(Dis)embodied language

The connection between language and the body has become a significant topic of research over the last decades. On the one hand, those who hold that language has an embodied nature endorse a close link between linguistic and sensorimotor processing. As a result, language processing is understood as a...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Meurer, César Fernando
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2020
País:Brasil
Institución:Universidade Federal de Pelotas (UFPEL)
Repositorio:Dissertatio - Revista de Filosofia (Online)
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:ojs.ufpel:article/14273
Acceso en línea:https://periodicos.ufpel.edu.br/index.php/dissertatio/article/view/14273
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Embodiment
Symbolic cognition
Abstract language
Conceptual representation.
Descripción
Sumario:The connection between language and the body has become a significant topic of research over the last decades. On the one hand, those who hold that language has an embodied nature endorse a close link between linguistic and sensorimotor processing. As a result, language processing is understood as an online activity, i.e., as something that stands in relationship to the local environment and engages in here-and-now tasks. On the other hand, for those who contend that language is fundamentally disembodied, linguistic processing is a matter of mental manipulation of amodal symbols according to a set of rules. On this view, language is an offline activity and is considered to be something that grants us interesting cognitive advantages due to its independence from sensorimotor contingencies. This paper [i] offers a comprehensive presentation of these two views; [ii] highlights a crucial challenge for each of them: the scaling phenomenon and the grounding problem, respectively; and [iii] argues that all attempts to overcome these two challenges have major shortcomings.