Embodiment, abduction, and expressive movement: A new realm of inquiry?

Abstract

I argue that there is a much more immediate and unreflective, bodily way of being related to our surroundings than the ways that become conspicuous to us in our more cognitive reflections. Further, I suggest that this way of relating or orienting ourselves toward our surroundings becomes known to us from within the unfolding dynamics of our engaged bodily movements within them, and that we can come to embody the recurrent patterns that we experience within such engaged movements in image schema or corporeal concepts. Below, I explore some of the implications of these claims. Taken all together, they suggest the opening up of a new realm of inquiry in psychological research of a practical kind to do with 1st-person explorations, from the inside, of the felt discriminative awarenesses we make use of, not in solving intellectual problems, but in resolving difficulties of orientation or relationship we face in both our everyday lives and in our professional practices—practical difficulties of a kind that still lack extensive examination.