Valentina Cuccio

This paper argues that interpersonal synchronization of physiological and motor rhythms constitutes the earliest and most basic mechanism of communication and meaning formation. Drawing on empirical work in developmental psychology and neuroscience, phenomenological analyses of intersubjectivity, and accounts of embodied social interaction, it proposes that temporal coordination between bodies affords a minimal, non-conceptual form of sense-making that precedes symbols, concepts, and linguistic articulation. On this view, meaning does not originate in detached cognitive representations but arises within shared temporal structures enacted through bodily attunement. On this basis, the paper further contends that disruptions of rhythmic synchronization can have distinctive epistemic consequences. Engaging phenomenological accounts of intercorporeality, particularly those developed by Merleau-Ponty, it suggests that the recognition of others as epistemic agents depends upon pre-reflective, bodily modes of attunement. When this intercorporeal ground is destabilized, as in schizophrenia, the conditions of mutual intelligibility are compromised. The resulting difficulties cannot be reduced to deficits in communication or social cognition alone; they extend into the epistemic domain, where individuals may cease to be readily acknowledged as knowers.

This paper explores the inferential processes underlying analogical reasoning, with a focus on its relationship to abduction. Peirce identified abduction as a central element of analogy (CP 1.65), and more specifically, as the cognitive mechanism uniquely responsible for the generation of new knowledge (CP 5.171). From this perspective, in this paper, I propose a typology of analogical reasoning based on the varying roles that abductive inference plays in the formation of analogical thought. To develop this framework, I draw on Peirce’s theory of abduction, as further refined by Eco’s ( 1981 ) typology of abductive processes. I argue that different types of abductive inferences give rise to distinct forms of analogy, each producing specific epistemic effects, ranging from quasi-immediate understanding to more elaborate processes that activate creative capacities. The typology of analogical reasoning developed here is then applied to metaphorical cognition in order to account for the different levels of cognitive complexity and the distinct epistemic functions that metaphors by analogy may have.

This paper develops an embodied account of the problem of other minds. I argue that our capacity to recognize others, and to be recognized by them, as individuals capable of subjective experience and knowledge, is rooted in a pre-reflective intersubjectivity, articulated through Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intercorporeality. On this view, the body plays a twofold role. At a basic level, social understanding arises through bodily attunement: in perceiving others’actions, our bodies simulate their experiences, thereby generating a corporeal mode of understanding. At a second level, the body contributes to the construction of meaning, as suggested by data on the embodiment of language and, specifically, on the embodiment of metaphors. This twofold role of the body is clarified through the case of schizophrenia. Reframing the problem of other minds in embodied terms carries epistemological implications. If the recognition of others as epistemic agents is rooted in bodily self-experience, disturbances of embodiment undermine the very conditions of epistemic relatedness.

In a paper that recently appeared in this journal, we proposed a model that aims at providing a comprehensive account of our ability to intelligently use tools, bridging sensorimotor and reasoning-based explanations of this ability. Central to our model is the notion of generalized motor programs for tool use, which we defined as a synthesis between classic motor programs, as described in the scientific literature, and Peircean habits. In his commentary, Osiurak proposes a critique of the notion of generalized motor program, and suggests that the limitations of our model can be solved by integrating it with the view that motor programs are generated by a previous mechanical reasoning, independent from sensorimotor knowledge. Here we reply that while on the one hand our reference to Peircean habits gets over the temptation to consider motor programs as fixed internal entities, it also rejects the view, endorsed by Osiurak, that intelligent practice is a mixture of antecedent abstract reasoning and subsequent motor execution.

Negation can be considered a shared social action that develops since early infancy with very basic acts of refusals or rejection. Inspired by an approach to the embodiment of concepts known as Multiple Representation Theories, the present paper explores negation as an embodied action that relies on both sensorimotor and linguistic/social information. Despite the different variants, MRT accounts share the basic ideas that both linguistic/social and sensorimotor information concur to the processes of concepts formation and representation and that the balance between these components depends on the kind of concept, the context, or the performed task. In the present research we will apply the MRT framework for exploring negation in Italian sign language. The nature of negation in LIS has been explored in continuity with the co-speech gesture where negative elements are encoded through differentiated prosodic and gestural strategies across languages. Data have been collected in naturalistic settings that may allow a much wider understanding of negation both in speech and in spoken language with a semi-structured interview. Five LIS participants with age range 30–80 were recruited and interviewed with the aim of understanding the continuity between gesture and sign in negation. Results highlight that negation utterances mirror the functions of rejection, non-existence and denial that have been described in language acquisition both in deaf and hearing children. These different steps of acquisition of negation show a different balance between sensorimotor, linguistic and social information in the construction of negative meaning that the MRT is able to enlighten.

In pragmatic theories, the notion of inference plays a central role, together with the communicative act in which it is activated. Although some scholars, such as Levinson, Sperber and Wilson, propose detailed and accurate analyses of this notion, we will maintain that these analyses can be better systematized if seen through Peirce’s notion of abduction. We will try to maintain that the variety of inferential processes in play in a linguistic act is mostly of an abductive nature. Moreover, we will maintain that the typological tripartition of abductions discussed by Eco allows to account for a significant part of the mechanisms involved in the comprehension of an utterance, ranging from quasi-immediate and spontaneous levels of understanding to processes that draw on creative resources. In our proposal the vast majority of our linguistic activities implies the automatic retrieval of a habit of action. In the other cases we need more onerous processes. We might need to identify, among a range of possibilities, the appropriate rule to be applied to the contextual situation or, depending on the context and on our background knowledge, we might be forced to create ex novo a new linguistic routine. In our view, this typology of abductive inferences provides us with all the necessary tools to account for the different inferential demands entailed by different levels of the process of language comprehension. On the basis of this typology we can, develop a fine-grained model of linguistic inferences and, thus, simplify the terms of some problematic nodes debated within contextualist approaches.The benefits of this fine-grained model is that it provides a unitary framework in which all the levels of the process of language comprehension are shown to be inferential and have the same logic structure. At the same time, it is also able to account for all the different inferential efforts entailed by different linguistic processes. Thus, this model gives us both a unitary account of the structure of linguistic inferences and a fine-grained description of the differences existing between them.

Tool-use behavior is currently one of the most intriguing and widely debated topics in cognitive neuroscience. Different accounts of our ability to use tools have been proposed. In the first part of the paper we review the most prominent interpretations and suggest that none of these accounts, considered in itself, is sufficient to explain tool use. In the second part of the paper we disentangle three different types of reasoning on tools, characterized by a different distribution of motor and cognitive ingredients. At the conceptual level, these types of reasoning reflect the distinction between three types of abductive inference as they are described in semiotic studies. At the functional level, we suggest that these types of reasoning on tools may correspond to different mental processes, possibly implemented in different regions of the left inferior parietal lobe. This proposal can account for the different interpretations commonly associated with the role of the left parietal cortex in tool use.

In the past few years, behavioural, neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies have been suggesting that Embodied Simulation represents a constitutive feature of language understanding. However, this claim is still controversial, as is the definition of Embodied Simulation. In this paper, I aim at providing a more suitable definition of Embodied Simulation. I will then apply this definition to the study of bodily metaphors. Embodied Simulation gets us attuned with our social world and it provides us with both a brain and bodily disposition, which is the starting point of many cognitive processes. Exploitation of the mechanism of simulation is particularly evident in the linguistic phenomenon of metaphors. Bodily metaphors are often so successful because they exploit this mechanism of brain and bodily attunement, enacted by means of Embodied Simulation. The role of Embodied Simulation and its importance for metaphor comprehension can be explained in two points: (1) Embodied Simulation allows speakers to share a bodily attitude during communicative exchanges; (2) by means of Embodied Simulation speakers directly experience the source domain during metaphorical mapping.

Although ontogeny cannot recapitulate phylogeny, a two-level model of the acquisition of language will be here proposed and its implication for the evolution of the faculty of language will be discussed. It is here proposed that the identification of the cognitive requirements of language during ontogeny could help us in the task of identifying the phylogenetic achievements that concurred, at some point, to the acquisition of language during phylogeny. In this model speaking will be considered as a complex ability that arises in two different steps. The first step of competence widely relies on a bodily-based format of knowledge. The second step relies on more abstract meta-representations and implies high-level socio-cognitive skills. It is hypothesized that in order to reach the second level of language competence, symbolic communication and interaction with a cultural community are needed. Hence, the origins of species-specific human complex language and cognition are in both the brain and culture. Moreover, in this model, data from the embodied language research will be discussed in the light of a usage-based account of language.

Is displacement possible without language? This question was addressed in a recent work by Liszkowski and colleagues. The authors carried out an experiment to demonstrate that 12-month-old prelinguistic infants can communicate about absent entities by using pointing gestures, while chimpanzees cannot. The main hypothesis of their study is that displacement does not depend on language but is, however, exclusively human and instead depends on species-specific social-cognitive human skills. Against this hypothesis, we will argue that a symbolic representation is needed to intentionally communicate absence and that this symbolic representation is tied to language. Moreover, data on the expression of displacement in home-sign systems will be taken into consideration. In light of this data, and in opposition to Liszkowski et al.'s claim, this paper will argue that displacement gestures are not foundational to language. Instead, they predate and predict..