Embodiment as generalized anti-prescriptivism

Standing in contrast to what I call constructionist theories of developmental, behavioral, and psychological phenomena are prescriptivist theories. Prescriptivist theories are a class of theories that say that the essence of some phenomenon exists prior to the emergence of that phenomenon. In developmental psychology, prescriptivist theories include the idea that motor behavior develops as a consequence of neural maturation, with the essential movement patterns stored in the nervous system. In neuroscience, prescriptivist theories include the theory of basic emotions, the idea that the essence of each emotion is stored in the brain, waiting to be triggered by the environment. In morphogenesis, prescriptivist theories include the idea that the blueprint for how to construct an organism is contained in the genes.

There are a couple of problems with prescriptivist theories. The first is that they tend to be false, like the examples I listed are. Second, they don’t explain anything. Consider a stop sign. It seems like the stop sign prescribes the act of stopping, right? But the stop sign doesn’t say anything about how the car stops—it doesn’t actually prescribe anything that has to happen to get the car to stop, like pressing the brakes. Also, just because the stop sign says the word “stop” doesn’t say anything about why the driver would actually stop their car. What, then, if anything, is really being prescribed by the stop sign?

Because the essence of a developmental, behavioral, or cognitive phenomenon is not stored anywhere, it has to be produced (economics), assembled (developmental psychology), constructed (neuroscience), or confabulated (developmental biology). A phenomenon is produced/assembled/constructed/confabulated when a system observably behaves in a way that makes a categorizing observer go, “That’s [the phenomenon].”

In order for a system to assemble something, it needs to have parts that organize in a way that makes the system look like that something is happening. Otherwise, there would be nothing to look at.

In order for the parts to organize into a system of relationships with each other, they need to share interoceptive signals with each other via a cognitive glue. This allows the parts to behave in ways that accommodate, constrain, and enable the trajectories of the other parts to produce a system-level assembly.

A body is this interoceptively coordinated system. Embodiment is thus a simple and obvious principle forced by general considerations about how we observe developmental, behavioral, and cognitive phenomena. If you don’t have prescriptivism, then you’re going to end up with embodiment: the system where we observe the thing happening doesn’t follow a plan from somewhere but self-organizes a plan on the fly.

This way of thinking about bodies implies that embodiments are frequently unconventional. Most bodies do not look like human bodies do. For example, the parts the economy uses to assemble various phenomena via interoception sharing is people. That is to say, the economy’s body is people.