Inés Crespo & Ariela Battán Horenstein
University of Amsterdam & National University of Córdoba
Phenomenological Accounts For Evaluative Judgement And Action
Natural language offers expressions by which we communicate our embodied ongoings: just consider gradable adjectives like tasty, pungent or heavy, featuring in evaluative judgements like “chocolate is tasty”, “this smell is pungent”, “I find this suitcase heavy”. Although we have frequent disagreements about such matters, we normally succeed at understanding each other. How are evaluative (dis)agreements possible? How come we attain intersubjective understanding of these expressions while they resist fitting in the Fregean model of sentence denotation? Could the normative warrant for these expressions be given by our embodied and embedded condition?
The meaning of these adjectives and evaluations is fundamentally tied to the embodiedness of linguistic agents. If a speaker tells someone that he finds a suitcase heavy, the interlocutor will not need to test that for himself to know what heavy means, or what it means for someone to find something heavy (i.e. the physical imbalance undergone when lifting it, the effortful and uncomfortable task of carrying it, etc.) These evaluations are exchanged by cognitive agents who express their enactive appraisal of their environment. We argue that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of practognosia offers a view of embodied (pre)comprehension which allows these judgements’ intersubjective contrastability.
For Merleau-Ponty, our operative, bodily intentionality is basic for all cognition. Though he introduces practognosia to account for comprehension of space and movement, a generalisation thereof may be at the basis of our communication with evaluative judgements. We understand them by comprehending the future and past possibilities for action they express. We utter them to express the possibilities for action afforded by the objects we judge. These evaluations do not describe private mental states; they express intersubjectively contrastable action possibilities enabled by our phenomenological and embodied states. The normative warrant of these expressions is thus given by our own practognosia and that of our interlocutors.