Intervista a Lawrence Shapiro

“We always need more philosophy, no matter what”.

Luigi Lobaccaro: We are here at the Department of Philosophy and Communication Studies with Professor Lawrence Shapiro. Lawrence is professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States. His research focuses on the philosophy of psychology, the philosophy of mind, and some aspects of the philosophy of biology. He is one of the most prominent scholars in the field of embodied cognition, and his works on this issue are considered milestones by researchers in the field. Lawrence has spent the last year at the University of Bologna, hosted by our Department of Philosophy and Communication Studies. Lawrence, welcome, and thank you so much to be here and for accepting this interview.

Lawrence Shapiro: Thank you for the flattering biography!

LL: It had to be! I want to start with some background questions just to break the ice. Why did you choose the University of Bologna for this long period abroad? What did you expect from your experience here? Have your expectations been matched? How have our department and colleagues here influenced your research and your thinking?

LS: I chose University of Bologna because it's a very well-known and famous University, the oldest Western university in the world, it has a marvelous faculty and students are reputed to be very good. And of course, Bologna is a beautiful city. It's my favorite city now in the world. I love to be here. I've met with colleagues like Francesco Bianchini, Maria Carla Galavotti and Antonella Tramacere. And I just met Elizabetta Lalumera. I've really enjoyed my contact with these people, we've chatted about work and exchanged ideas. And it's just been fun to socialize with these people too. So, this has been a marvelous year for me and I would do it all over again. I wish I could.

LL: Thanks Larry, we’re glad that you enjoyed your time here with us. Now we’ll move to a more serious matter concerning your work.

LS: Of course, let’s do it!

LL: In your last words, you're putting your philosophical expertise to help people to think more clearly and evade some thoughts trap. Your last book with Steven Nadler (2021), When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People. How Philosophy Can Save Us From Ourselves, which has been recently translated and edited in Italian by Raffaello Cortina, and the book The Miracle Myth (2016), seems to take this direction in which the epistemology is an instrument for spreading a function of philosophy that we can define almost ethical. Can you tell us more about this attempt to fight the wrong way of thinking and irrational beliefs? 

LS: I'm glad you asked me about those two books. In a way, they're my favorite books i've written because they discuss, i think, some of the most important ideas that we should be regarding now in the world. The miracle myth was a response to the christian right in america. American christian right are the very conservative evangelical christians that are pushing a political agenda in the united states. They're opposed to gay marriage, they're opposed to abortion, they're opposed to trans rights. I'm very much angry with the way that their political influence is shaping the country, and so i wrote this book as a way to sort to get off my chest. Is that an italian expression? To relieve myself of this feeling that they need to be confronted. I did that with the miracle myth. Then the second book with steve nadler was more general. It was not focused on religion per se, but it was focused on conspiracy theorists, where the conspiracy theorists in the united states are spinning all sorts of stories that culminate in events like the january, 6 insurrections when the capitol was stormed in an attempt to prevent biden from becoming president of the united states. So, the ideas i'm taking up in that book are a direct response to what i take to be a pernicious evil movement in the united states.

 
LL: Thank you. Today you were going to give a talk at the International Center of Humanities “Umberto Eco” entitled “Why Science Needs a Philosophy” which has unfortunately been canceled because of the weather emergency. In your opinion, what is the role of philosophy in science? Do you think that this topic is somehow related to your last interest in irrational beliefs? Or, more accurately, could it be that even scientists are gradually adopting a religious stance with what is called scientism, which philosophy could help avoid and fight? 

LS: That's interesting that you draw a connection between the two books that we just discussed and the topic of the relation between science and philosophy which my latest book project is about. I do think that scientism is the view that science can answer all questions, including the sorts of questions that philosophers have for a very long time been asking. So, scientism shares with, I guess, conspiracy theorists or religions the idea that they know better than everyone else. In this latest book, I'm simply pointing out the limits of science, and I'm arguing that scientific efforts to answer questions about free will or consciousness, or happiness cannot possibly succeed without the contribution of philosophy.

LL: I could imagine that parts of this reflection come from the fact that you’ve discussed a lot with scientists on themes related to your main area of interest which is embodied cognition. On this topic, you've written two very important books (Shapiro 2004; 2019) and an entry for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Shapiro & Spaulding 2021). What role do you think philosophy has had, is having, and will have to enhance this field of study? Is the idea of the embodiment of our cognitive process, in your opinion, more a necessity that emerged from experimental data or more from some conceptual needs?

LS: Embodied cognition is a fun area of science for a philosopher to think about because it's a fairly new area of science. And just as other fields like psychology and physics and biology were once very new fields and ripe for philosophical analysis, that's the status that we have with embodied cognition now. Scientists working in embodied cognition will make claims about, say, the way that cognition extends, the way that cognition can be extended beyond the body. So that might be a claim that they're making. And that's a claim that needs some philosophical analysis because we need to know first of all, what cognition is, and in what sense it could be extended. And then we need to ask questions about the difference between saying that the body simply causally informs cognition, that is, has a causal impact on cognition, or whether the body is, in fact, a constituent of cognition itself. And differences between saying one thing causes another and one thing being a constituent of another require subtle philosophical distinctions in thinking. And scientists tend to blur over distinctions like that. And they end up making claims that don't stand up to additional scrutiny without the philosophical analysis of these terms that are required to make sense of them.

LL: Let's stay on this topic of embodied cognitive sciences, you have anticipated some of the aspects I wanted to go deep. In 2014, you edited The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognitive Cognition. The book presents a very wide overview of all the themes and the approaches that compose the galaxy of embodied cognition. In the last nine years, the situation, if it's possible, even more multifaceted. We have the parallel development of the embedded, extended and enactive approaches that are exploring different topics and are sometimes providing alternative explanations to the same phenomena. Not always these explanations are compatible. The situation is made more complex by the fact that the interdisciplinary needs of other fields of studies like literature, art, media studies, and semiotics, are incorporating all the suggestions that come from the embodied cognitive sciences, but sometimes without examining the difference between the approaches and different views. In your opinion, this expansion of embodied cognition as a discipline and as an object of interest for other disciplines is more of a resource or something that could limit some philosophical efforts that have been made in the last few years. What is the future of embodied cognitive science and what are the present challenges?

LL: I'm glad you mentioned that 2014 book. Is that when it came out? One of the projects I've been working on here in Bologna is a new edition of that book. I've taken on a coeditor, a former student of mine named Shannon Spalding, who is a professor at Oklahoma State University. We've solicited new chapters from original authors and new chapters from new authors. And as you might expect, the diversity of the field is only increasing. So, we've had to add new sections to this book. We've amplified the section on education because embodied cognition is playing a much larger role in pedagogy and how teachers should teach algebra to students or geometry to students. And we've added a section on the new predictive processing movement in cognitive science, which sees the brain as a predictive engine where the brain is constantly in the business of trying to guess what we're going to experience next. And this is part of cognitive processing. I see all these new developments in embodied cognition as an indication that the field is only going to become more important in years to come. The fact that embodied cognition is extending into these other areas like semiotics, sports psychology, fields like education, and even in art criticism, means that it's a big field and it's getting bigger. And I think its applications might involve specific sorts of contributions where... So, in your field of semiotics, you might look at one of the Es of the 4Es and find in that resources for understanding your work in new ways. But it's also an inspiration in the sense that it just generates ideas that might not draw specifically from embodied cognition, but rather from its basic approach, where we emphasize how the body might contribute in unexpected ways to thought processes or action. Just that general idea might have unpredictable impacts.

LL: And in your opinion, do we need more philosophy to manage the expansion of this galaxy in the different fields, or the philosophy should be more focused on the 4E approaches?

LS: Well, we always need more philosophy, no matter what. But I've seen people gesturing toward embodied cognition to justify claims that make no sense. They say: “I believe this because this is how I'm understanding embodied cognition”. So, we still need philosophers to tell us what the claims of embodied cognition actually are, what they entail, and how they might fit together with other sorts of claims. This requires careful thought to take a science like embodied cognition and understand it well enough to interpret results in a way that maybe the scientists themselves wouldn't agree with or wouldn't have occurred to them, and to show how these consequences of embodied cognition can be made sense of and be integrated in useful ways in other fields. So, without philosophy, I think embodied cognition is open to abuse in certain ways or misuse.

LL: Thank you so much, Lawrence. Thank you for this interview.

LS: Thank you for the wonderful questions.

Bibliography

Nadler, S. & Shapiro, L. (2021). When bad thinking happens to good people: how philosophy can save us from ourselves. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Italian edition, Quando persone intelligenti hanno idee stupide. Come la filosofia ci salva da noi stessi, Milano, Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2022)

Shapiro, L. (2004). The Mind Incarnate.  Cambridge: MIT Press.

Shapiro, L. (2011). Embodied Cognition. London; New York: Routledge. (Second Edition 2019)

Shapiro, L. (2014). The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition (ed.). London; New York: Routledge.

Shapiro, L. (2016). The Miracle Myth: Why Belief in the Resurrection and the Supernatural Is Unjustified. New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/shap17840

Shapiro, L. & Spaulding, S. (2021) "Embodied Cognition", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/embodied-cognition/>.

Aknowledgements

Thanks to Francesco Bianchini for organizing this interview with Lawrence Shapiro.