Bayesian Bodies: The Predictive Dimension of Embodied Cognition and Culture1

Abstract

The embodied mind has a predictive, probabilistic dimension. The present chapter develops some implications of such Bayesian aspects of embodied cognition, the so-called ‘predictive processing model’, for reading and sense-making. As we shall see, readers might not only experience embodied resonances of a character’s actions and engage with the affordances of fictional environments, but they might also use the probabilities inscribed in these embodied actions and environments for their own sense of the development of the narrative. Such probabilities are derived from the bodily actions and affordances mentioned in the text and, at the same time, from the cultural ‘patterned practices’ of the real world (and of fictional worlds from established literary precedent). Furthermore, language emerges as an important element of embodied predictive processing in more recent accounts, shaping inferences both in the real world and, arguably, in the imaginative mode of fictional narrative. A predictive approach to embodied cognition provides, I argue, one way for integrating issues of long-standing concern in literary studies, namely, narrative, cultural practices and fictional uses of language, with e-cognition in cognitive approaches to literature.