Body Language

In Body Language, Mark Rowlands argues that the problem of representation--how it ispossible for one item to represent another--has been exacerbated by the assimilation ofrepresentation to the category of the word. That is, the problem is traditionally understood as oneof relating inner to outer--relating an inner representing item to something extrinsic or exteriorto it. Rowlands argues that at least some cases of representation need to be understood not in termsof the word but of the deed. Activity, he claims, is a useful template for thinking aboutrepresentation; our representing the world consists, in part, in certain sorts of actions that weperform in that world. This is not to say simply that these forms of acting can facilitaterepresentation but that they are themselves representational. These sorts of actions--which Rowlandscalls deeds--do not merely express or re-present prior intentional states. They have an independentrepresentational status.After introducing the notion of the deed as a "preintentional act," Rowlandsargues that deeds can satisfy informational, teleological, combinatorial, misrepresentational, anddecouplability constraints--and so qualify as representational. He puts these principles ofrepresentation into practice by examining the deeds involved in visual perception. Representing,Rowlands argues, is something we do in the world as much as in the head. Representing does not stopat the skin, at the border between the representing subject and the world; representing isrepresentational "all the way out."

Mark Rowlands is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami. He is the author of The Body in Mind: Understanding Cognitive Processes, Body Language: Representation in Action (MIT Press, 2006), The Philosopher and the Wolf, and other books.