CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Cognitive Humanities:

Whence and Whither?

Peter Garratt

This book opens up an area of enquiry called the ‘cognitive humanities’.

What is to be gained by using this term? Why speak in this way? Like
T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock wondering whether he dares to disturb the uni-
verse, floating a critical term like this cannot avoid the risk of seeming to
enjoy a pose, one risibly grand and impoverished all at once. So rather
than shouting and arm-waving about another supposed turn or paradigm
shift, the phrase can be understood less dramatically as a way of naming
particular research directions emerging at the intersection of the cognitive
sciences and literature, culture and the arts. Put this way, it will hardly
sound new, even to those only vaguely familiar with, or unimpressed by,
apparently similar work. I will say a little more below about why the cogni-
tive humanities, as defined here, should be distinguished from such areas
as neuroaesthetics and evolutionary literary criticism, but for now let me
keep it simple. The book tries to do two things: it embraces multiple forms
of cultural expression, not only literature, and so adopts a wider canvas
than cognitive literary studies; and its most sustained interdisciplinary
conversation is held with approaches and models that take seriously the
ineffaceable fact that minds are embodied.

P. Garratt ( )
English Studies, Durham University, Durham, UK
e-mail: [Link]@[Link]

© The Author(s) 2016 1

P. Garratt (ed.), The Cognitive Humanities,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59329-0_1
2 P. GARRATT

To say that embodiment has become a lively topic in the cognitive

sciences over the past twenty-five years would be a colossal understate-
ment. Different versions of a story about the embodied mind—in fact,
different stories of how and why embodiment matters to cognition—have
exerted a huge influence on the theoretical side of the mental sciences,
especially at the more radical end of the field, by fundamentally challeng-
ing a picture of the mind found in mainstream or classical cognitive sci-
ence itself. Unlike the classical idea of the mind as a computer, this ‘new
science of the mind’, as Mark Rowlands has dubbed it, tries to take a fuller
account of the role of embodied experience in cognitive life in ways that
require not only new methods and explanations but a different underlying
conception of what cognition is.1 This means rejecting the guiding norma-
tive view that thought is abstract and computational, and that the mind
begins and ends with the brain. If, for the purposes of a crude but illustra-
tive contrast, the classical paradigm can be caricatured as ‘disembodied’
cognitive science, then the core commitment of embodied cognitive sci-
ence is that features of the body beyond the brain alone play an important
part in cognitive processes—bodily sensations, gestures and motor capac-
ities, for example—and, moreover, at least for some of its proponents,
that the role they have may be constitutive as well as causal. Thinking, as
humans experience it, depends deeply on our having the kinds of bodies
that we have.2
In what might seem to be the most radical form of this story (though
probably isn’t), it is even claimed that cognitive processes do not stop
at the boundary of the body but reach out some of the time to include
aspects of the non-neural physical world. On this view, often called the
extended mind hypothesis, using a pen and paper to solve an arithmetical
task would be a basic example of a strategy for spreading out a thought
process over a local environment in order to perform it. Doing a written
multiplication or long division, say, establishes a cognitive circuit spread
across the brain, body and simple writing tools, an ensemble of embodied
actions and equipment that can be regarded as the act of thinking itself and
not merely some graphic elaboration of a prior, wholly internal process. At
a basic level, ‘doing the working’ of the problem in pen and ink drastically
reduces the demand placed on internal working memory during the task
by externally storing the various steps of the solution. Perhaps more con-
tentiously, the linked objects and bodily gestures (holding the pen, writing
down numbers, carrying remainders and so on) are said to be insepa-
rable constituents of the overall activity of solving the problem, running
 INTRODUCTION: THE COGNITIVE HUMANITIES: WHENCE AND WHITHER? 3

in tandem with inner neural processes. The whole system spans neurons,
limbs, bodily movements and material things, all working together. To
insist on a strict line of division between the internal and external parts of
this integrated system would be arbitrary, so the story goes. Cognition in
cases like this should not be regarded as confined to the head.
In the most widely discussed thought experiment to explicate the
extended mind hypothesis, Andy Clark and David Chalmers present a sce-
nario in which two people, Otto and Inga, wish separately to visit the
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on 53rd Street to see an exhibition.3
Whereas Inga relies on her memory for the address of MoMA, Otto has
a mild memory impairment due to Alzheimer’s disease and so consults a
personal notebook in which he routinely writes down useful bits of infor-
mation. Otto’s notebook contains MoMA’s address, and with this infor-
mation he is able to go to 53rd Street and visit the art exhibition, just
like Inga. The essential point is that the instances of Inga and Otto are
equivalent. It just so happens that in one case a longstanding belief that
MoMA is on 53rd Street is accessed from internal memory storage, and in
the other case the same belief is accessed from a location physically outside
the brain and body. The functional role played by Otto’s notebook, Clark
and Chalmers propose, is the same as Inga’s biological memory. Because
his notebook is used as a reliable and continuously available resource, it
functions in the same way as her internal mental machinery. In this sense,
Otto’s cognitive process has an embodied, material, extra-neural depen-
dency such that it extends beyond his own skin. His belief that MoMA is
on 53rd Street exists literally outside his head.
A great deal of debate of a philosophical kind has ensued about this
apparently simple scenario and the status of Otto’s notebook.4 Much of
this has centred on whether or not, after further close inspection, the
Otto-notebook coupling really turns out to be functionally similar to
Inga’s case, and hence genuinely ‘cognitive’ in the terms set up by the
thought experiment; and it has generated further rich debate over what
counts as a cognitive process and why—the so-called ‘mark of the cogni-
tive’.5 Some, such as Shaun Gallagher, have observed that the Clark and
Chalmers account of extended cognition retains a surprisingly conserva-
tive or internalist notion of cognitive processes, since what happens inside
the head guides the evaluation of whether or not some candidate object
or process forms part of an extended system. And, Gallagher contends,
Clark and Chalmers use a specific category of mental states to generalise
about cognition (the Otto-Inga story is about beliefs).6 Even before one
4 P. GARRATT

reaches such subtle considerations as these, however, it is hard to miss the

counterintuitive thrust of the extended mind thesis, a quality not inciden-
tal to its general import. The suggestion that a thought process—or, in a
somewhat grander vein, the mind—is not limited by the container of the
human organism obviously conflicts with primary folk intuitions or com-
mon sense. Such a view feels at odds, at least initially, with our immediate
experience of cognitive agency. All of these areas have been subjects of
intense argument in the specialist literature.
But also intriguing (and this is very much a non-specialist observation)
is the way that the Otto-Inga scenario makes particular use of an art gallery
to leverage its point. Of course, it matters not at all that Otto’s and Inga’s
desired destination happens to be MoMA. It could just as easily have been a
dentist’s surgery, garage or delicatessen, without altering the thought exper-
iment (it just has to be a venue appropriately familiar to them). All the same,
the choice of MoMA is suggestive, it being a cultural institution of a specific
kind and prestige. It provides visitors with an environment for having par-
ticular kinds of aesthetic experiences and acquiring art-historical knowledge
via a series of objects classified through their display as works of art. As
Clark and Chalmers set it up, the thought experiment deals with extended
cognition only as a prelude to all of this. Attention falls on Otto’s extended
mind only before he enters MoMA’s stylish glass frontage, where presumably
he will enjoy complex experiences with various kinds of textual and visual
artefacts presented in the exhibition. In other words, it is noticeable that
the narrative separates the cognitive episode from the cultural and aesthetic
domain of the museum that fundamentally motivates the two protagonists’
behaviour. This is not some design flaw or philosophical shortcoming, just
an observable feature of how the scene is constructed. But what if the cog-
nitive were not cordoned off from the cultural in this theoretical context?
What would happen if we could follow Otto and Inga into the museum, as
it were, and consider how the extended mind story might play out there?
How would the content and structure of this rich creative environment lead
us to assess, or reassess, the hypothesis?
These are examples of the sorts of questions that the cognitive humani-
ties might choose to tackle. Posing them is meant to illustrate the kinds of
concerns that distinguish the area, as this book seeks to define it, rather than
to elicit immediate answers. The point to underline is that an important
feature of the cognitive humanities will be looking beyond the horizons
of debates already configured and regulated from within the cognitive sci-
ences, creating new terms of reference for different types of conversations
 INTRODUCTION: THE COGNITIVE HUMANITIES: WHENCE AND WHITHER? 5

that have begun to happen and can continue liberally unfolding, as opposed
to adding to what goes on already. The aim for a cultural theorist who
comments on Otto and Inga should not be to inch closer to resolving
the mark of the cognitive, for example. Without licensing weak or woolly
appropriations of concepts from outside the arts and humanities, it is prob-
ably true that the extended mind view, say, will begin to take on an altered
appearance or even become something different once granted an existence
outside the constraints of the philosophical and scientific systems that artic-
ulate it. Concepts change as they migrate, as they become integrated with
other systems of understanding and regimes of knowledge, and a liberal
position on interdisciplinary dynamics would do well not to be purist here
and hence abandon the pursuit of concepts in a fixed or pristine form.7
To stay with the present example, the extended mind hypothesis could
provide a fresh framework for understanding the creative origins of one or
other of the paintings that Otto encounters at MoMA. As Clark observes
in Natural-Born Cyborgs, the ‘sketch pad is not just a convenience for the
artist’, and the tools and practices that artists use do not merely serve to
translate an already fully conceived in-the-head picture into a materially
inscribed image on paper or canvas.8 Rather, the image emerges from the
interactive flow or feedback loop between internal representation and
external media (the movement of the hand and its embodied technologi-
cal process of mark-making). This kind of thinking with tools, and not the
naked brain, is responsible for creating the finished painting. A similar story
could readily be told about the plastic arts, and about some literary creativ-
ity too.9 Yet the general extended claim would not be the satisfactory end
of analysis for the cognitive humanities; if anything, it would be an enliven-
ing starting point for getting a more detailed set of considerations off the
ground, such as the interplay between extended ecologies of creativity and
particular artistic movements (such as realism and abstraction) and genres
(such as history or still life), taking into account the different aesthetic or
representational conventions of epochs and the variable forms of technol-
ogy in use throughout art history. Then the idea of intentionality, which
has its own conceptual anchorage in the arts, just as it does in the cognitive
sciences, would need to be addressed. And so on. Furthermore, questions
besides the genesis of works of art, such as the nature of aesthetic spectator-
ship and reception, could subsequently be taken up too. And, in doing any
of this, the cognitive humanities might still ask why the extended-mind rea-
soning adds explanatory value, and what makes creative artefacts and artis-
tic experience more than the embodied optimisation of information flow.
6 P. GARRATT

In short, Otto in the museum poses interesting challenges. These

challenges include thinking anew about the original hypothesis of
extended cognition itself. But the case is merely illustrative, and not the
whole: speculating about Otto serves synecdochally here for the larger
area and style of enquiry that will be pursued. Throughout the book, an
emphasis falls on the mind’s realisation in and through bodily, affective
and material structures, even its extension beyond the skin, in histori-
cal environments and in multiple cultural forms (the novel, poetry, non-
fiction, drama and performance, visual culture, physical objects, digital
culture). Quite often, cognition is approached less as a matter of internal
representation—a Cartesian inner theatre—than as a form of embodied
action: cognition always inhabits a world and often reaches out into the
resources of that setting in ways that establish micro-ecologies or niches
for thinking, and in which reciprocal feedback loops spread across mind,
body, movements, tools, technologies and environment. How one begins
to rethink culture and creative forms in relation to this model of cognitive
agency is one of the highlighted tasks ahead. To be more precise about
the whole venture, the ‘embodied mind’ referred to in the book’s sub-
title gestures towards the keen interest shown by cognitive science in the
bodily contribution to thinking in a general sense, while signalling a more
particular focus on approaches often glossed as ‘4E cognition’. The term
4E cognition summarises four varieties of explanatory model: embodied,
embedded, enactive and extended.10 While not applied as a rigid frame-
work, 4E approaches provide a shared reference point for many of the
chapters, and sometimes a more extensive critical resource.
All four Es take human cognition to depend on aspects of the physi-
cal body and situated environment of cognitive agents, in ways that are
important and empirically supported. Their being bundled together
implies an allied project to a minimal extent, even though notably deep
disagreements exist between some of the commitments they entail and
among some of their proponents. (For instance, is the human body a
unique vehicular realiser of, and constraint on, thought, or is cognition
heterogeneously realisable?) According to Richard Menary, what unites
the 4Es is that all are held to reject classical disembodied cognitivism
and in doing so to embrace the virtue of more diverse modellings, as
the broad picture ‘shows us that our cognitive lives are rich and varied
and that simple homogenous explanations do not do justice to the com-
plexity of cognitive phenomena’.11 To take them in turn, and necessar-
ily briefly, the embodied approach states (as already sketched) that some
 INTRODUCTION: THE COGNITIVE HUMANITIES: WHENCE AND WHITHER? 7

cognitive abilities depend upon features of human bodily experience. This

basic commitment allows for a number of more specific positions—each
ascribing essentially different kinds of significance to what the body does
in cognitive performances—and it would be fair to say that the mean-
ings of embodiment ramify in different, even incompatible directions in
the cognitive science literature.12 Examples of the different theses might
include, on the one hand, the conceptual metaphor model developed by
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, which identifies the formative role of
basic bodily spatial orientation (up/down, front/back, shallow/deep, and
so on) in everyday conceptualisation and metaphorical mappings (such
as ‘happy is up’). On the other, the embodied cognition label would also
apply to Anthony Chemero’s dynamical stance, a ‘methodological com-
mitment to explaining perception, action, and cognition dynamically and
without referring to [mental] representations’.13 (For Chemero, Clark just
isn’t radical enough: he uses embodiment merely to enrich a standardly
representational and computational account of the mind.)
What embodiment is taken to mean influences the degree of endorse-
ment its proponents are willing to give the three remaining 4E terms.
Embedded cognition claims that while cognitive processing may take
place in the head, it often depends on interactions between the agent
and his or her ecological setting. The enactive view also proposes that
agent–environment interactions matter in non-trivial ways to the work of
cognition, though particular emphasis typically falls on the contribution of
sensorimotor skills; the experience of visual perception (a heavily discussed
area in the enactive literature) ‘isn’t something that happens in us. It is
something we do; it is a temporally extended process of skillful probing’,
as Alva Noë vividly puts it.14 A key upshot of this is that perception ought
not to be thought of as a process of making a rich internal visual picture
of the world, but rather as a form of action for making relevant features
of the environment available to us. We have knowledge of the invisible
backside of an object in front of us (minimally, we know it is there and it is
a feature of our perceptual experience) because it is possible to anticipate
moving around the object, in ways that are structured by the contingen-
cies of our sensorimotor embodiment, so that it will become perceptually
available to us. Physical actions and gestures are inseparable features of
perceiving. In a different version of this E known as autopoietic enactiv-
ism, which has a more radical anti-representationalist flavour, embodiment
is literally vital to cognition in the sense that bodies are living systems striv-
ing to individuate, structure and regulate themselves autonomously while
8 P. GARRATT

in dynamic interactive relationships with their ecological milieu.15 Finally,

as already discussed, the extended cognition claim argues that some cog-
nitive processes are not brain-bound, and extend literally into physical
features of the world around us.
Many of the contributors to this book explore why cognition matters to
the arts and humanities when it is investigated as an embodied process in
terms such as these—when mind is taken to be something irreducible to
the brain and fundamentally disposed towards world-involving, situated,
flexible action, often in concert with, or integrating, non-neural struc-
tures and media. In key respects they build on previous research associated
with cognitive cultural studies and the important related area of cognitive
literary studies. However, while the cognitive humanities can evidently
refer to almost any kind of dialogue in the creative, critical and humanist
disciplines with the incredibly broad venture known as cognitive science,
the driving purpose here is narrower and in general less neurocentric than
these earlier developments. Taken as a whole, these chapters signal possi-
bilities for future cultural interpretation linked to frameworks in embodied
cognitive science, especially the 4E picture, while voicing at the same time
the priority of their own concerns. Far from being exhaustive, the result
is intended to be illustrative. Areas as different as archaeology, film stud-
ies and musicology could be included.16 And this reflects the unsurprising
fact that 4E approaches have not been central to the way cognitive literary
studies has developed. For sure, similarly targeted work is on the increase,
as some fine recent studies amply show. In The Style of Gestures (2012), for
example, Guillemette Bolens examines embodiment and literary texture in
medieval romance narratives (and to a lesser extent the fiction of Marcel
Proust) by focusing on expressive movement—kinesis—as a ground of
meaning (social and textual) and by exploring the ‘heuristic significance
of kinesic intelligence and kinaesthetic knowledge as they are activated in
the understanding of narrated gestures and movements’.17 In her recent
‘biocultural’ model of literary theory, Nancy Easterlin presents a situ-
ated and environmental view of cognitive action and literary textuality.18
Meanwhile, developing a more historicist frame, Evelyn Tribble has illu-
minated early-modern acting techniques using theories of cognitive off-
loading favoured by proponents of the extended mind hypothesis and the
influential anthropology of Edwin Hutchins, showing how Shakespeare’s
actors achieved the feat of remembering lines and complex stage directions
for multiple plays in short windows of time.19 And, in another vein, a 2014
special issue of the journal Style, edited by Karin Kukkonen and Marco
 INTRODUCTION: THE COGNITIVE HUMANITIES: WHENCE AND WHITHER? 9

Caracciolo, was devoted to ‘second generation’ (or non-Cartesian, or 4E)

cognitive science in narratology and literary studies.20
All of these count as discrete instances of what I am calling the cognitive
humanities, and they are not isolated examples. Yet it remains the case that
cognitive literary studies (and its close relation cognitive cultural studies)
has established critical paradigms that are grounded in psycholinguistic
processing, cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience and (to some
extent) evolutionary biology, however diverse the composition of the
field.21 While still on the fringes of English Studies, judging by the typical
layout of mainstream anthologies and primers in literary theory, cognitive
literary studies has successfully made a name for itself in these terms, and
its recognition only grows. It has sometimes staked a claim on investigat-
ing the embodied mind, but with an understanding of embodiment chiefly
referring to the neural materialisation of mental acts. Once we recognise
that ‘human subjects are also always embodied and that enculturation can
take place in the absence of a material brain’, writes Alan Richardson,
one of the most influential and interesting cognitive literary critics, then
‘We have in effect moved beyond the residual behaviorism that has kept
poststructuralist analysis from peering into the black box of the human
brain, and we have opened up the possibility of a productive dialogue
with contemporary work in the mind and brain sciences.’22 This need to
speak back to, or find a way of working with, the textualist strategies of
poststructuralism can be seen in much of the early key work in the field
of cognitive literary studies. Bringing the biological brain (or mind-brain,
as it sometimes gets called) back into critical discourse was one of the dis-
tinctive primary moves for addressing how cultural minds are embodied.
Foundational studies tackled this work differently—Mark Turner’s The
Literary Mind (1996) was a rejoinder to the idealism of French literary
theory, while Ellen Spolsky proposed unexpected links between Derrida
and Darwin—but, with the exception of Lakoff and Johnson’s innovative
account of conceptual metaphor, embodiment was a term mostly confined
to the ‘black box’ of the brain, as Richardson put it.23
More recent work, some of it field-defining, continues this trend. The
essays in Lisa Zunshine’s Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (2010)
engage very little with recent embodied cognitive science, with the excep-
tion of a characteristically rigorous chapter by David Herman on distrib-
uted cognition and narrative theory.24 And a familiar series of topics tend
to organise the field: theory of mind, metaphor theory, conceptual blend-
ing, poetics, reading and attention, empathy, the emotions, storyworlds,
10 P. GARRATT

cognitive universals, and so on.25 Meanwhile a tenuously related develop-

ment in the shape of Literary Darwinism has emerged, backed up by pro-
ponents of ‘consilience’ between the arts and sciences, with little or no
support from the leading lights in cognitive literary studies.26 This some-
what isolated and sometimes self-consciously embattled group of mostly
US critics, spearheaded by Joseph Carroll, bases literary interpretation on
the assumption that biological evolution has furnished Homo sapiens with
a modular mind innately adapted for stories, and it goes on to repack-
age some dubious ideas from earlier sociobiology; the limitations of this
view have been superbly outlined by Jonathan Kramnick.27 Also in the
mix, sometimes wedded slightly differently to the explanatory authority of
the sciences, has been the rise of ‘neuro’-prefaced subdisciplines, includ-
ing neuroaesthetics. Here, neurobiology and artistic experience (includ-
ing both literary and visual) are brought together on the methodological
assumption that techniques for brain imaging and measuring neuronal acti-
vation patterns can deliver fresh insights about the nature of aesthetics.28
It should be sufficiently clear that the orientation of the present book
departs from the inwardly focused explanatory frameworks and strate-
gies sketched above. The purpose and scope here are not brain-bound.
The bodily context and environmental scaffolding of cognitive life are
given greater attention, and ascribed a much larger role, than tends
to be the case in cognitive literary studies and in adjacent domains of
enquiry. While the brain is not by any means entirely overlooked in the
chapters here—how could it be, after all—the forms of embodiment
that interest the contributors frequently encompass much more than
the underlying engine-room of the brain in conceptuality, categorisa-
tion, perception, memory, theory of mind, and so on, given support by
evidence of localised neural activation and so on. The fuller embodied
life and world of the cognitive agent, subject or person are instead in
the frame. The chapters variously propose theorisations of narrative and
poetic interpretation, fiction, viewpoint and performance, illustrating
what reading cultural objects and texts with the embodied mind might
achieve, and still drawing on hybrid traditions and methods—histori-
cist, textual, philosophical, linguistic, narratological, empirical—while
attempting a more sustained conversation with embodied, embedded,
enactive and extended approaches to cognition than typically found in
cognitive literary studies.
The book has three Parts. Part 1, ‘Theorising the Embodied Mind’,
has the greatest theoretical and methodological ambition; Part 2,
 INTRODUCTION: THE COGNITIVE HUMANITIES: WHENCE AND WHITHER? 11

‘Reading Culture’, deals with more extended historical, cultural and

textual examples, from poetry, drama and political writing; and Part 3,
‘Cognitive Futures’ sets out new horizons for the cognitive humanities,
including points of contact with the medical and digital humanities. It
is no accident that the opening chapters bear a close relation to cogni-
tive literary studies, for indeed such is the origin of the book. Merja
Polvinen and Marco Bernini, however, both draw on embodied cogni-
tion to present significant challenges to existing narratological debates
in the field pertaining respectively to the understanding of how readers
navigate fictionality (as established by deictic shift theory) and to the
opacity of fictional minds (that is, the sense in which their narrative
depiction allows minds to be seen through). Both do so with reference
to recent models of embodied perception, with Polvinen drawing on
the enactive framework to show that although ‘spatial metaphors of
entering and exiting worlds seem to match many of our intuitions about
the ontological levels encountered during reading, they are misleading
when it comes to understanding the fictionality of fictions’. Bernini,
in careful steps of argumentation, blends narratological analysis with
the predictive processing approach of Jakob Hohwy, in order to pro-
pose ‘a more precise and specific hypothesis about what is exceptional
in literary representations of cognition’. Barbara Dancygier’s chapter
uses some literally concrete examples from the graffiti artist Banksy to
explore embodied viewpoint construal, and Teemu Paavolainen analyses
the rhetorical imagery deployed by 4E cognitive theories, revealing how
theatricality and performance have become structuring metaphors in
the philosophical and cognitive science literature. Embodied metaphor
theory is thereby applied and refreshed by being brought to bear on the
textures of extended and enactive discourse itself.
In Part 2 the focus narrows in a series of case studies drawn from partic-
ular worlds (the early modern period and the Romantic era) in relation to
different expressive forms (sonnets, theatre and stagecraft, political contro-
versy). Miranda Anderson thinks through the print culture of Shakespeare’s
age as an ecology for distributing cognition, proposing that we should
recognise the specific terms of a Renaissance extended mind. The uses
of embodied silence on the Shakespearean stage, explored through The
Taming of the Shrew, are the related subject of Laura Seymour’s chapter,
while Michael Sinding explicates the intersection of (political) worldview
and energy systems in political discourse after the French Revolution, elic-
iting the conclusion that ‘we imagine mental life in terms of bodily life
12 P. GARRATT

because we experience and conceptualise both in terms of structured pat-

terns of sensorimotor energy—that is, patterns of force mediated by struc-
tures of substance’. Part 3 then departs most clearly from the prevailing
concerns of cognitive literary studies. First, helpfully reinforcing the point
that the brain is not unwisely abandoned in these analyses, both Karin
Kukkonen and Nigel McLoughlin address, in turn, the role of predictive
processing in textual comprehension and a cognitive-affective model of
creativity. Both uncover the importance of surprise: for Kukkonon, draw-
ing on neo-Bayesian approaches currently being developed by the likes of
Andy Clark, prediction and the management of surprise guide the reader’s
response to narrative; for McLoughlin, the kind of creative novelty exem-
plified by poetic metaphor is grounded in affective experience, and neuro-
science has helped to establish support for this view. The final two chapters
are rather more exploratory and future-oriented. Nicola Shaughnessy and
Melissa Trimingham reflect on their project on embodied performance
and autism in children, and Matt Hayler addresses the need for embodied
and 4E cognitive science in the emerging fields of the digital humanities
and technology studies.
One often finds defences of cognitive studies making the claim (or
some variation of it) that engaging with the contemporary science of
mind helps to put our understanding of literature and the arts on a
‘firmer footing’.29 There are manifest problems with such claims, not
least the way it is ghosted by the unspoken possibility of consilience and
scientific reduction. For what’s it worth—and now I speak personally,
not gesturing at some impossible synthesis of the contributors’ views—
the value of the cognitive humanities should not lie in hoping to secure
some regained respect as a scientifically legitimated venture. The chap-
ters in this book do not formulate a single methodology, nor do they
adhere slavishly to one or more frameworks in the cognitive sciences.
What they attempt to do is remain pluralistic while opening up a larger
conversation with recent and emerging embodied approaches than one
usually finds in work of this sort. It may be the case, as mentioned above,
that this will have the effect not just of adding to the density of aca-
demic analysis devoted to such hypotheses as enactive perception and the
extended mind, but of helping to develop and transform these concep-
tual frameworks in new settings and in ways that have value inside and
outside the arts and humanities. Such is the essential hope of the cogni-
tive humanities, one embodied in the arguments and ideas that unfold
in the following pages.
 INTRODUCTION: THE COGNITIVE HUMANITIES: WHENCE AND WHITHER? 13

NOTES
1. See Mark Rowlands, The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to
Embodied Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press,
2010), 1–24.
2. For an excellent account of the issues glossed very briefly here see Shaun
Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005).
3. See Andy Clark and David Chalmers, ‘The Extended Mind’, Analysis 58,
1 (1998), 7–19.
4. Two different styles of counterargument are presented in Robert Rupert,
‘Challenges to the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition’, Journal of
Philosophy 8, 101 (2004), 389–428, and Frederick Adams and Kenneth
Aizawa, The Bounds of Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010). See also Mark
Sprevak, ‘Extended Cognition and Functionalism’, Journal of Philosophy
106, 9 (2009), 503–27, which includes commentary on these two chal-
lenges to the Otto-Inga thought experiment. Detailed responses to such
criticisms appear in Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action,
and Cognitive Extension (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), espe-
cially Chaps. 5 and 6.
5. See Fred Adams and Rebecca Garrison, ‘The Mark of the Cognitive’,
Minds and Machines 23, 3 (2013), 339–52.
6. Gallagher, in drawing this distinction between conservative and liberal ver-
sions of cognitive extension, challenges Andy Clark’s restrictive criteria for
judging when an external phenomenon may count as part of a cognitive sys-
tem. This, Gallagher suggests, bars certain important external instruments
(institutional entities like legal contracts, say) from being considered as con-
tributing to, or enabling, cognitive processes. See Shaun Gallagher, ‘The
Socially Extended Mind’, Cognitive Systems Research 25–26 (2013), 4–12.
7. For an innovative model of interdisciplinarity (as a practice) which draws
directly on embodied and extended approaches to cognition, see Marco
Bernini and Angela Woods, ‘Interdisciplinarity as Cognitive Integration:
Auditory Verbal Hallucinations as a Case Study’, WIREs Cognitive Science
5 (2014), 603–12.
8. Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of
Human Intelligence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 77.
9. For a detailed exploration of literary production in these terms, see Dirk
Van Hulle, Modern Manuscripts: The Extended Mind and Creative Undoing
from Darwin to Beckett and Beyond (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
10. See Richard Menary, ‘Introduction to the Special Issue on 4E Cognition’,
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9, 4 (2010): 459–63.
11. Menary, ‘Introduction’, 461.
14 P. GARRATT

12. For a discussion of this point see Julian Kiverstein, ‘The Meaning of
Embodiment’, Topics in Cognitive Science 4 (2012), 740–58. Kiverstein
notes that the role assigned to the bodily component of cognitive perfor-
mances corresponds to a fault line in the philosophical literature separating
those who retain a computational view of cognition from the more radical
camp, for whom the body is a ‘source of meaning’ rather than a ‘mobile
bridge’ or ‘go-between’ (as Andy Clark has called it) that affords distributed
information processing (744). See also Clark, Supersizing the Mind, 208.
13. Anthony Chemero, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2009), xi.
14. Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 216.
15. For an introduction to this area see Ezequiel Di Paolo and Evan Thompson,
‘The Enactive Approach’ in The Routledge Handbook of Embodied
Cognition, ed. Lawrence Shapiro (London and New York: Routledge,
2014), 68–78. A seminal work is Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson and
Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human
Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
16. In archaeology see the work of Lambros Malafouris, especially How Things
Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2013), which features detailed and sustained consideration of the
extended mind view in particular. The film theorist Murray Smith has dis-
cussed affect and emotion in art and film in relation to 4E approaches to
the mind; see Smith, ‘Empathy, Expansionism, and the Extended Mind’ in
Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Koplan and
Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 99–117. See also
Adrian J. Ivakhiv, Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature
(Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013). Embodied and
enactive approaches have particular explanatory potential for non-verbal
art forms like music, as discussed in Marc Leman and Pieter-Jan. Maes,
‘Music Perception and Embodied Music Cognition’ in The Routledge
Handbook of Embodied Cognition, ed. Shapiro, 81–88.
17. Guillemette Bolens, The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in
Literary Narrative (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 11.
18. Nancy Easterlin, A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and
Interpretation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), espe-
cially Chap. 4.
19. See Evelyn Tribble, Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in
Shakespeare’s Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
20. See Karin Kukkonen and Marco Caracciolo, ‘Introduction: What is the
Second Generation?’, Style 48, 3 (2014), 261–74.
21. For an excellent account of the area see Alan Richardson, ‘Cognitive
Literary Criticism’ in Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide, ed.
Patricia Waugh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 544–56.
 INTRODUCTION: THE COGNITIVE HUMANITIES: WHENCE AND WHITHER? 15

22. Alan Richardson, The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic
Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 10.
23. See Mark Turner, The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought of Language (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Ellen Spolsky, ‘Darwin and Derrida:
Cognitive Literary Theory as a Species of Post-Structuralism’, Poetics Today 23,
1 (2002), 43–62; and Spolsky, Gaps in Nature: Literary Interpretation and the
Modular Mind (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).
24. See David Herman, ‘Narrative Theory After the Second Cognitive
Revolution’ in Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa
Zunshine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 155–75.
Herman’s wider work, which has shaped the development of cognitive
narratology, takes the understanding of narrative practices (or the mind-
narrative nexus) to be an essential component of properly developed cog-
nitive science; see Herman, Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).
25. For an illustration see Lisa Zunshine, ed., The Oxford Handbook of
Cognitive Literary Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). The
publication of this major volume witnesses the field gaining mainstream
recognition. The 4E picture—to adopt the shorthand—is not explicitly or
extensively taken up by it.
26. This development can be sampled in Joseph Carroll, Literary Darwinism:
Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (New York: Routledge, 2004). See
also Edward Slingerland and Mark Collard, Creating Consilience: Integrating
the Sciences and the Humanities (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
27. Jonathan Kramnick, ‘Against Literary Darwinism’, Critical Inquiry 37, 2
(2011), 315–47.
28. See for example Paul Armstrong, How Literature Plays with the Brain: The
Neuroscience of Reading and Art (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2013); and Gabrielle Starr, Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of
Aesthetic Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). The work of
neurobiologist Semir Zeki has been influential in the area of visual art and
neuroscience; see for example Zeki’s Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art
and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
29. As Chris Danta and Helen Groth put it in their introduction to an edited
volume that usefully, and unusually, houses both proponents and sceptics
of the cognitive turn: ‘literary critics have increasingly drawn insights from
cognitive neuroscience to deepen and clarify our understanding of the
value of literature’. Such critics are motivated by the desire to ‘put literary
criticism on a firmer, more scientific footing’; see Danta and Groth, ed.,
Mindful Aesthetics: Literature and the Science of the Mind (New York and
London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 1.