Meat Knowing

July 5th, 2007 Fred McVittie

The body knows the world in its experiencing of that world. Knowledge, in embodied terms, is coexistent with experiencing and is therefore inevitably limited to the unalloyed affordances of the body. In this regard, ‘experiential knowledge’ refers to that subset of knowledge which is directly apprehensible to the senses and which is capable of being represented within the sensorimotor system of the body.

It could be argued that, since the mind is also ultimately embodied, in the sense that the conceptual mechanisms of thought are derived from the affordances of the body, then all knowledge is ‘experiential’, sharing a consilient body-based vocabulary of image schema and metaphor. However, there are significant differences between knowledge which is based on the language of experience, call it ‘embodied conceptualisation’, and knowledge which is embodied experience itself. One key difference lies in the necessary consistency which marks embodied experience and which is absent from embodied conceptualisation. Embodied experience involves the active engagement with the physical objects of the world; when learning to operate a lathe for example, one is actively connected to the material reality of the lathe and to the material one is working. The embodied experience or tacit knowledge which this activity produces is dependent upon, and constrained by, the necessary constancy of the lathe and the material. In simple terms, the lathe will not change into a container or into an animal half way through the process. The material one is working with will not usually transform into a liquid or volatalise away into gas the moment the chuck key is tightened on it. That is not the way the real world works, and the embodied knowledge of using a lathe is constrained by this reality.

Embodied conceptualisation, being a form of knowledge which uses the language of embodiment but does not operate in the real world, has no such constraints. When constructing knowledge or communicating knowledge which has no literal physical correlates, knowledge concerning some abstract entity such as justice for example, there is no demand for ontological consistency and no need for the constancy of material properties which mark the real world. When using embodied concepts, in metaphor for example, it is commonplace for the guiding metaphor to shift many times during the course of a single sentence. If we wish to create or share knowledge about justice we may find ourselves alluding to metaphorical swords, scales, blindfolds, etc, and moving between these allusions seamlessly and unproblematically. The ontology and materiality of such a concept is not constrained by the physics of the real world but rather has a fluidity which gives it its power. It has been suggested that the very act of mixing metaphors is a strategy for the advancement of conceptual knowledge, these mixings acting as ‘engines of organisational enquiry’(1).

(I am aware that even in talking about such conceptualisation I am making use of the very capacity under discussion. Most of the above paragraphs have been chains of shifting metaphors employed to organise the enquiry I am engaged in.)

1. Boland, Richard J. Jr. & Tenkasi, Ramkrishnan V.
Metaphor and the Embodied Mind: An Engine of Organizational Inquiry.
SPROUTS: Working Papers on Information Environments, Systems and Organizations
Volume 1 Issue 1 Article 2 – 2001

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