4-E Cognition

We’ve all heard the old stories about the mind: They separate mind and body, elevate reason above the fleshy body and all of its messy emotions. We’ve seen this story in sci-fi images of floating brains in glass jars, consciousnesses downloaded into computers—ways of preserving the mind and the self without the need for bones, muscle, or skin. Some of these stories separate mind and body completely; others allow that the mind is in the brain, which functions as a cybernetic control center, figuratively and literally above the meat of the body. The body is the wetware; the mind is the software, the operating system processing what it perceives and telling it what to do. They might work together, but are ultimately separate: the rational, transcendent mind stuck vs. the fleshy animal body.

Western thinkers have been telling this story about the mind for centuries—perhaps, best exemplified by Rene Descartes’s proclamation “I think, therefore I am”—and we accept mind and body separation as self-evident common sense. This separation has far reaching implications for how we think about reason, emotion, and the body. Neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio notes that he, like many of us, “had been advised early in life that sound decisions came from a cool head… had grown up accustomed to thinking that the mechanics of reason existed in a separate province of the mind, where emotion should not be allowed to intrude,” (xii). The cool reason with which we are supposed to approach thought requires us to isolate the mind from body, emotion, and feeling. This separation introduces a binary; one where reason and the mind—associated with masculinity and whiteness—is elevated above feelings and the body—associated with the effeminate and the Other (Kelley 15).

During the past thirty years, cognitive scientists and philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists have started to rewrite and revise the stories that we tell about our minds and bodies, our thinking, and ourselves. Rather than a unified theory, the term “4-E cognition” refers to a constellation of approaches that conceptualize the mind as embedded, embodied, enacted, and extended beyond the brain to the body and the physical and social environment in which it is situated. While there is disagreement among these theories about what exactly constitutes thinking and where we locate cognition, they are grouped together because they question traditional Cartesian understandings of the mind that tend to individualize and abstract it, separating it from the body, emotion, and social and physical contexts.

These new stories are sometimes difficult to tell because we don’t always have the vocabulary to do so. Our way of talking about thinking, feelings, the mind, and the body pose limitations in realigning our understanding of what cognition is. As cognitive philosopher Mark Johnson explains in The Meaning of the Body, “what we call ‘mind’ and what we call ‘body’ are not two things, but aspects of one organic process, so that all our meaning, thought, and language emerge from the aesthetic dimensions of this embodied activity” (1). The linguistic separation of “mind,” “body,” and “emotions,” makes it difficult to discuss them as “one organic process” because it reinforces a Cartesian separation. But, as Johnson notes, because we do “not have the appropriate vocabulary for capturing the primordial, nonconscious unity of the human person” (7), we have to make do with what we have. For this reason, when we use phrases like “embodied understanding,” “bodily perception,” “distributed cognition,” and “emotional experience,” our adjectival use of these terms is not to suggest that there are other kinds of thinking or being that are not embodied, distributed, or emotional, but rather to highlight the role that our bodies, context, and emotion play in the way that we perceive and think about and through the world.

Cognitive Linguistics

In the introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens explain that cognitive linguistics does not understand language as a separate mental phenomenon, but approach “language as embedded in the overall cognitive capacities” of human beings and our interactions with the world (4). Cognitive linguistics focuses on the importance of context, environment and interpersonal interaction in “what constitutes shared meaning” (Rohrer 26). The meaning that we construct from language is not the result of abstracted referentiality, but is embedded in social interactions, physical environments, and bodily experiences (Rohrer 28). As cognitive scientist Mark Turner explains, “Meaning is not a deposit in a concept-container. It is alive and active, dynamic and distributed, constructed for local purposes of knowing and acting” (The Literary Mind 57).

In Metaphors We Live By, cognitive linguist George Lakoff and Johnson propose that “the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor” (3). Unlike literary metaphors, which draw attention to themselves, conceptual metaphors are a conventionalized part of our everyday language use, so that they often don’t register as metaphorical expressions. When I say “I am on top of my work,” I’m drawing on the HAVING CONTROL IS UP^[1] metaphor (15). If I complain “I’m in a bad mood,” or gush that I’ve “fallen in love with a character,” I am using the EMOTIONS ARE A CONTAINER metaphor (32). Because they have become so much a part of our cultural, conceptual, and linguistic system, we don’t think of these statements as metaphorical, but they are.

These metaphors, Lakoff and Johnson argue, are anchored in “our physical and cultural experience,” in our bodies and social interactions (14). The physical and social grounding of these metaphors allows us to make sense of abstract concepts (61). My understanding of the EMOTIONS ARE A CONTAINER metaphor is based in my knowledge of how my body interacts with the world, how it moves things and itself inside and outside of the various containers I encounter every day (Tupperware, yes, but also things like houses, rooms, cups, cars, bags, and the body itself). This conceptual metaphor, like many of the ones discussed by Lakoff and Johnson, makes use of what are called schemata: general, skeletal conceptual structures into which we unconsciously slot information. For example, the CONTAINER schema entails an inside and an outside, movement between these states, barriers, and possibly a lid, as well as an INSIDE/OUTSIDE orientation. Schemata function as basic cognitive tools through which we organize information and experiences. They are based in our bodily, social, and cultural interactions and it is through these experiences that we conceptualize and make meaning of the world. As Lakoff and Johnson explain, “we typically conceptualize the nonphysical in terms of the physical” (59). Our conceptualizations and language, then, is embodied. Without a body, the metaphors we use would fundamentally shift—and so would our thinking.

Schemata and metaphors are not just a part of our linguistic system, but our conceptual one as well, shaping the way that we think about and understand the world (Lakoff and Johnson 3). For example, Lakoff and Johnson discuss the RATIONAL IS UP; EMOTION IS DOWN metaphor: “The discussion fell to the emotional level, but I raised it back up to the rational plane. We put our feelings aside and had a high-level discussion of the matter. He couldn’t rise above his emotions.” (17, emphasis in original). This orientational metaphor brings with it certain entailments, existing within a larger conceptual system where GOOD IS UP; BAD IS DOWN (16) and HAVING CONTROL OR FORCE IS UP; BEING SUBJECT TO CONTROL OR FORCE IS DOWN (15). The metaphor, then, conceptualizes RATIONAL as good, as being in control, while EMOTION is bad, something that we are subjected to.

Cognitive linguist Seana Coulson explains that frames^[2] are skeletal cognitive structures that help us to understand words, sentences, images, and situations. Frames provide the background knowledge about of roles, contexts, and events necessary to make use of language and make sense of the world (267). We are not consciously aware of the fact that we are conceptualizing events and ideas through frames, but they structures and shapes our thoughts, expectations, and actions.

“Frame-shifting” refers to the “reanalysis process” (Coulson 3) that occurs when “additional context can necessitate reinterpretation of existing message-level representation” (35). As we read or listen to a person talk, words provide additional context which prompts us to change the frames through which we understand the utterance. Coulson notes that one-liner jokes clearly demonstrate this phenomenon. For example, when we hear “My father has the heart of the lion and a lifetime ban from the local zoo,” we, initially, understand the first clause to be metaphoric, an expression of the father’s bravery. However, the second clause provides additional context and requires us to shift our framing of the first half of the sentence; we realize that we’re discussing a literal lion heart.

In The Way We Think, cognitive scientists Giles Fauconnier and Turner explain what they call “Conceptual Blending.” They argue that we construct meaning by networking together different mental spaces. Fauconnier defines mental spaces as “partial assemblies constructed as we think and talk for purposes of local understanding and action” (352). Mental spaces are structured and organized through frames and connected to both general schemata and specific personal experiences and interactions within social and physical environments (352). As we think, we create connections between mental spaces, and it is through these links that meaning emerges. We are not consciously aware of these mental operations, but they nevertheless play a fundamental role in how we “produce our conscious awareness of identity, sameness or difference” (Fauconnier and Turner 18).

Fauconnier and Turner refer to the integration of different mental spaces to produce new meaning as “conceptual blending” or “conceptual integration networks.” Part of what makes blending powerful, Fauconnier notes, is that “It is a general property of mental space configurations that identity connections link elements across spaces without implying that they have the same features or properties” (353). As a result, we can draw analogies, compress time, identity, and cause and effect, and entertain counterfactuals. Take, for example, what Fauconnier and Turner refer to as “the skiing waiter”: the evocative advice a skiing instructor might give to a client to “imagine that he was a waiter in a Parisian cafe carrying a tray with champagne and croissants on it and taking care not to spill them” (21). This visual is meant to provide the new skier with a sense of how to hold and move his body, but as Fauconnier and Turner note, “The instructor is not suggesting that a good skier moves ‘just like’ a competent waiter” (21). Rather, “we have the construction of ‘matches’ between ‘waiter’ and ‘skier,’” which are used not for “analogical reasons” but an “integration of motion” (21-22). This integration produces a movement that is not present in either of the input spaces; it emerges only through their integration in the blend.

^[1] I am following the convention of Lakoff and Johnson and other scholars who have written about conceptual metaphors of using all caps to indicate when I am discussing metaphors and schemata.

^[2] The term “Frame” is sometimes used interchangeably with “schema” or Erving Goffman’s theory of social “scripts.” However, as I am using the terms, frames, while still skeletal, are more specific in their structure than schemata. For example, Coulson discusses the restaurant frame (86). We know the structure of going to a restaurant and it provides background knowledge that we can slot specifics into, but it is less general than something like the CONTAINER schema.

Emotions

In Metaphor and Emotion, Zoltán Kӧvescses details the different conceptual metaphors that we use to talk about and understand our emotions, many of which conceptualize feelings as things happening to the mind and body. Emotions are states that we fall into; they are physical and natural forces that overwhelm us, knock us down, wash over us. They are an opponent that we grapple with. Feelings are conceptualized in terms of captive animals and hunger, madness and disease, burdens, and physical damage. In many of these metaphors, emotions are represented as irrational, dangerous, something that happens to us and that is out of our control that we need to either bear, cure, or fight against. These conceptual metaphors underpin our understanding of ourselves as overcome by our emotions, unable to tame them or get them under control. However, recent work in the cognitive sciences has challenged the understanding of emotion as something that happens to us, arguing instead that we play an active role in constructing our experiences of emotion.

This reframing of emotion is informed by affective neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barret’s the theory of constructed emotion. In her 2017 How Emotions are Made, Barret argues that recent scientific studies attempting to understand emotions suggest that “your emotions are not built-in but made from more basic parts….They are not triggered; you create them. They emerge as a combination of physical properties of your body, a flexible brain that wires itself to whatever environment it develops in, and your culture and upbringing, which provide that emotion” (xii). Emotions, Barrett asserts, do not have a distinctive fingerprint—we cannot point to a particular facial configuration or physical sensation and say “this is anger”; there is a lot of variety in how we construct and perceive anger, so there is variety in what anger is. However, that does not mean that emotions are not real or that our physical experience of them is somehow imagined. Rather emotions are culturally developed concepts—part of a “social reality”^[3] (39)—that helps us to make sense of what we are feeling.

In order to account for variations of sadness or anger or pleasure or joy, Barrett suggests that emotions are concepts through which we categorize our experience. Emotion concepts, though, are not abstract ideas, sperate from the body; they are rooted in the body and anchored in the social and material world. We create connections between our cultural and material environment, our bodily experience, and our concept of that emotion (92). In his groundbreaking 1884 study of emotions, psychologist William James rejects the “Common sense” understanding that bodily states result from emotions: “we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival and strike” (190). In contrast, he posits that what we feel in the body constitutes our emotional experience: “we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble” (190). Because I have an emotion concept for anger, when I feel my face heating, my muscles tightening, my heart rate increasing, I categorize those sensations in that context as anger. If I don’t have a concept for anger, though, I can’t perceive myself feeling angry; I will understand my embodied sensory experience through a different concept. Because each “instance of emotion” is constructed through a different physiological and contextual experience (39), anger or fear or sorrow doesn’t have to look or feel the same in order for us to perceive ourselves experiencing it. This process is done unconsciously, though, so that “no matter how hard you try, you cannot observe yourself or experience yourself constructing” them (26).^[4] You don’t perceive yourself categorizing your anger; you just perceive the anger. This theory of emotion is radically different from the classical view of emotions as something that happens to us. Changing the way that we think about emotions—shifting our stance from passive recipient to active creator—has substantial implications for how we talk about emotion.

The other significant challenge to our classical understanding of emotions is the way recent research in cognitive science and philosophy has demonstrated that thinking and feeling are part of the same cognitive system. Going all the way back to Plato, the “internal battle between emotion and reason is one of the great narratives of Western civilization. It helps to define you as human. Without rationality, you are merely an emotional beast” (Barrett xi). But work in the cognitive sciences has suggested that this story about reason and emotion is not reflective of how the mind actually works: Emotions are based in and a part of the cognitive system (2). In the aptly titled Descartes’ Error, Damasio asserts that “reason might not be as pure as most of us think it is or wish it were, that emotions and feelings may not be intruders in the bastion of reason at all: they may be enmeshed in its networks” (xii). Emotions inform our conscious experience of the world. As Johnson reminds us, “once we stop thinking about concepts as abstract, disembodied entities and see them rather as bodily processes of discrimination and relation, we can recognize the crucial role of emotions in the meaning of situations, persons, objects, and events” (68). Our emotions are not a response to our interpretation of a situation; they are an interpretation. They are part of our analyzing, thinking, and reasoning, integral to how we make sense of the world (Johnson 54). Simply put, “There is no cognition without emotion” (Johnson 9).

^[3] Barrett explains that a “social reality” is a socially constructed agreement about the world which influences how we perceive and understand it. Social reality is the reason why some plants are flowers and others are weeds (132), a muffin is breakfast but a cupcake is desert (39), and we can buy things with pieces of paper that have no intrinsic value of their own (133). Social reality is reality because of cultural consensus, so emotions are real, but that they are not “perceiver-independent categories,” because they are culturally constructed and dependent (131).

^[4] In contrast to appraisal theories of emotion, I am not suggesting that there is an additional step where we intellectually assess what we are feeling. We don’t need to. The context and culture in which our bodies are embedded is part of the cognitive process, and it is through that system that we perceive what we feel.

Embodied Cognition

Cognitive scientist Tim Rohrer defines the embodiment hypothesis as “the claim that human physical, cognitive, and social embodiment ground our conceptual and linguistic systems” (27, emphasis in original). The body is integral to how we thinking and feel. The mind of a brain floating in a jar would be a very different mind from what we experience; we likely would not recognize it as a human mind at all. That is because, as cognitive philosopher Alva Nöe puts it, “you are not your brain… the brain is not a thing inside of you that makes you conscious” (7), because consciousness is a “living activity” that your body does in interaction with the world (7). The brain is part of the story of how we think, but not the whole story.

In The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, neuroscientist Francisco Varela, psychologist Eleanor Rosch, and philosopher Evan Thompson highlight the connection between cognition and the body, arguing “that cognition depends upon the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities, and second, that these individual sensorimotor capacities are themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological, and cultural context…..sensory and motor processes, perception and action, are fundamentally inseparable in lived cognition” (172-173). We access the world through our bodies, but it is also through our bodies that we make meaning about the world. The body is not an unthinking machine that the brain operates or the mind pilots. It is an integral part of how we understand the physical and social world, how we move through, interact with, and make sense of it.

We often overlook the role that the body is performing as we make meaning. This oversight, Johnson explains, is because the role the body plays in how we understand the world is often transparent: “We don’t have to work to ignore the workings of our bodies. On the contrary, our bodies hide themselves from us in their very acts of making meaning and experience possible” (4). As I am writing this primer, I am not any more aware of the way that my eyes are scanning the page, my head is moving to track my words, the muscles that are contracting as I type, my heart rate, the conceptual metaphors I use are anchored in the body, the neural pathways they activate, than I am of contact lenses I need to see the screen. If I were constantly aware of my contacts, it would be incredibly distracting. Same goes if I am constantly aware of everything my body is doing. So, like those lenses, the body is often transparent; we see through it “in order to make possible our fluid and automatic experiencing of the world” (Johnson 5). But that does not mean that the body is any less integral part of the meaning-making process than my contacts are to my ability to see.

Take, for example, the way that we understand other people’s facial configurations and bodily movements. Cognitive philosopher Shaun Gallagher theorizes that we don’t need to mentalize to figure out the secret inner workings of a person’s mind; we understand those around us “not by puzzling about their mental states, but, for example, by catching their glance, noticing their expression, seeing what they are doing, listening to what they are saying, and how they are saying it” (Action 98). Our understanding of others is not abstracted but embedded within social and material contexts and anchored in our embodied experiences. Literary critic Ellen Sposky attributes this understanding to our “kinesic intelligence”: our knowledge of our bodies informing our understanding of others (160). As cognitive theorist Giovanna Colombetti argues, we “sense in” and “live through” the bodies of others, so that we feel, and thereby perceive, their excitement, their fear, their tenseness through our bodies (174-75). As I watch one character look longing at another, I sense and live that desire.

Our bodily interactions with the world and the other bodies who inhabit it are what cognitive philosophers refer to as smart. Gallagher explains that “direct social perception, without any extra-perceptual processes involved, can grasp more than just surface behavior—or to put it precisely, it can grasp behavior as meaningful” (Action 132). When I’m watching TV and a character looks longingly at another, I do not observe the tension of his lower eyelid, the slight creasing of his brow, the parting of his lips, the relaxation of his cheek muscles, and then draw an inference that he is in love. Rather I perceive, and feel, his romantic desire directly. The additional step of inference or interpretation is not necessary. As Gallagher explains, “Part of what makes smart perception smart is that it is always contextualized; I perceive actions with their circumstances, and other bodily comportments, such as facial expressions, in their context” (Action 132). My understanding of the character’s love and desire does not require that I consciously parse or interpret what his body is doing, because I already have a contextual and bodily understanding of them. In perceiving the scene, my body is making sense of his without requiring conscious theorization or analysis.

Extended and Distributed Cognition

Now that we have seen the new stories that are being told, which cast the mind and body as not distinct entities but part of the same cognitive system, I want to extend our understanding of the mind beyond the body and into Thinking of the mind not as located within the individual brain or body encourages us to reconceptualize what we mean by cognition, to see it not as something that happens within the isolated individual, but as an activity that emerges through our interactions with physical and social environments.

Andy Clark and David Chalmers have argued that understanding cognition requires that we move beyond “the boundaries of skin and skull” to consider how thinking emerges through our interaction with the world around us (7). When we use a pen and paper to figure out calculations, when we make a list to help us to remember what we need from the store, we are relying on “environmental supports” (8). However, it is not just that the environment supports our thinking, but that our interactions with the environment constitute our thinking: as Clark and Chalmers explain, “the human organism is linked with an external entity in a two-way interaction, creating a coupled system that can be seen as a cognitive system in its own right” (8). Cognition, then, is not contained in the individual brain or body; it extends out into the world through our interactions with it.

One of the ways in which we can see our cognition as extended, embedded, and enacted are through the affordances we make of our environments. James J. Gibson explains that affordances are how we make sense and use of our environment through our interactions with it in specific situations. A chair, for example, might have a variety of affordances: it is a place to sit, to store a bag, hang a coat, a thing to stand on in order to reach something high, and it can also be used to barricade a door, to wield as a weapon. As I think with and through my environment, I perceive these different affordances based on my needs, abilities, and the circumstances in which I find myself. The affordance is not present in me, my environment, or my situation, but emerges through the cognitive system constituted by their interaction. Gallagher notes that “affordances can also be social and not just physical… other people afford a variety of interactions. A certain cultural practice affords the possibility of learning a skill, or earning a wage” (10).

CogSci Primer

4-E Cognition

Cognitive Linguistics

Emotions

Embodied Cognition

Extended and Distributed Cognition

Further Reading