The last decades of the twentieth century were marked by great progress in cognitive neuroscience, made possible by recently-developed brain imaging technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)—which allowed for the first time non-invasive study of the human brain.
But what is cognitive neuroscience? We think it is fair to say that it is above all a methodological approach whose results are strongly influenced by which questions are being asked and how. Studying single neurons and/or the brain does not necessarily predetermine the questions to be asked that will help us understand how and how much our human nature depends upon our brains. Even less so the answers. Our purpose here is twofold. On the one hand, we aim to provide a brief overview of current cognitive neuroscience and its methods. We first present the limitations displayed by most current mainstream cognitive neuroscience, followed by a proposal for an alternative approach, both in terms of the employed methodology and of its main goals. In short, in contrast with what many normally take for granted[1], we assume the brain level of description to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for studying intersubjectivity, language, and the human self, which are only properly visible if coupled with a full appreciation of their intertwined relationship with the body. This overview has been specifically designed to provide a useful tool for researchers working in the humanities. Section 2 is entirely devoted to this goal.
On the other hand, the authors of this essay are a cognitive neuroscientist and a philosopher of language, and as such our second purpose is to propose how cognitive neuroscience could provide new insights on specific aspects of human cognition. In section 3 we introduce mirror mechanisms and embodied simulation and, in the following sections, we discuss their relevance for a new account of intersubjectivity, the human self, and language—which privileges the body as the transcendental foundation of each.
We emphasize the crucial role of the body, conceived as the constitutive source of pre-reflective consciousness of the self and of the other and as the ground upon which linguistic meaning is also based. The body we talk about in this paper manifests itself in two different, complementary, and closely intertwined ways:[2] it is a Leib, a lived body entertaining experiences of self and others, and a Körper, the somatic object, of which the brain is a constitutive part. We posit that this dual nature of our experienced body can be fully understood—and its genesis revealed—by investigating its motor neurophysiological underpinnings at the sub-personal level. The naturalization of intersubjectivity, the self, and language implies a first attempt to isolate the constituent components of the concepts we use to refer to these aspects of human social cognition by literally investigating what they are made of at the level of description of the brain–body system. This attempt in relation to the notions of intersubjectivity, the self, and language is intended here to form an identification of their constitutive mechanisms. We believe that this investigation becomes really effective only when it is framed within both comparative and developmental perspectives.[3]
The comparative perspective not only allows us to frame human social cognition within an evolutionary picture, thus providing access to its phylogenetic antecedents.[4] It also greatly reduces the risk of the empirical investigation of the human brain being subordinated to a specific human ontology of mind. A further reason for privileging the comparative perspective resides in the fact that it also brings us the most finely grained approach to date for studying the brain, and the possibility of correlating single neurons’ activity with behaviour and cognition—as when studying single neurons’ activity in non-human primates, like macaque monkeys.
The immanent transcendence[5] of the body’s corporeality can be revealed, we contend, by bringing the analysis back to the level of the brain–body system; that is, to the level of the Körper. We show that this particular neurocognitive approach is beginning to reveal the tight relationship between a core notion of the bodily self, its potentiality for action, and motor simulation at the level of the cortical motor system. Cognitive neuroscience can enable the analysis of several concepts and notions we normally refer to when describing ourselves and our social cognitive lives. In the present paper we apply this method to the notions of intersubjectivity, the self, and language.
To fully account for the specific quality of human social cognition one cannot undervalue the linguistic dimension. For this reason, we introduce aspects of social cognition related to language and discuss them in terms of embodiment, emphasizing the progress and limitations of this approach. Traditionally, the linguistic and corporeal sensorimotor dimensions of social cognition have been considered entirely unrelated. We posit that embodied simulation, conceived of as a model for important aspects of our relation to the world, might help in overcoming this apparently unsolvable dichotomy. We argue that a key aspect defining the unique specificity of human language consists in its decoupling from its usual denotative role. This means that language allows us to talk about general concepts such as beauty or mankind, without denoting any particular instance of these concepts. In so doing, human language manifests its power for abstraction. We discuss these features of human language as instantiations of the Greek notion of paradeigma, originally explored by Aristotle, and relate it to embodied simulation. When a word or syntagm, like the Latin word Rosa, is decoupled from its usual denotative role, it can function as a general rule of knowledge, e.g., as a paradigm for the female nominative case of Latin nouns belonging to the first declension. The notion of paradeigma does not establish a connection between a universal principle and its contingent aspects, as in deduction, it rather exemplifies a particular case of induction: specifically the transposition of inductive reasoning in in the field of studies of persuasive communication, known as rethorics, where contingent particular cases lead to general rules describing them. Paradigmatic knowledge, however, differently from standard cases of induction, connects the particular with the particular, moving from the contingent particular situation to an exemplary case. We propose that embodied simulation could instantiate such a notion of paradigmatic knowledge, hence enabling its naturalization and helping us overcome the apparent gap between the linguistic and corporeal dimensions.
We conclude by emphasizing how the specific use of cognitive neuroscience here proposed can lead to a new take on social cognition. This new take brings about a demonstration on empirical grounds of the constitutive role played in foundational aspects of social cognition by the human body, when conceived of in terms of its motor potentialities; hence its transcendental quality.[6] Of course this only covers a partial aspect of social cognition. However, we think this approach has the merit of providing an epistemological model, which is also potentially useful for empirical investigation into the more cognitively sophisticated aspects of human social cognition.