Abstract EN:

The present dissertation is about what I purpose to call the Opacity Problem of Embodied Cognition (OPEC). Roughly, the idea that ‘embodied cognition’ is an ill-defined expression. And it is about a family of (not yet) fully examined solutions to OPEC, according to which cognition is embodied when it reuses body-related representational formats. Format-reuse solutions to OPEC, so I will argue, do seem to carry with them a set of further opacity issues. For instance, it is not fully clear what a body-related representational format is, and thus what gets reused in Embodied Cognition cases. And such opacity issues do seem to constrain any theory that targets OPEC by means of these two ideas. The discovered constrains would hopefully deliver a less opaque notion of Embodied Cognition – even though they would deliver a deflationary account of it. I believe the present dissertation provides a number of original – and hopefully convincing – contributions. First, the idea that the OPEC is a genuinely interesting problem. Both conceptually and empirically. In fact, we have been collecting so many data on alleged body contributions to cognition, but it seems we have got little understanding of what exactly those contributions amount to, how much of the body is actually involved, and indeed which section of cognition gets “bodily” affected. Few scholars have emphasized the urgency of asking EC defenders (and EC critics) to specify what they exactly intend by ‘embodied’ – and similar expressions – and the present dissertation has vindicated exactly this urgency. We do not have yet a sufficiently clear and consistently applied account of what makes a token cognitive state embodied, and without such an account, so we maintain, claims that want to show or refute EC seems to be just vacuous. This may well be the first credit of the project. Having introduced and argued for the import of OPEC: precisely quantified claims are more the exception than the rule in EC, and we asked to have more of them. The second contribution of the thesis amounts to an original treatment of the notions of format and reuse as providing a solution to OPEC. What are body-related formats? And which kind of reuse EC subscribes? Anybody who wants to resolve OPEC by introducing representational formats or neural reuse mechanisms, so we argue, seems to face a set of identity puzzles. Identity criteria for cognitive formats (neural, semantic, computational) seem one way or another unsatisfactory. Neural organization does not seem to be predictive of cognitive formats, cognitive formats do not seem to be content-involving properties, and even if we consider cognitive formats as computation-sensitive features, it is unclear whether there are cognitive computation-sensitive properties in the first place. On the other hand, once reuse mechanics gets properly analysed (unity of reuse, functional analysis, functional relations) and applied to embodiment phenomena, it remains unclear how reuse hypothesis identifies sensorimotor functions, which relations they entertain with non-sensorimotor functions, and whether sensorimotor functions are relevant in EC cases of reuse. Nobody has ever explored these sets of interconnected 1) format-related and 2) reuse-related issues before and nobody has ever applied them to the problem of clarifying the property of embodiment (OPEC). This is the second achievement of the dissertation. A third and final contribution is more positive. We defended a) a syntactic view of representational formats (formats are formal properties of representations), and b) a physicalistic account of reuse mechanisms (what gets reused are the physical structures, regardless of their functions). Once applied to EC, a) and b) have deflationary outcomes. EC cases would in fact be cases where, for a cognitive task, it is efficient to code in a sensorimotor format, or, for a sensorimotor region, it is efficient to be reused in a cognitive task.