part of the meaning of flying pigs is precisely that flying pigs don’t exist. What all of this means, not to be too cute about it, is that the Mentalese theory that meaning is about the relation of definitions to real things in the world will only work when pigs fly.
Second, if you’re like most people, what you did when you understood flying pigs probably felt a lot like mental imagery. You might ask yourself, did you experience visual images of a flying pig in your mind? Were they vivid? Were they replete with detail? Of course, consciously experiencing visual imagery is just one way to use simulation—you can also simulate without having conscious access to images. But where there’s imagined smoke, there may be simulated fire. If you’re like most people, when you simulate a flying pig, you probably see the snout and the wings in your mind’s eye. You may see details like color or texture; you might even see the pig in motion through the air. The words flying pigs are not unique in evoking consciously accessible visual detail. The same is true for lots of language, whether the things it describes are impossible like flying pigs or totally mundane like buying figs or somewhere in between, like the polar bear’s nose.
Third, and I don’t expect that this occurred to you because it only became clear to me through my extensive research—flying pigs doesn’t actually evoke something of the genus Pigasus for everyone. For some people, flying pigs don’t use wings to propel themselves, but instead conscript superpowers. If your flying pig is of this variety—let’s call it Superswine—then it probably wears a cape. Maybe a brightly colored spandex unitard, too, with some symbol on the chest, like a stylized curly pig tail or, better yet, a slice of fried bacon. And what’s more, when it flies, Superswine’s posture and motion are different from those of winged flying pigs. Whereas winged flying pigs hold their legs beneath their body, tucked up to their bellies or hanging below them, Superswine tend to stretch their front legs out in front of themselves, à la Superman.
I’ll be the first to admit that the respective features of Pigasus and Superswine are not of great scientific value or vital public interest in and of themselves. But they do tell us something about how people understand the meanings of words. People simulate in response to language, but their simulations appear to vary substantially. You might be the type of person to automatically envision Superswine, or you might have a strong preference for the more common Pigasus. We observe individual variation like this not only for flying pigs, but equally for any bits of language. Your first image of a barking dog might be a big, ferocious Doberman, or it might be a tiny, yappy Chihuahua. When you read torture devices, you might think of the Iron Maiden or you might think of a new Stairmaster at your gym. Variation in the things people think words refer to is important because it means that people use their idiosyncratic mental resources to construct meaning. We all have different experiences, expectations, and interests, so we paint the meanings we create for the language we hear in our own idiosyncratic color.
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Add Comment"Furthermore, if we indeed make meaning through simulating sights, sounds, and actions, that would mean that our capacity for meaning is built upon other systems, ones evolved more directly for perception and action."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"built upon other systems, ones evolved more directly for..." seems to be one option. Nevertheless, in my opinion a more consistent understanding, and one that has been around for a very long time, is that meaning is and has always been co-constructed, and has always co-evolved, with systems for perception and action.
kahea
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor an earlier and infinitely more interesting discussion of this kind of projective nonsense, check out the debate between Lenin and Ernst Mach regarding empirio-criticism. Here are a couple of links to Lenin's 1908 book, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, which contains all the further references needed:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://marxistphilosophy.org/LenEmpCrit1.pdf
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/index.htm
Simulating my godlike hand in the jaws of Fenrir the wolf is one thing, simulating the movements of quarks and muons, or the behaviour of brutalized atoms in the core of the sun or a black hole is quite another. Thought, language and meaning are articulated and mediated in ways that a MRI scan still can't quite capture. In a lot of ways the discussion hasn't really progressed beyond Hegel, who managed to dissolve the antinomial agnosticism of Kant and move on, and opened the way to materialist dialectical realism in science, more or less consciously in the work of Marx, Einstein, and Chomsky, and unconsciously and reluctantly in the work of all scientists worthy of the name.
If a book like Benjamin Bergen's can revive the debate, so much the better. But "new science"? Hah.
I have always thought of pigs-wings as batlike.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOn a planet with small gravity and dense atmosphere they would be functional.
The mental blueprint for this creature was probably the "Overlords" in Arthur C Clarkes novel Childhoods End.
This discussion evokes the Cambridge EEG research that indicates when we use the word 'arm' in sentence it produces an excitation in the motor homunculus at the site controlling arm movements.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisReading the April, 2007 article,"The Movies in our Eyes" will inform those interested that the eyes send crude imagery over 12 separate circuits to the cortex which hallucinates that which we perceive as reality. Lucid dreaming produces this same hallucinatory experience as the same level of perception. Feedback sensation, walking etc. is also complete as touch and sensory input. For Embodied Cognition, it's a complete experience.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is sometimes a need for new words because existing words are ambiguous, imprecise, confusing or technically obsolete.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Qualia" is a word that begs to be replaced because only a few people comprehend its meaning therefore it is confusing to many people.
"Soul" refers to the essential, conscious self but most people think of the soul as immortal. A new word is needed to satisfy non-believers who question immortality.
A new word for "memory" may be needed as well but this is not obvious to me.
Embodied simulation describes a physical process or the results of a physical process?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf I simulate the potential damage of a hurricane, the simulation is not real. The simulation has no purpose without human analysts to react to the simulation.
If the insurance company or civil planner reacts to the simulation, their reactions are not part of the simulation.
Embodied simulated of sound is what I hear or the testable neurological signals that arise from sound waves?
Sound (or any other sense) has no meaning without the awareness of the inner self.
The phrase "embodied simulation" is confusing.
jayjacobus is right about the confusion. There's an interplay between reality and perception of it, and perception itself is a reality, so we have perceptions of perception. It's like consciousness and self-consciousness, and this relationship has been a central problem for philosophy. One of the most primitive responses has been to invent a previous cause, and stop the infinite regression by calling some given cause final or ultimate or prime or whatever. This "embodied simulation" nonsense is the same kind of thing - what it doesn't do is answer the question of reality, ie what is being simulated.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is a philosophical perpetuum mobile that pretends it isn't.
Now Kant was smart, so he stopped his infinite regression pain by claiming that the ultimate ground for everything was ultimately unknowable, which was the agnostic thing to do. Hegel was smarter but far less diplomatic, and said "look, reality and our perception of it is full of contradictions, live with it", and moved beyond Kant, opening the way for Marx to move beyond the whole supernatural 'perception/consciousness/thought first' approach.
For empirical beings, we are very attached to abstract ideas. The reason is simple - we process continuous empirical reality including ourselves using discrete abstract reflections of it in thought. So if you want to call this processing 'simulation', be my guest. Ditto if you want to be empirical by calling it 'embodied'. Well done. Which leaves us as bodies that think. Square one.
Moving in a world of discrete, abstract reflection our mirror minds naturally assume everything is discrete and abstract as soon as it thinks about it, except that the basic presupposition for our survival in reality is concrete continuity. And since survival is opportunistic and iconoclastic, we survive in reality at the expense of broken intellectual dogma, icons and fetishes.
This drama is entertainingly embodied for me in Lucretius's great Latin poem On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura), and in Hegel's two great works The Phenomenology of the Spirit and The Science of Logic. These are guaranteed pre-Marxist so clear of any ideological tarring and feathering that anything written after 1848 might risk. For a scientific mind they are immensely rewarding, and even a short dip is very invigorating!
When a person talks about the perception of reality, he is in the inside looking out, but when he talks about his own perception he is in the inside looking in.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEmbodied simulation describes a theoretical process to explain the reality of the mind. But can the mind be understood by looking outside from within. The mind is not real except from inside looking in.
In other words, I am aware of the cave, but you must take my word for it. You cannot see that I am aware of the cave by using your senses.
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