Understanding Bodily Awareness
Michael O’Donovan-Anderson
mikeoda@cs.umd.edu
Bodily Awareness
Abstract and Outline
“We stand to our limbs in a relation of awareness. A concrete or intuitional awareness. And since that awareness ceases when feeling ceases, and in despite of the
fact that feeling is not its evidential ground, it must be a sensuous intuition. Then what information do we glean in being thus aware? We learn of the presence of the
limb, and of such properties as that it is straight or moving away from one’s body, i.e. of certain spatial properties of the limb.” (O’Shaugnessy 1980, p. 167) For
O’Shaugnessy, our awareness of our bodies is immediate and sensuous; he supposes the latter because bodily awareness evidently requires the cooperation of our
nervous system, but it should be clear that, given the immediacy of the awareness, the postural and kinaesthetic ‘sensations’ play only a causal, and not an epistemic
role in bodily awareness. It is because of, but not through bodily sensations that one is aware of the limbs and their posture; there is, in such awareness, nothing else
to notice but the limb and its posture. No qualia intervene. “This immediate awareness, which is possible only because of feeling in the limb, we non-senseperceptually characterize as ‘being able to feel that it is flexed’.” (p.217)
This paper situates the claim, found in, e.g., O'Shaugnessy (1980), that bodily
awareness is not to be understood on a perceptual model—that we have an
unmediated epistemic awareness of the disposition of our limbs, for instance—
within two ongoing enquiries in cognitive science. The first concerns the
possibility of learning, that is, understanding how experience can be a rational
constraint on thinking. More particularly, it is claimed that this faculty of
bodily awareness can be used to solve the modern version of the paradox of the
learner, according to which it is difficult to see how conceptual change, or
learning, can take place. The second concerns the relation between perception
and action, and suggests how the notion of a body-schema can be used to help
understand the possibility of an affordance (Gibson, 1979), the perceived
availability of a given object for, or openness of a situation to, certain actions.
The Body Schema
I. “Since Kant, we find it almost impossible not to think of mind as divided into active and passive faculties, the
former using concepts to ‘interpret’ what ‘the world’ imposes on the latter . . . But as soon as we have this picture in
mind it occurs to us, as it did to Hegel, that those all important a priori concepts, those which determine what our
experience or our morals will be, might have been different . . .The possibility of different conceptual schemes
highlights the fact that a Kantian unsynthesized intution can exert no influence on how it is to be synthesized—or, at
best, can exert an influence we shall have to describe in a way . . . relative to a chosen conceptual scheme.” Rorty
(1979)
On this picture, anomalous experience—which we suppose to be necessary for learning—becomes by definition
impossible, for even anomalies must be conceptualized if they are be coherent as experience, and in particular if they
are to be conceptualized with enough depth to be understood as inconsistent with some theory under consideration.
Confronted with an anomaly, then, we do not have the option of conforming a theory more closely to pure experience
(or the world it reflects), but only more closely to another theory—the one within which the anomaly was
conceptualized. But if sensation cannot provide epistemic friction for our theories or concepts, and there is no other
mode of epistemic access to the world, then the phenomenological order—the “world” of our “experience”—must be
epistemically closed. Content can be traced to mind and no further; our cognitive insides cannot be related to the
reality outside, and thus we cannot be supposed to be in touch with the world.
II. Recently, theorists in the cognitive sciences have been rethinking vision. Rather than understanding vision as the
construction from light signals of a fully specified, three-dimensional world model, and treating perceptual experience,
therefore, as the apparently passive reception of the world's objective qualities, researchers in animate vision suggest
(1) that perception involves a good deal of directed intervention in the world (2) that our representations of the world
are action-oriented (3) that the perceptual field is structured (partly) in terms of action structuring saliences
(affordances). As Andy Clark summarizes: "The internal representations the mind uses to guide actions may thus be
best understood as action-and-context specific control structures rather than as passive recapitulations of external
reality." (Clark, 1997)
This is a perfectly plausible suggestion, which I have written in support of (see O’Donovan-Anderson (1997), where I
argue that some such story must be told about the bodily grounding of our concepts, and therefore of our perceptual
experience, for intentionality to be possible). However, insofar as such accounts depend on the active body to provide
the structuring elements of perception, they seem to require an awareness of (or other epistemic access to) the body
and its behavior (e.g. proprioception, kinaesthesia), which cannot itself be understood on the model of perception, on
pain of circularity or infinite regress. Nor, since it is evidently possible to be conscious of our body and its movement,
can we simply relegate the necessary awareness to unconscious or sub-personal structures.
Clark (1997) Being There, Cambridge: MIT Press.
Gallagher (1986) “Body Image and Body Schema: A Conceptual Clarification” J. of Mind and Behavior 7:541-554.
Gibson (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Lakoff and Johnson (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh, New York: Basic Books.
O’Donovan-Anderson (1997) Content and Comportment, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
O’Shaugnessy (1980) The Will, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rorty (1979) “The World Well Lost” The Consequences of Pragmatism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
This research is supported by grants from the AFOSR and ONR.
Bodily perception is also possible, of course: consider the case of an itch. Here the awareness of the itching part of our body is indeed mediated by the sensation; it
is by and through the sensation that our awareness is directed. Note, however, that it is evidently not possible to feel an itch in a place that does not at least seem to
be part of one’s body. “Bodily sensations cause an awareness of themselves as set in a specific position in a determinately postured limb, and simultaneously those
same sensations cause awareness of the very limb, and as determinately postured, in which they themselves come as seemingly set.” (p.204) Given that we can
experience such sensations at any, but only at some, place on a seeming body (and recalling that it is not by and through having such sensations at given points on
our bodies that we are aware of the body) we can postulate the existence of an always already present seeming body, which provides the framework or substrate for
bodily perception, and is the object of bodily awareness. This is the body schema. In its short-term manifestation, it consists of an awareness of one’s current
posture; in its long-term manifestation it consists of a sense of the persisting spatio-structural features of one’s body, thus not current postures, but possible ones.
Why maintain a dual-mode theory of epistemic access to the world? If we can conceive of an unmediated, epistemic awareness of some part of the world, why not suppose all perception is like this?
1.
The notion of unmediated perceptual access to the world doesn’t appear to do justice to the phenomenological complexity of perception, in which it seems possible to attend to sensations, structuring
conceptions, as well as the world as presented.
2.
The phenomenon of seeing-as, which is indicative of the particular influence of conceptual structures in perception, does not seem to have a place in bodily awareness. Of course, it does have an
important place in bodily perception, that is, in the formation of a body-image; but the body image is importantly different from the body schema. (Gallagher, 1986)
3.
The possibility of forming perceptual communities, which depends upon seeing-as, is extremely important to perception. Such a perceptual community does not appear to make sense in the case of
bodily awareness.
4.
It perhaps allows one to capture the intuition that brute physical contact is epistemically simple (e.g. Johnson’s reply to Berkeley).
Application to Understanding Affordances
Concepts are open to the world in virtue of (and their particular role in the synthetic operations
of perception is to be partially explained in terms of) their practical significance. The concepts
brought causally to bear in perception also shape, in their practical aspects, the ego-centric
action-space, thereby providing a set of expectations (or a multiplicity of future possibilities)
which, as it were, exist at the level of the action-space, but resonate in the perceptual field. (It
would not be right to think of perceived space and the ego-centric action-space as distinct;
rather these are the same space experienced—known—by different epistemic faculties). It is
worth emphasizing, in this regard, that the term “action-space” is somewhat misleading, for the
representations of this arena foreground the temporal; whereas in perception temporal
awareness provides coherence to experience, in the action-space it provides the substance of
awareness in the form of multiple future intentional paths. Thus a range of possible actions
can be given to perception, filtered in terms of current purposes (not every endless possibility
is perceptually present; rather some are brought to awareness by the light cast by one’s active
intentions).
Application to Understanding Learning
If sense can be made of notions like ‘expectation’,
‘constraint’, and ‘possibility’ at the level of the egocentered action-space, and insofar as these notions
can be cashed out in terms of the practical
dimensions of the concepts drawn simultaneously
into operation in the perceptual and practical arenas,
then the stage has been set for a direct confrontation
between expectation and actuality—precisely the
conditions for productive anomaly which the
simplified Kantian picture of perception denies. It is
on such grounds that a theory of the epistemic
openness of concepts to the world—and thus a theory
of learning—can be built.
At the simplest level, concepts are open to the world
in virtue of practical contents (hammer) which create
expectations regarding the shape of the action-space,
or by being metaphorically rooted in more basic,
practically oriented schemas (Lakoff and Johnson,
1999). Just as the contours of a room or an object
can be verified by touch (which has an important
proprioceptive dimension) , so the contours of the
action space can be verified in action.
Bodily activity can help us reach
beyond our ‘enclosing’ concepts.