The title, though clever, is quite misleading.  From 'Body Language' one would expect a treatment of how people unintentionally send subliminal nonverbal messages to one another through body position and movement.  This is, in remote sense, what the book is about, but more specifically it advances a highly technical externalist theory of representation, according to which a certain category of activities, which Mark Rowlands calls deeds, represent states of the world.  So the claim is that representation is not confined to internal mental states representing external things and events.  The scope of the argument is not to claim that all representation is performed by such deeds, but only that the existence of representation by deeds entails that the standard mentalist model of representation does not apply universally.

Rowlands' target is the view that representation consists in a relation, supplied by an interpretation, between a passive internal mental token and an external item in the world.  He assumes that linguistic representation provides the model for this view and that people adopt it because they mistakenly assimilate mental to linguistic representation.  (This dubious claim is fortunately quite peripheral to the central argument.)  Against what he takes to be this standard internalist model of representation, Rowlands follows thinkers from J.J. Gibson to Susan Hurley to Alva Noe and assumes that an externalist model of representation is more likely to be true: representing can take place out in the environment–not just in the mind, and the vehicles of such representing can be physical activities, not just words or mental states.  Rowlands chief contribution to the on-going discussion is to identify a class of activities he calls deeds to be the vehicles of such external representing.  The detail with which he describes deeds and the psychological research he calls on to analyze them mark a significant advance in the field. 

Unfortunately, most of Rowlands' detailed examples of deeds are taken from the game of cricket, depriving his North American readers of the explanatory economy that comes from citing examples with whose features they will be antecedently familiar.  Since countless examples of deeds outside of cricket come readily to mind, Rowlands' one-note song quickly grows tiresome, leading the reader to question his imagination and his editors' diligence.  The charm of the exotic for North American readers pales as quickly as it would for British readers of a book most of whose detailed examples came from American football.

When a person does something intentionally, e.g., walks from her house to a bus stop, her action can be broken down into many sub-personal sub-events, e.g., lifting her right foot, swinging her right foot forward, shifting her weight to her right foot, lifting her left foot, etc., etc.–not to mention the activation of certain motor neurons, the contraction of certain muscles, etc.  These sub-routines are not in most cases themselves intentionally or even consciously performed–they are not intentional actions in themselves at all–but they are done for  a purpose the person who does them would endorse, e.g., walking from her house to the bus stop.  They are neither full-blooded intentional actions themselves, nor are they pointless movements like squirming in one's chair.  They are what Rowlands calls deeds. 

Rowlands claims deeds can represent the world.  He assumes that genuine representations must (1) carry informational content, (2) have a proper function, (3) be susceptible of misrepresentation, (4) be "decouplable" from their objects, and (5) be capable of novel combination with other representations.  He then argues that deeds satisfy all these conditions.  For example, in moving one's legs as one walks, one makes countless minute accommodations to the state of the surface on which one is walking. 

1.  These adjustments carry information about the state of the surface on which one is walking, e.g., whether it is uphill or downhill, whether there is a crack in the sidewalk, a tree root in one's way, etc. 

2.  The specific deeds involved in moving one's legs each has a function of moving the body from A to B, as well as integrating seamlessly with the other required leg movements.

3.  A person can stumble, because a deed which was a component in the walking was a deed appropriate to a smooth surface, whereas the walker was actually faced by a crack in the sidewalk; the deed represented the sidewalk as smooth when it was actually cracked.

4.  One can rehearse walking movements in the absence of walking, as physical therapy patients sometimes have to do.

5.  The specific micro-movements–the deeds–of walking fit together to produce the continuous macro-movement of walking.

With the assumption of a broadly naturalistic, externalist concept of representation, Rowlands' ascription of representational status to deeds is convincing; without it, his analysis is question-begging.  Rowlands' argument occurs in a context, the context of a discussion of those who adopt his externalist assumptions.  But much of Body Language will not be new to those who share Rowlands' assumptions, because much of the book is uncritically derivative from other authors (e.g., Ruth Millikan).  On the other hand, much of the exposition and argument will be too cursory to satisfy non-specialists or those who do not share his assumptions.  In fact, Rowlands' contribution in focusing on deeds would have been more satisfactorily presented in an article than in a book. 

© 2007 Robert Kimball

Robert Kimball, Ph.D. is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Louisville.  He is also Co-Director of the University of Louisville’s new Interdisciplinary M.A. in Bioethics and Medical Humanities.

Categories: Philosophical