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THE ARCHE OF COGNITION 267
action, and introspection. Instead, grounded cognition proposes that modal
simulations, bodily states, and situated action underlie cognition. (Barsalou 2008: 1)
The traditional assumption that knowledge resides in the form of amodal symbols in a
modular semantic system separated from modality-specific systems is generally criticized.
Following the grounded cognition approach, higher-order abilities such as thinking or
conception are “grounded” in low-level sensorimotor abilities. Consequently, cognition is here
understood as consisting of representations including activation patterns from various
sensory modalities, i.e. the “perceptual symbol system” (Barsalou 1999). Thereby, Barsalou’s
perceptual symbol systems theory is also a sophisticated challenge of the classical separation
of perception, cognition and motor control.
The proponents of grounded cognition frequently argue that there is a lack of direct empirical
evidence for amodal representations as proposed in classical cognitive science. Gallese &
Lakoff (2005) and Pulvermüller (1999) suggest that completely modality-free categories are
rare, because concepts in general are distributed over modality-specific domains and involve
reactivation of states in sensorimotor systems. Besides, Mahon & Caramazza (2008), for
example, critically remark that the empirical data alone cannot decide between theories
postulating modal or amodal representations because the recent experimental results are
compatible with a huge variety of theories at hand. Even a ‘disembodied’ view of conceptual
representation can be inferred from the empirical evidence and the ‘embodied’ view may be
without empirical support compared to traditional theories. Hence, the most interesting
question is whether there are only modality-specific representations, or whether we need to
assume multi-modal or even amodal representations in addition.
3. Constitution and Acquisition
At this point it is only interesting for us what it means that a certain cognitive ability is
“embodied” or – more specific – “grounded”; we will investigate the kinds of possible
representations involved elsewhere later on. It is necessary to focus on plausible cases of
cognitive processing in order to develop a comprehensive and precise account of “grounded”.
One obvious place to start with is what we will call action cognition, i.e. thinking about
actions and perceiving actions. It is an obvious place to start with because this kind of
thinking involves action-related concepts which may be grounded in our sensorimotor
abilities, to perform and perceive these actions. By focusing especially on action cognition and
action perception we want to get a close view on the interdependencies of the three domains
of action, perception and cognition. In the case of action cognition, the “embodiment”-
relation in question is as close and as direct as possible. More complex abstraction
mechanisms within conception have not to be taken into our account here. Thus, we will
analyze and examine the idea of grounded cognition by focusing especially on the relations
between motor control, action perception, and action cognition; let us analogically call this
“grounded action cognition”. So, the guiding questions are how and to what extent action
perception and action cognition are “grounded” in basic sensorimotor abilities? What are the
implications for an adequate description and explanation and for the general conception of
the architecture of the mind?
First, we provide an analysis of the term “grounded” that goes beyond mere metaphor and
fosters a more specific theoretical understanding. To define the ambiguous term “grounded”,
we suggest recognizing it in terms of the conditions of acquisition or constitution of a given
ability (cf. Weber and Vosgerau 2012):
Interpreted in terms of acquisition conditions, “grounded” means that ability A is grounded in
ability B if B is necessary to acquire A.