Embodied higher cognition: insights from Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of motor intentionality

Abstract

This paper clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s original account of “higher-order” cognition as fundamentally embodied and enacted. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy inspired theories that deemphasize overlaps between conceptual knowledge and motor intentionality or, on the contrary, focus exclusively on abstract thought. In contrast, this paper explores the link between Merleau-Ponty’s account of motor intentionality and his interpretations of our capacity to understand and interact productively with cultural symbolic systems. I develop my interpretation based on Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of two neuropathological modifications of motor intentionality, the case of the brain-injured war veteran Schneider, and a neurological disorder known as Gerstmann’s syndrome. Building on my analysis of Schneider’s sensorimotor compensatory performances in relation to his limitations in the domains of algebra, geometry, and language usage, I demonstrate a strong continuity between the sense of embodiment and enaction at all these levels. Based on Merleau-Ponty’s interpretations, I argue that “higher-order” cognition is impaired in Schneider insofar as his injury limits his sensorimotor capacity to dynamically produce comparatively more complex differentiations of any given phenomenal structure. I then show how Merleau-Ponty develops and specifies his interpretation of Schneider’s intellectual difficulties in relation to the ambiguous role of the body, and in particular the hand, in Gerstmann’s syndrome. I explain how Merleau-Ponty defends the idea that sensorimotor and quasi-representational cognition are mutually irreducible, while maintaining that symbol-based cognition is a fundamentally enactive and embodied process.

From substitute to supplement: towards a normative reading of Merleau-Ponty’s Schneider case

“…This is not to say that cognition is absent in skillful action: pragmatic situations are rife with demands and our engagement with them is never impartial (Pacherie, 2002(Pacherie, , 2018). Not only is there for Merleau-Ponty a "storage of practical intentionality", but also motor intentionality itself mediates actuality and virtuality within unitary action (Halák, 2021;Merleau-Ponty, 2020, p. 155). The skier "intuitively" knows from experience or visualization that an ice sheet lays beneath the seemingly neat layer of snow.…”

Re-evaluating the structure of consciousness through the symintentry hypothesis

“…The gist ∼ focus function of symintentry resonates with our proposal that symintentry realizes intentionality by providing context for global transformations of PS. We contend that in AEEN, symintentry, as a control parameter, operates in the manner of biological action (BA) to realize the particular way meaning ensues through embodied hermeneusis (Halák, 2023).…”