One of the key challenges for the embodied approach to human social cognition consists in trying to understand whether and how our bodily nature determines some of our linguistic activities, such as denying, asking, or doubting, that seem to be exclusively human. Are linguistic activities as those ones anchored to bodily mechanisms? The question is open and empirical research must address this challenge in the coming years. In the meantime, at least at a purely speculative level, let us try to delineate a possible point of contact between the anthropogenic power of language and embodied simulation.[17]
There is indeed a way to connect the common pre-linguistic sphere to the linguistic one (Gallese 2003b, 2007, 2008; Gallese & Lakoff 2005; Glenberg & Gallese 2012). This consists in showing that language, when it refers to the body in action, brings into play the neural resources normally used to move that very same body. Seeing someone performing an action, like grabbing an object, and listening to or reading the linguistic description of that action lead to a similar motor simulation that activates some of the same regions of our cortical motor system, including those with mirror properties, normally activated when we actually perform that action.
These data on the role of simulation in understanding language (see Pulvermüller 2013 for a review of this topic) broadly confirm a thesis already discussed in the history of philosophy (for instance, by Epicurus, Campanella, Vico, see Usener 1887 and Firpo 1940 or Condillaco 2001). The thesis in question claims for the bodily, sensory, and motor dimensions a constitutive role in language production and understanding. However, it seems that the relationship between language and body does not move in a single direction. The fact is that language is without doubts constitutive of human nature and, as such, it seems to offer us wholly human modalities of experiencing our corporeity.
In this sense, neuroscientific data on the role of simulation during understanding of language also lend themselves to a mirror and complementary reading with respect to that previously proposed. On the one hand it is plausible that embodied simulation might play a crucial role in understanding language. Indeed, if one reversibly interferes with this process, for instance by means of TMS stimulation, understanding of language is jeopardized. On the other hand, language allows us—and in this we are unique among all living species—to fix and relive specific aspects of our bodily experience. Through language we can crystallize and relive fragments of experiences that are not topical, that is to say are not my experiences now, but become a paradigm, a model, for understanding ourselves and others.
In the following section we discuss the role of embodied simulation seen as a paradigm or model in the light of the Aristotelian notion of paradeigma.[18] For the time being it suffices to stress that the possibility of hypostatizing and then segments of our experiences independently of our immediate physical context, or independently of specific physical stimuli, is a possibility that only the possession of language allows us to experience. The faculty of language is therefore, on one side, rooted in corporeality but, in turn, changes and moulds our way of living bodily experiences.