Abstract
The role of the body in cognition is acknowledged across a variety of disciplines, even if the precise nature and scope of that contribution remain contentious. As a result, most philosophers working on embodiment—e.g. those in embodied cognition, enactivism, and ‘4e’ cognition—interact with the life sciences as part of their interdisciplinary agenda. Despite this, a detailed engagement with emerging findings in epigenetics and post-genomic biology has been missing from proponents of this embodied turn. Surveying this research provides an opportunity to rethink the relationship between embodiment and genetics, and we argue that the balance of current epigenetic research favours the extension of an enactivist approach to mind and life, rather than the extended functionalist view of embodied cognition associated with Andy Clark and Mike Wheeler, which is more substrate neutral.
Highlights
The role of the body in cognition is acknowledged across a variety of disciplines, even if the precise nature and scope of that contribution remains contentious
We argue that the balance of current epigenetic research favours an extension of the enactivist approach to mind and life, and a stronger integration of biology and cognition, rather than the extended functionalist view of embodied cognition associated with Andy Clark and Mike Wheeler, which is more substrate neutral
We have suggested that postgenomics in general, and epigenetics in particular, provide resources for a ‘dynamic materialism’ that is of direct relevance to embodied cognition and enactivism, even if these interdisciplinary fields have said relatively little about the positive details of epigenetic research far
Summary
Synthese (2021) 198:10685–10708 relationship between embodiment and genetics. We argue that the balance of current epigenetic research favours an extension of the enactivist approach to mind and life, and a stronger integration of biology and cognition, rather than the extended functionalist view of embodied cognition associated with Andy Clark and Mike Wheeler, which is more substrate neutral. Since the late 1990s philosophers of science like Godfrey-Smith have emphasized the importance of phenotypic plasticity to explain how the organisms’ features, including cognition, can adaptively cope with mutating environments: cognition as an intelligent tracking of environments (1998, 2017) Given their focus on the situatedness and embeddedness of knowledge-generating mechanisms (Lyon 2017), proponents of both embodied cognition and enactivism have drawn on these frameworks, but much of the ‘parallelism’ has been on the critical or negative side of the story, elaborating for instance how the mind or genes don’t work (Moss 2003). We will address some of these studies in what follows, but for a simple observation will suffice Many of these same phenomena are important platforms for embodied approaches to the mind, yet arguments about the nature and scope of embodied cognition proceed without due attention to these details, with epigenetics either not considered or given only fleeting reference.. While the conversation has moved away from the stale opposition of the biology-versus-culture construction of Neo-Darwinism’s heyday, important problems remain regarding the extent to which experiences of memory, learning, and cognition are fully permeated by the details of our biological embodiment, as we will see in Sects. 3 and 4
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