Intercorporeality and the Problem of Other Minds

Summary

The recognition of others as minded individuals is grounded in pre-reflective bodily interaction, not abstract inference. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty's intercorporeality, the body enables social understanding through two mechanisms: basic bodily attunement, where perceiving actions triggers corporeal simulation, and higher-level meaning construction via embodied metaphors. Schizophrenia illustrates how disruptions to bodily self-experience can impair the capacity for epistemic relatedness, reframing the other minds problem as an embodied, epistemological issue.

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Abstract

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.

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