Internal perception. The role of bodily information in concepts and word mastery

Cognition is typically addressed in relation to perception understood as the ability to become aware of something external by means of the senses. However, people are also aware of a multitude of signals coming from their body. The cognitive function of this internal information has been largely overlooked by the classical cognitive approach; we argue this has led to a limited understanding of a number of mental phenomena. This book aims at investigating how bodily information contributes to categorization processes for at least some conceptual classes and thus to the individual mastery of meanings for at least some word classes. The bodily information we consider here is mainly that provided by the so-called proprioceptive and interoceptive systems as introduced by Sherrington, which we reconsider in a new Gibsonian fashion calling it more generally “proprioceptive”. In our perspective, proprioception indicates the complex of all the bodily signals we are aware of and the qualitative experiences these give rise to. In this work, we try to show that proprioceptive information understood in this sense is essential for explaining (among others) how we develop broad categories such as ANIMATE vs. INANIMATE, concepts denoting bodily experiences such as hunger or pain as well as emotions and abstract concepts such as friendship and freedom and in accounting for how we master the meanings of the corresponding words in our language.