Sharing Meanings about Embodied Meaning

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 language 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 independently 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 “meaning” is embodied in various ways. But in extending these semantic concepts to new and different uses, we risk equating language 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 meaning 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 cognitive abilities of the interpreter, abilities that may well be grounded in the same functions governing language 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 this distinction between symbolic language and other kinds of communicative behavior in mind can help to illuminate the challenges we actually face in achieving a shared understanding of the meanings we utilize and value.

A Failure to Share Meanings About Meaning

At the recent American Philosophies Forum symposium, I presented a draft of a paper on mirror neurons and shared meanings.² The ensuing discussion turned out to be profoundly informative; interestingly enough, this was because it went in circles. Conversation centered around a—self-admittedly—unexamined premise of mine, namely, that language is a precondition for shared meaning. Several of the participants disagreed with my claim and offered helpful counterexamples, ostensibly demonstrating that meaningful communication can and does take place without language. In the end, we wound up at an impasse. The very examples my colleagues found so obviously compelling failed to convince me that “meaning” was being communicated in these cases. And yet, I could not explain why I found them unsatisfying and why it remained important to me to assert that language, in some way, is a requirement for meanings to be shared between people.

Our failure to achieve a common understanding on the topic of shared meanings is more than just an amusing irony. As with many occasions in which people talk past one another, the apparently unbridgeable space between our positions turns out to be the result of differences in our starting assumptions and indicative of ambiguities in the very terms we were using. Such confusions can be rich philosophical fodder if they happen to contain an unexamined concept or two, and in this case we hit pay dirt. Words like communication, understanding, and even meaning were being used to refer to everything from response to a stimulus, to implicit representations in one’s choice of personal...