Sharing Meanings about Embodied Meaning

Abstract

There is a motivation behind many contemporary projects in philosophy to restore the body?traditionally denigrated, ignored, or both?to a place of significance. Given philosophy's recent focus on and perennial interest in the very nature of thought, one consequence of this body-centered inquiry is the recognition of how embodiment shapes both our concepts and our ability to communicate them. Once we discard the illusion that thoughts are produced in minds indepen dently of bodies or that sentences are like carrier pigeons conveying our ideas in self-contained propositions, we can learn a great deal about how our bodies not only produce thoughts but help to convey our intentions and purposes as well. Gestures, facial expressions, posture, and even clothing and other symbols of personal style serve, in various ways, as a means of communication. And yet, even as we benefit from this new perspective, we may be in danger of obfuscating one phenomenon as we illuminate another. Recognizing the body's power to communicate, we refer to gestures and similar behaviors as body language and talk about how is in various ways. But in extending these semantic concepts to new and different uses, we risk equating with fundamentally different types of communication, thus misunderstanding important factors specific to each form of expression. In particular, and as the subject under scrutiny in this article, the notion that bodies convey needs to be carefully investigated; misconstruing such a claim could easily lead us to minimize important differences between linguistic and similarly symbolic communication, on the one hand, and signaling behaviors, on the other. Furthermore, it can lead us to forget the unique role of the interpreter in the meaning-making process. For it is not as though words do have meanings but smiles, an outstretched hand, or a raised eyebrow do not. However, the ability to take these signs as symbols of something meaningful depends on the cogni tive abilities of the interpreter, abilities that may well be grounded in the same functions governing production and comprehension. As we investigate what embodied meaning could mean, we need to remain aware of the distinction between symbols and signals as different kinds of signs and at the same time note that the way a sign functions depends on how it is being interpreted.1 Keeping