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The embodied mind: ContrastingvisionsPeter E. Jones aa Communications Studies, Sheffield Hallam University, MundellaHouse, Collegiate Crescent Campus, Sheffield, S 10 2 BP, GreatBritain E-mail:Published online: 01 Sep 2009.

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MIND, CULTURE, AND ACTIVITY, 6(4), 274-285Copyright O 1999, Regents of the University of California on behalf of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition

The Embodied Mind: Contrasting Visions

Peter E. JonesCommunication Studies

Sheffield Hallam University

This article presents a critical examination and discussion of 2 arguments in support of the embodiedmind position as developed within the philosophical literature of the Cognitive Linguistics paradigm.Employing the dialectical Materialist approach of Evald Ilyenkov (1997), closely allied to the cul-tural-historical and activity theory traditions, the article argues that neither Lakoffs cases of reasoningfrom "typical examples" nor Thelen and Smith's (1994) example of dynamic cognition undermine aMaterialist perspective on cognition as a process of knowing the objective properties of an independ-ently existing reality.

This article offers critical commentaries on two arguments in support of the embodied view ofmind and cognition as presented in the philosophical literature of Cognitive Linguistics (e.g.,Johnson, 1987; Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999). These commentaries take then-inspiration from the dialectical Materialist philosophical perspective that underpinned theVygotskian and Activity Theory (or CHAT, cf. Cole, 1996) traditions (henceforth just Material-ism for convenience) and especially from the works of Ilyenkov (e.g., 1977, 1982, 1997; cf.Bakhurst, 1991; Jones, 1994, 1998) in which that perspective receives its "clearest articulation"(Bakhurst, 1995, p. 156).

So far there has been little dialogue about or between CHAT and the philosophy of embodi-ment (but cf. Sinha, 1997; Lemke, 1996; Jones, 1997). It is certainly rather surprising, to say theleast, that an approach can advertise itself as a "challenge to western thought" (Lakoff & Johnson,1999) without paying attention to the entire CHAT tradition or its Materialist roots. Nevertheless,it is clear that both Materialism and CHAT are also being challenged, albeit indirectly. This chal-lenge certainly needs to be met, despite the attractions that embodiment and, more particularly,the Cognitive Linguistics paradigm may hold for those working within the CHAT tradition (cf.Sinha, 1997). For one thing, the elaboration of a theoretical perspective that is systematically op-posed to the extreme biological reductionism of Chomskyan linguistics is a welcome, and poten-tially exciting, development. But there is also much in the embodied mind approach that is directlyat odds with the CHAT tradition and the work of its founders. However, the intention here is not toprovide a rounded CHAT response to embodiment1 which would be difficult, given that CHAT istoday a broader church, philosophically speaking, than in the days of Vygotsky and A. N.

Requests for reprints should be sent to Peter E. Jones, Communications Studies, Sheffield Hallam University, MundellaHouse, Collegiate Crescent Campus, Sheffield S 10 2 BP, Great Britain. E-mail: p.e.jones@shu.ac.uk1 A critical review of Lakoff and Johnson (1999) is currently in preparation.

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Leont'ev. The aim, rather, is to introduce and to clarify some of the key philosophical issues atstake between materialism and embodiment with the help of a couple of case studies. The first in-volves reasoning from "typical examples" from Lakoff (1987) and the second a metaphor for cog-nition from Thelen and Smith (1994).

THE EMBODIED MIND: SOME GENERAL PRINCIPLES

A view of mind as embodied is central to the philosophy of experiential realism developed withinCognitive Linguistics, which, as its name suggests, is concerned with both language and cognition.Experiential realism focuses specifically on the ways in which human cognitive abilities andmechanisms are expressed in language as well as with the role language itself plays in cognition. Interms of its ontological commitments, the embodied view considers itself to be a form of philo-sophical realism"internal realism" following Putnam (Lakoff, 1987, p. 261)due to its "com-mitment to the existence of the real world" (Lakoff, 1987, p. xv). It also, however, has deepepistemological differences with other forms of realism. Specifically, the notion of embodimentexpresses opposition to positions that are considered to constitute the dominant trend within west-ern thought and that are referred to as "objectivist." The key epistemological principle ofobjectivism, to which embodied philosophy objects, is as follows: "Knowledge consists in cor-rectly conceptualizing and categorizing things in the world and grasping the objective connectionsamong those things and those categories" (Lakoff, 1987, p. 163).

This view is rejected because

what the human body does not do, on the objectivist account, is add anything essential to concepts thatdoes not correspond to what is objectively present in the structure of the world. The body does not playan essential role in giving concepts meaning. And the body plays no role in characterizing the nature ofreason. (Lakoff, 1987, p. 174)

"Experiential realists" prefer a view of human reason as "embodied in the sense that the verystructures on which reason is based emerge from our bodily experiences" (Lakoff, 1987, p. 386).These experiences are one of the sources of "basic-level categories" (Lakoff, 1987, p. 13) or "ba-sic-level-concepts" (Lakoff, 1987, p. 302), which also manifest the workings of various "humanimaginative processes," such as metaphor and metonymy, which "do not mirror nature" (Lakoff,1987, p. 371). Consequently, on their view, "human conceptual categories have properties thatare, at least in part, determined by the bodily nature of the people doing the categorizing ratherthan solely by the properties of the category members" (Lakoff, 1987, p. 371).

On the embodied view, "human concepts do not correspond to inherent properties of things butonly to interactional properties" (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 181) which are "the result of our in-teractions as part of our physical and cultural environments given our bodies and cognitive appa-ratus" (Lakoff, 1987, p. 51).

In fact, experiential realism, far from being a challenge to western thought, is a rather typicalneo-Kantian creation. It wants to accept the existence of the world independent of our minds whiledenying that we can have objective knowledge of it, that is, knowledge of a kind in which "themind reproduces the logical relations that exist objectively among the entities and categories inthe world" (Lakoff, 1987, p. 163)an objectivist position disparagingly referred to as a God's eye

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view. In contrast, the experientialist position is held to motivate a form of relativism, in whichtruth is not "absolute, objective truth" but is truth "relative to understanding" (Lakoff, 1987, p.294) and in which "the existence of alternative, incompatible conceptual schemes" is permitted(Lakoff, 1987, p. 264). On the other hand, "total relativism" is rejected, because "experience ofthe real world" sets limits to the way we can think about it (Lakoff, 1987, p. 264), and, further-more, "reasonable standards for stable scientific knowledge" are provided by "standards of objec-tivity and correctness" supplied by the "scientific community" (Lakoff, 1987, p. 265).

In the terms established by the embodied view, Materialism is undoubtedly a species ofobjectivism because it is a form of realism that is also committed to the objective knowability ofthe world in principle (cf. Tolman, 1987). On the other hand, being based on the primacy of hu-manpractice it has little in common with the bloodless and abstract logical empiricist realism tar-geted by Lakoff (1987) in which a direct and timeless correspondence between categories of themind and categories of the world is assumed. But a rejection of such objectivist views, contrary tothe whole line of argument of the philosophy of embodiment, does not in fact entail the rejectionin principle of the possibility of objective knowledge and objective truth. Materialism can there-fore accept the experientialist characterization of meaning, for example, in terms of "our collec-tive biological capacities and our physical and social experiences as beings functioning in ourenvironment" (Lakoff, 1997, p. 267) while sticking to its epistemological guns. This may meanthat there is more in common between the two traditions than there is dividing them (cf. Sinha,1987, for an upbeat view of the relationship) or it may mean that the philosophical differences aretoo deep to allow much scope for meaningful dialogue. The commentaries below will, it is to behoped, help to clarify some of the contrasts and congruences between Materialism and the philos-ophy of embodiment.

Case 1 : Typical Examples and Categories in Cognitive Linguistics

Cognitive Linguistics has a special interest in the study of categorization, which it sees as "a key tothe study of reason" (Lakoff, 1987, p. 368). Categorization here means seeing something "as a kindof thing, for example, a tree" (Lakoff, 1987, p. 6), and when "we reason about kinds ofthingschairs, nations, illnesses, emotions, any kind ofthing at allwe are employing catego-ries" (Lakoff, 1987, pp. 5-6). Categorization based on basic-level experience or basic-level objectsin our immediate environment such as chairs, tables, trees, and rocks (Lakoff, 1987, p. 297) alsoprovides the securest forms of knowledge: "The best examples of knowledge are things that weknow about basic-level objects, actions and relations in the physical domainwhat might becalled our cat-on-the-mat-knowledge" (Lakoff, 1987, p. 297).

Knowledge of basic-level objects is expressed in "concrete categories [italics added]" (Lakoff,1987, p. 6) or "physical concepts" (Lakoff, 1987, p. 267) from which "abstract categories [italicsadded]" dealing with "abstract entities" such as events, actions, emotions, governments, illnesses,and "entities in both scientific and folk theories" (Lakoff, 1987, p. 6) are derived by "metaphoricalprojection" (Lakoff, 1987, p. 268) from basic-level categories.

Lakoff (1987) argued that categorization provides evidence against objectivism. Some of thisevidence comes from "prototype effects" which involve "scalar goodness-of-example judge-ments for categories" (p. 136). "Prototype effects" arise from the "normal activities involving theuse of human reason" (p. 367), and some are due to "metonymically based reasoning" (p. 152) as

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in the use of "typical category members" in inferencing (p. 86). The following involve typical ex-amples: "Robins and sparrows are typical birds. Apples and oranges are typical fruits. Saws andhammers are typical tools" (Lakoff, 1987, p. 86).

Lakoff (1987) cited a study by Rips (henceforth "the Rips case," 1975) which showed that"subjects inferred that if the robins on a certain island got a disease, then the ducks would, but notthe converse" (Lakoff, 1987, p. 86). Subjects generalized from the typical case of the bird cate-gory (the robin) to the nontypical case (the duck). Because a part of the category (the typical case)is made to stand in for the whole category in the inferencing process then it is metonymy, "one ofthe basic characteristics of cognition," which underlies this particular prototype effect (Lakoff,1987, p. 77). Lakoff is not arguing that the inference is correct. He noted, for example, that theclosely related phenomena of "social stereotypes" are used in "what is called 'jumping to conclu-sions'" and that these stereotypes "are usually recognized as not being accurate" (Lakoff, 1987, p.85). He is arguing that these phenomena show that cognitionthat is, "how human beings catego-rize" (Lakoff, 1987, p. 160)is not as it is painted by objectivism. The one-way inference fromrobins to ducks is not consistent with there being a strict correspondence between categories ofmind and categories of the world but suggests, instead, that the content of categories and conceptsis "motivated by bodily or social experience" (Lakoff, 1987, p. 154); categories of mind are, there-fore, "not 'in the world,' external to human beings" (Lakoff, 1987, p. 56).

A Materialist point of view would require us to be more circumspect about the relation be-tween typical examples reasoning in the Rips case and cognition. After all, only someone whoknew absolutely nothing about the subject would reason in this way, and the resulting inferencewould be wrong. It is, in fact, a very good example of jumping to conclusions in the absence ofany relevant knowledge or serious engagement with the problem scenario. Indeed, one couldsay with some justification that it looks more like unreason than reason, bearing the same rela-tion to cognition as hitting one's thumb with a hammer bears to carpentry. But this point simplyemphasizes the fact that the embodied view of cognition ("how human beings categorize") dif-fers quite sharply from the Materialist view of cognition as the process of knowing the object(as it is in itself).

To clarify the differences, contrast what happens in the Rips case with the study where we putthe same question to someone who actually knows about birds, or diseases, or both. How would azoologist, or an ornithologist, or a specialist in viruses respond? It is safe to assume that reasoningfrom typical examples would play no part in their thinking, which shows not just that themetonymically based inference happens to be wrong, but that this very way of reasoning is not go-ing to help us find a solution. Alternatively, imagine that the Rips's scenario was not hypotheticalbut a real world problem requiring practical intervention. How would a person who reasons fromtypical examples of birds fare in this situation? It is safe to assume that either more serious reflec-tion on the problem or practical engagement with it would show that this form of reasoning wasleading up the garden path. Maybe this person would admit defeat (and bring the experts in) orstart thinking on different lines. In either case there would be a sharp break with the previous formof reasoning and the categories used in that reasoning would have to be ditched.

Two contrasting logics are evident here: the logic of reasoning from typical examples that mustlead to error, and the logic of attacking the problem armed with specialist knowledge that (at leastin principle) may lead to truth. A Materialist can happily accept that one person might think in thefirst way and another person in the second way. If objectivism cannot accept this, then embodiedphilosophers are right to attack it. But at the same time, from a Materialist perspective, it would be

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a mistake to consider both logics indifferently to be instances of cognition because, in this particu-lar case at least, new knowledge begins to take shape only from the point at which typical examplereasoning is left behind and we head toward, and build on, the "stable scientific knowledge"(Lakoff, 1987, p. 265) worked out by the scientific community. Only the logic ofthat process inwhich knowledge actually develops would be called cognition; otherwise the term loses its specif-ically philosophical content and simply means any and all psychological or linguistic processes(cf. Ilyenkov, 1997, pp. 75-76), as indeed is the case in Cognitive Linguistics. The metonymicallybased inference in the Rips case is actually more a display of prejudices than cognition in the senseof working out something new. In fact, the relationship of this unreflecting response to the ques-tion asked is tautological in character as all that it really tells us is what the subjects mean by thewords bird, robin, duck, and so on. For materialism, only "an analysis of the abstraction in termsof its real objective content" (Ilyenkov, 1997, p. 75) can show whether we are dealing with cogni-tion and concepts rather than semantic processes. This requires a more complex view of the rela-tionship between language and thinking, word meaning and concept, concept and category, andconcrete and abstract.

To begin with, it is fundamental to CHAT, and clear and explicit in the work of Vygotsky aswell as that of Ilyenkov, that someone can understand what a word means and use that word suc-cessfully in everyday communication without having acquired a concept or category. Ilyenkov il-lustrated this with an example not too unlike the Rips case, although he draws very differentconclusions:

In order to check if someone has really grasped [usvoil\ a category (and not just a word or term referringto it) there is no more reliable way than to in vite him to consider a concrete fact from the point of view ofthat category.

A child who has learnt the word "cause" ["prichina"] (in the form of the word "why?") will answerthe question "why does a car go?" immediately without thinking"because its wheels are goinground," "because someone is driving it" or something like that.

Someone who understands the meaning of the category [soznaiushchii smysl' kategorii] will notanswer straightaway. First he will "think it over" ["podumaef]; he will carry out a series of mental ac-tions. Either he will "remember," or he will look at the thing again, trying to find the real cause, or hewill say that he cannot answer this question. To him, the question about "the cause" is a question whichorientates him towards very complex cognitive actions and which outlines the general contour of theway in which he may arrive at a satisfactory answerat the correct consciousness of the thing. The cat-egory for him is first and foremost the forms of objective cognition, of concrete cognition of thingsgiven in contemplation. (Ilyenkov, 1997, p. 64)2

From this point of view, not all forms of mental or linguistic activity manifest the action ofcategories:

For the adult, the primary significance of categories is that they express the totality of means withwhich he may work out a correct consciousness of the thing, a consciousness verified by the practice ofcontemporary society. They are forms of thinking, forms without which thinking itself is impossible.

2 The pronoun he has been used throughout the translated passages to conform with Ilyenkov's use of the masculine sin-

gular pronoun to refer to "the child," "the adult," etc.

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And if there are only words in someone's head but no categories, there is no thinking but only the verbalexpression of sensuously perceived phenomena. (Ilyenkov, 1997, pp. 6465)

Going back to the Rips case, Ilyenkov would see our second logic, but not the first, as thinkinginvolving categories. In Lakoff s basic-level categories used in typical example reasoning, on theother hand, there is only the ability "to express one's sense impressions in speech, in words, in ut-terances, in the totality of utterances," an ability that is "more elementary and which arises earlierthan the ability to think, the ability to reflect reality in concepts" (Ilyenkov, 1997, p. 79). Ilyenkov(1997) sees basic-level categories as expressing the form in which "a person becomes consciousof things but does not yet think them, does not yet 'reflect' on them" (p. 65) with this first form be-ing "a necessary premiss and condition for the development of the second" (p. 79).

On the Materialist view, the basic-level categories of the embodied view are, therefore, neitherthe best examples of knowledge per se, nor examples of concrete concepts. They are the best ex-amples of the most abstract rather than the most concrete knowledge. Instead of expressing thingsin their concreteness, that is, in their objectively conditioned place within a system or systems ofinterconnected and interacting phenomena functioning independently of our minds, such catego-ries express them in terms of how we see, touch, hear, taste, or smell them, that is, as things ab-stracted from that system. No form of reasoning applied to such uncritically accepted categoriescan result in genuine theoretical or conceptual knowledge, however indispensable they are in ev-eryday life. But someone who remains under the sway of these categories and accompanying pro-totype effects "will not be an active, self-acting subject of social activity, but never anything morethan an obedient tool of somebody else's will" (Ilyenkov, 1997, pp. 60-61), as indeed is the casewith social stereotypes.

So categories, in the Materialist view, are only actively employed when "the process of ab-straction begins to be guided by such categories as the 'essential' and 'inessential'" (Ilyenkov,1997, p. 79). Thus, for the person who really thinks about the question in the Rips case, the "asym-metry between typical and nontypical cases" (Lakoff, 1987, p. 87) proper to the basic-level cate-gories of robin, duck, bird, etc. must be separated out as inessential to the cognitive task alongwith the metonymically based inference, otherwise no correct solution can be obtained. Indeed,the very categories of robin, sparrow, duck, etc. may well prove irrelevant, and therefore an obsta-cle to objective understanding in so far as these categories are not respected by the real world pro-cesses under investigation.

For Ilyenkov ( 1997), thinking "in the strict sense of the word" (p. 74) goes beyond the ability touse the type of generalized abstractions found in word meanings expressing basic-level categoriesand involves the concept understood as an abstraction expressing the "essential general"[sushchestvennoe obshchee], which "reflects the essential side, the essential characteristics of theobject" (p. 74). The concept reflects the thing from the side of its objective interrelations with theconcrete whole to which it belongs and it is therefore the concept, and not the basic-level categorywhich has the property of concreteness. The concept takes us closer to an understanding of thething as it is in itself even though the content of the concept may completely contradict the imme-diate evidence of our senses.

Empirical, abstract generalizations of the kind expressed in basic-level categories are referredto as "notions" and not "concepts" by Ilyenkov ( 1982, pp. 51-52). In his treatment of the relationsbetween the two he is not intending to "belittle the significance and cognitive role of elementary,' intellectual ' general abstractions. Their role is great: no concrete universal concept would be pos-

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sible without them" (Ilyenkov, 1982, p. 85). However, the notion is an "abstraction, whose forma-tion is affected by a great number of factors, and first of all the direct practical interest, man's needand the purpose reflecting the need ideally" (Ilyenkov, 1982, pp. 51-52), whereas "the links be-tween the concepta theoretical abstraction expressing the objective essence of the thingandpractice is [sic] much broader, deeper and more complicated" (Ilyenkov, 1982, p. 52). He ex-plains, "In the concept, the object is comprehended from the standpoint of mankind's practice inits entire volume throughout the history of world development, rather than from the standpoint ofthe particular, narrow pragmatic objective and need" (Ilyenkov, 1982, p. 52).

Materialism, like embodiment, rejects the view of cognition as a disembodied process andwholeheartedly embraces the view that human experiencethe source of all knowledgeis theproduct of an interaction between humanity and the world. It also follows that "in the ideas wedirectly have of the external world, two quite dissimilar things are muddled and mixed up: theform of our own body and the form of the bodies outside it," as Ilyenkov put it in his discussionof Spinoza's philosophy (Ilyenkov, 1977, p. 67), a situation giving rise to the types of experien-tial reasoning processes previously discussed: "The naive person immediately and uncriticallytakes this hybrid for an external thing, and therefore judges things in conformity with the spe-cific state evoked in his brain and sense organs by an external effect in no way resembling thatstate" (Ilyenkov, 1977, p. 67).

Ilyenkov's naive thinker is just like the participants in Rips's study who show, by reasoningfrom typical examples that their ideas "have properties that are, at least in part, determined by thebodily nature of the people doing the categorizing rather than solely by the properties of the cate-gory members" (Lakoff, 1987, p. 371). This is also exactly why this kind of reasoning is of noearthly good when the bodily natures of the robin, the sparrow, and the duck are at issue ratherthan the bodily nature of the thinker. The crucial issue here is not whether two "quite dissimilarthings" may be mixed up in one idea, but whether it is in principle possible to begin to separatethem out and to distinguish the states and dispositions of one's own body from those of the bodiesone is seeking to understand. The embodied view is premised on the impossibility in principle ofunravelling this experiential complex (which would entail a God's eye view), whereas material-ism is based not just on the possibility of doing so, but on the theoretically and empirically verifi-able fact of so doing in the course of history.

The embodied view, like materialism, attempts to study the cognitive process from the point ofview of the real, suffering human beings who are responsible for it. Its strength and its potential liein its opposition to the dualistic, formalistic, or crudely biological reductionist tendencies ofobjectivism. Its weakness, in Materialist terms, is that its naturalistic focus on the body and bodilyinteractions as the source of knowledge entails an idealistic and relativist epistemology and with ita preoccupation with the mere form of the cognitive process rather than its objective content,which means that the "real Logic of thinking" (Ilyenkov, 1997, p. 76) is left out of account. WithinMaterialist epistemology, the process of cognition is just the reflection in knowledge of what isabove all a practical process in which the social body of humanity must learn to use the forces ofnature in accordance with the objective properties of the latter. In the struggle to make these forcesserve our vital ends, a process unfolds in which these forces ultimately dictate the necessary linesalong which thinking must go to arrive at knowledge adequate to our aims. Practice ultimately re-veals what part of our ideas belongs to our bodies and what part belongs to the body external to us.The standpoint of objective truththe God's eye view, as it werecoincides with the standpointof purposeful practical transformation of reality.

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Case 2: Watt's Centrifugal Governor as a Metaphor for Cognition

Thelen and Smith (1994) presented an original and very powerful account of "embodied cogni-tion" as a fluid and dynamic process taking shape through the interactions between human bodiesand their environment (cf. Lemke, 1996). Although they are favorably disposed toward work in theCHAT tradition (e.g., Thelen & Smith, 1994, pp. 328-329), they rely heavily on the ideas of Lakoff(1987) and particularly Johnson (1987) to argue against "objectivist philosophy" in which "con-cepts represent an external realityan external set of'true' categories that exist independently ofthe minds that create them" (Thelen & Smith, 1994, p. 162). Their own position involves shiftingthe focus to "how concepts are used in particular tasks ... how they make contact with reality"(Thelen & Smith, 1994, p. 162) and its "central tenet" is "that behaviour is not symbolically repre-sented in the system or programmed in the absence of the here-and-now context in which it is per-formed [italics added]" (Thelen & Smith, 1994, p. 263).

In illustration of this nonrepresentational, embodied view of cognition, Thelen and Smith (1994,p. 331) re-presented a metaphor from van Gelder (1992) involving an account of the invention of amechanical device to solve "a 19th century engineering problem involving a steam engine thatdrives a flywheel connected to some machinery" (Thelen & Smith, 1994, p. 331 ). The problem is asfollows: "The speed of the flywheel must remain constant despite irregular and continuous fluctua-tions in the workload on the engine and the steam pressure. How could one design a device, called agovernor, to maintain a constant flywheel speed?" (Thelen & Smith, 1994, p. 331).

First, van Gelder considered "a computational solution that contains the following: a tachometerfor measuring the speed of the wheel, a device for calculating the throttle valve adjustment, a throttlevalve adjustor, and an executive to handle the sequencing of operations" (Thelen & Smith, 1994, p.331). In other words, the device contains "representations (measures of the steam pressure, the speedand so forth)" and "worksjust like the traditional metaphor of cognitionby the manipulation andpassing of representations from one component to the next" (Thelen & Smith, 1994, p. 331). Althoughacknowledging that a device involving such representations "probably could be built that wouldwork," they argued that "it is unlikely that it would work as well as or adapt as intelligently and fluidlyto changes in workload and pressure as does the simple and elegant device invented by James Watt inthe early 1800s" (Thelen & Smith, 1994, p. 331). This device is the "centrifugal governor," whichworks "in a way that allows for intelligent and continuous context sensitivity and a global order with-out representations or computations" (Thelen & Smith, 1994, p. 332). Watt's device "consists of averticle spindle geared into the main flywheel so that it rotates at a speed directly dependent upon thatof the flywheel itself (Thelen & Smith, 1994, p. 331).Van Gelder's (1992) explanation follows:

Attached to the spindle by hinges were two arms, and on the end of each arm was a metal ball. As thespindle turned, centrifugal force drove the balls outwards and hence upwards. By clever arrangement,the ann motion was linked directly to the throttle valve. The result was that as the speed of the mainwheel increased, the arms raised, closing the valve and restricting the flow of steam; as the speed de-creased, the arms fell, opening the valve and allowing more steam to flow. The result was that the en-gine adopted a constant speed, maintained with extraordinary swiftness and smoothness in the pres-ence of large fluctuations in pressure and load. (p. 3)

Hence, Watt's governor "does not represent anything, it just does the job" (Thelen & Smith, 1994,p. 332). The device "is smart; it embodies [sic] (although it does not represent) as much knowledge as

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the computational governor" (Thelen & Smith, 1994, p. 332). Cognition "is like the smartness ofWatt's centrifugal governoran activity emergent in the simultaneous and continuous interactions ofa myriad of heterogeneous forces" (Thelen & Smith, 1994, p. 332), with one qualification:

The theory of cognition that we have laid out in this book is not like the centrifugal governor in one crit-ical way: cognition develops. We must envision a centrifugal governor that through its own activitychanges its very components and the manner of their interaction. We believe that this vision of the de-veloping centrifugal governor offers a good metaphor for cognition. (Thelen & Smith, 1994, p. 332)

The centrifugal governor certainly makes for an interesting philosophical case. But from a Ma-terialist point of view, its value as a metaphor for specifically human cognition in general is ques-tionable. Of course, Thelen and Smith's (1994) work is a salutary reminder that cognition mustnot be reduced to or equated with the manipulation and processing of symbolic representations;thinking is more than just verbal thinking. The kind of spontaneously developing, exquisitely sen-sitive dialectic of brain and limbs, of eye and brain that we observe and experience in skilled tooluse, in the creative work of the craftsman (cf. Keller & Keller, 1996), or in the goalkeeper's dive tosave the penalty involves not so much the "'expression' of thinking" but "thinking itself, thinkingas such," as Ilyenkov (1974, p. 76) puts it in his discussion of "the work of the hands" as opposedto verbally expressed thought. On the other hand, the capacity to think in this way is exercised byindividuals only within a community, a culture, a life space saturated by, amongst other things,symbols. And, consequently, if human cognitionin its most essential or typical formisviewed as a dimension o social practice, and that practice is necessarily mediated by the produc-tion and use of tools (both material and symbolic),3 then the case of the governor's action, meta-phorically construed, cannot be the best example of it.

Let us instead, then, indulge in a rather mischievous subversion of Thelen and Smith's (1994)argument. Instead of taking the governor as a metaphor for cognition, why not take it for what it is,namely a genuine instance ofactual cognition? If we do so, then suddenly everything looks differ-ent. Now the governor is only one component of a larger system of dynamic cognition that also in-cludes the practical and theoretical activity of James Watt, its inventor. It is still true that thegovernor contains no representations or measures of other processes taking place within the me-chanical system; the governor "just does the job." But the job that it does is the job that it is de-signed to do, a design that exists outside of and independently of the governor. If steam pressureand the speed of the wheel are not represented in the body of the governor they are represented inthe body and mind of Watt himself in the course of designing the device. Watt's design activityconsists in abstracting all necessary moments or interconnections between the governor and themechanical system and representing them symbolically. Through the bodies of these symbolicobjects the governor does its job only in representation, or "ideally," as the Materialist traditionwould say (Ilyenkov, 1977). The design idea, though the product of the bodily processes of its in-ventor, including the action of "neuronal groups" (Thelen & Smith, 1994, p. 142), becomes some-thing separate from and independent of the inventor and can then be passed to the manufacturerwho will produce the real thing in conformity with it.

Consequently, if we look at the system as a whole, we find that the centrifugal governor existsin a number of empirically distinct, and apparently contradictory, forms (or embodiments): as a

3 Compare Jones ( 1998) for discussion.

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real piece of functioning machinery and as an idea expressed in symbols, to name two. The firstdoes the job without representing anything, and the second represents without doing anything.What's more (so to speak), in between there is Watt himself who does the job of designing the firstby means of the second. This now looks all very confusing from an embodied cognition point ofview. If it is Watt's thinking that is really embodied in the literal sense, we should concede that it isnot actually his body, but that of the governor, which is doing the real work. Alternatively, if weprefer to say that the device embodies knowledge, as the authors' metaphor has it, then this knowl-edge is disembodied in the body of Watt and in the symbolic body of the design. Thus, with re-spect to this complex system of action and cognition we find, contrary to Thelen and Smith's(1994)central tenet, that the governor's behavior is indeed both "symbolically represented in thesystem" and "programmed in the absence of the here-and-now context in which it is performed"(p. 263).

Ilyenkov (1997) offered quite a different metaphor for embodied cognition:

The conscious relationship of the subject to the world surrounding him ... can be likened to what theportrait artist does, and how he does it. The painter, as we know, places in front of him the model, alongwith a canvas on an easel and then begins to purposefully bring the representation on the canvas intocorrespondence with the model. The portrait or the landscape taking shape on the canvas is a reflection,an image of the model. But this reflection, like the model itself, is located outside the artist, as the objectand product of his activity. It is the artist himself, as the subject of activity, who compares the represen-tation with themodel from the side, from a third position. Both the object represented and the represen-tation of the object are counterposed to the artist as two objects located outside of him and which can becompared to one another, (p. 46)

In the case of the governor, we begin instead with the representation of the object and then pro-ceed to create the object represented. The coming into being of the real device is preceded and me-diated at all stages by the ideal device which portrays its mode of functioning in all essentialdetails. As the real device takes shape in accordance with the design, the one can be comparedwith the other and the two objects can be purposefully brought into correspondence from the thirdposition of the designer. Finally, the functioning device stands on its own, operating independ-ently in accordance with physical laws, which are blind not only to the problem Watt started withbut to theory in general.

The case of the governor, therefore, is a good illustration of the form taken by the cognitiveprocess in human social activity: "Man, and only man, ceases to be 'merged' with the form ofhis life activity; he separates it from himself and, giving it his attention, transforms it into anidea" whereupon "the form itself of the activity corresponding to the form of the external objectis transformed for man into a special object with which he can operate specially without touch-ing and without changing the real object up to a certain point" (Ilyenkov, 1977, p. 278). Watt'sactivity here is "activity on the plane of representation, altering the ideal image of an object"(Ilyenkov, 1977, p. 280). Such activity, Ilyenkov stressed, is also "sensuous objective activity"in which Watt interacts bodily with a "sensuously perceived object" (Ilyenkov, 1977, p.280)for example, a diagram of the governorand physically alters that object in some way.However,

the thing altered here is special; it is only the objectified idea or form of the person's activity taken as athing. That circumstance also makes it possible to slur over the fundamental, philosophical,

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epistemological difference between material activity and the activity of the theoretician and ideologistwho directly alters only the verbal, token objectification of the ideal image. (Ilyenkov, 1977, p. 280)

Thelen and Smith's (1994) treatment of cognition involves precisely the kind of philosophical"slurring over" referred to by Ilyenkov. Although they commendably attempt to examine the realinterconnections between thinking and doing as aspects of practical activity, they are reluctant totreat thinking as ideal activity and thereby miss the significance and role of the ideal, includingtheoretical and scientific representations, in social practice. The problem of the ideal is one of themost difficult in Materialist philosophy, but its difficulty is proportional to its importance for anunderstanding of specifically human cognition, and of social practice in general: "Without anideal image man cannot in general exchange matter with nature, and the individual cannot operatewith things involved in the process of social production" (Ilyenkov, 1977, p. 274).

While acknowledging, therefore, the power and explanatory potential of Thelen and Smith's(1994) embodied account of cognition in action, one must recognize that its inability to theorizethe role of the ideal leaves a rather large hole at its center.

On a final note, it is perhaps worth thinking briefly about how the experiential realism ofLakoff and Johnson would cope with Watt's centrifugal governor. We can assume that as Wattworks out his design he categorizes and makes use of a variety of imaginative processes such asmetaphor. The embodied view would insist that the resulting ideas could not be objectively true inthe sense of corresponding to the inherent properties of the real world, although they may be true"relative to understanding." The problem then becomes how to explain why the real piece of ma-chinery works in the way it was designed to do. How can the systematic correspondence betweenidea and real object be accounted for? Clearly, the actual behavior of the governor cannot be ex-plained in terms of human bodily and social experience. By the same token, we cannot say thatWatt's ideas are true only relative to understanding because the governor, as an unthinking lumpof metal, is completely indifferent to any understanding. If human ideas cannot be separated fromthe body that makes them possible, then why do they apply so accurately to the non-human bodyof the governor? If we know only "interactional properties" then how can we know the "inherentproperties" of a mechanical system? How is it possible, using cognitive mechanisms that "do notmirror nature," to represent so faithfully the properties and interactions of natural phenomena?

To a Materialist, the case of Watt's governor highlights serious contradictions in the philoso-phy of the embodied mind and provides powerful evidence of the objectivity of human thinking.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A version of this article was presented at a meeting of Sheffield Hallam University Language andLinquistics Group on 4th March, 1999.1 would like to thank all those who attended for their com-ments and encouragement. Passages from Ilyenkov (1997) were translated with help fromMarianna Ivanova.

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