Essentially Embodied, Emotive, Enactive Social Cognition

Abstract

I have argued that decision-making and moral evaluation depend constitutively on affective framing, and also that these cognitive processes should be understood as enactive and essentially embodied. In this chapter, I will maintain that social cognition and interpersonal interaction likewise are a matter of emotional engagement, and that our ability to interpret other people’s actions, thoughts, feelings, and expressions largely depends on our capacity for affective framing. Such framing affords us an implicit, spontaneous, embodied understanding of social behavior and renders other people’s behavior decipherable. Building on the claim that the mind is essentially embodied and enactive, I will argue that processes of so-called ‘mind-reading’ and ‘body-reading’ are inherently intertwined and that understanding other people’s minds and behavior relies necessarily on the desire-based, emotive, essentially embodied interaction process itself.