International Journal of Philosophical Studies Vol.

18(5), 629–649

Coping Without Foundations: On

Dreyfus’s Use of Merleau-Ponty

International
10.1080/09672559.2010.528600
RIPH_A_528600.sgm
0967-2559
Original
Taylor
502010
18
000002010
and
& Article
Francis
(print)/1466-4542
Francis
Journal of Philosophical
(online) Studies
J. C. Berendzen
Abstract
Hubert Dreyfus has recently invoked the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in
criticizing the ‘Myth of the Mental’. In criticizing that supposed myth, Dreyfus
argues for a kind of foundationalism that takes embodied coping to be a self-
sufficient layer of human experience that supports our ‘higher’ mental activi-
ties. In turn, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is found, in Dreyfus’s recent
writings, to corroborate this foundationalism. While Merleau-Ponty would
agree with many of Dreyfus’s points, this paper argues that he would not, in
fact, agree with the foundationalism. Furthermore, when understood in the
right way, Merleau-Ponty’s early phenomenology supports the idea, opposed
to Dreyfus’s foundationalism, that conceptual activities are tied up with our
coping activities. The paper ends by considering the upshot of this reading of
Merleau-Ponty’s work for Dreyfus’s phenomenology.
Keywords: Merleau-Ponty; Hubert Dreyfus; conceptualism;
phenomenology; perception; foundationalism

In his 2005 Presidential Address to the Pacific Division of the American

Philosophical Association, Hubert Dreyfus set out to critique what he calls
the ‘Myth of the Mental’. Philosophers fall into this myth by construing
human experience as primarily marked by thinking and reasoning, which
leads them to ignore the embodied activities that are actually fundamental.
He put the point, as a part of a criticism of John McDowell, in the following
way:

Can we accept McDowell’s Sellarsian claim that perception is concep-

tual ‘all the way out’, thereby denying the more basic perceptual
capacities we seem to share with pre-linguistic infants and higher
animals? More generally, can philosophers successfully describe the
conceptual upper floors of the edifice of knowledge while ignoring the
embodied coping going on on the ground floor; in effect, declaring
that human experience is upper stories all the way down?1

International Journal of Philosophical Studies

ISSN 0967–2559 print 1466–4542 online © 2010 Taylor & Francis
http://www.informaworld.com
DOI: 10.1080/09672559.2010.528600
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

Importantly, Dreyfus’s architectural metaphor displays a peculiar kind of

foundationalism. As a part of what we might call his phenomenological
foundationalism, Dreyfus argues that there is a primary layer of human
existence that is free of, and supports, higher mental activities. And Dreyfus
seems relatively comfortable with accepting that his view is foundationalist,
despite the often negative connotations of the term. He is also adamant that
a proper phenomenological investigation shows us that embodied coping is
‘self-sufficient, constant, and pervasive’.2
Unsurprisingly, Dreyfus turns to existential philosophy to support this
foundationalism, and he particularly draws on the work of Maurice
Merleau-Ponty. On this reading, Merleau-Ponty shows that non-cognitive
coping activities operate as a background to our cognitive activities. This
background is furthermore taken to be meaningful, but its semantic content
is non-conceptual. Also, Merleau-Ponty’s analyses supposedly show that
this non-cognitive element to human experience is prior to and more
fundamental than all of our higher-level cognitive activities.
As will be shown, Merleau-Ponty’s view is in fact similar in many ways to
Dreyfus’s. But Merleau-Ponty would disagree with Dreyfus’s putatively
phenomenological foundationalism. Dreyfus’s reading of Merleau-Ponty
generally ignores the central role that discussions of the human world play
in Merleau-Ponty’s early works, such as Phenomenology of Perception.
These discussions focus on the uniqueness of human intersubjectivity,
culture, and linguistic interactions in ways that go beyond Dreyfus’s
discussions of skilful coping. And when one carefully examines these
elements of Phenomenology of Perception, it can be seen that Merleau-
Ponty would not support the idea that there is a non-conceptual, pre-linguis-
tic layer of human experience that is foundational.3
This paper will focus on the parts of Merleau-Ponty’s thought that Drey-
fus overlooks, and thus calls into question Dreyfus’s aims. This will first (in
section I) involve examining the basics of Dreyfus’s view, and examining the
extent to which Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology does support Dreyfus’s
arguments. Section II, however, will begin to draw out the elements in
Merleau-Ponty’s thought that Dreyfus ignores, and describe the sense in
which Merleau-Ponty believes that conceptual activity and embodied
coping are intertwined. Section III will then further support this non-foun-
dationalist interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, by focusing
on his thoughts on language. Finally, section IV will examine what
philosophical consequences the arguments of sections II and III have for
Dreyfus’s work.

I
One of Merleau-Ponty’s primary aims in Phenomenology of Perception is to
show how ‘consciousness must be faced with its own unreflective life in
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things’.4 The general point of such a claim is that our experience is not
primarily composed of mental acts. Rather, cognition is embedded in a
general context of practical activity (of the type Dreyfus calls ‘coping’).
Merleau-Ponty discusses this idea, from the preface of the text onward, in
terms of a ‘background context’:

Perception is not a science of the world, it is not even an act, a

deliberate taking up of a position; it is the background from which all
acts stand out, and is presupposed by them. The world is not an object
such that I have in my possession the law of its making; it is the
natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit
perceptions.5

Perception is not a ‘science’, because its contents are not made explicit in a
system of logically ordered propositions. Hence the use of the term ‘back-
ground’, which is borrowed from Gestalt psychology’s discussion of the
figure–background relationship. Merleau-Ponty argues that the Gestalt
figure–background framework ‘is the very definition of the phenomenon of
perception’, because the ‘perceptual “something” is always in the middle of
something else, it always forms part of a “field”’.6 An explicit perceptual act
can only happen within a specific holistic context.
But as the argument continues, Merleau-Ponty generalizes this holism.
Something like the figure–background relationship, wherein things are
made determinate only by standing out through relations with other things,
is taken to hold for all aspects of human thought and action. This back-
ground element to our experience is not formed by explicit acts of cognition.
Rather, it is taken to be the basis (in the sense in which the background is
the basis for the figure) of such explicit acts.
This basic Merleau-Pontian view is expounded by Dreyfus through
discussions of skill acquisition and expert performance. Skill acquisition,
considered in stages from novice to expert, displays the non-representa-
tional, non-cognitive aspect of our practical dealings in the world. On
Dreyfus’s description, one usually begins by learning a number of explicit
rules which are difficult to keep in mind. As learners progress, however,
they become able to recognize the rules in aspects of the action situation and
can later focus on salient situational aspects in order to cope with informa-
tion. Eventually, reliance on rules can ‘gradually be replaced by situational
discriminations accompanied by associated responses’.7
The crucial point for Dreyfus’s argument is that the latter stages move
away from consciously explicit information processing or rational judging.
To progress, the acquirer of the skill must be able to respond in appropriate
ways to lived situations that are far too complex to be cognitively repre-
sented. This movement reaches its peak with the expert, whom Dreyfus
describes in the following way:
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The proficient performer, immersed in the world of his skillful activity,

sees what needs to be done, but decides how to do it. The expert not
only sees what needs to be achieved: thanks to a vast repertoire of
situational discriminations he sees how to achieve his goal. … This
allows the immediate intuitive situational response that is characteris-
tic of expertise.8

Most important here is the contrast between the proficient actor having to
decide, and the expert’s having an immediate intuitive situational response
which is embedded in perception. Somehow, the environment can directly
solicit the appropriate actions from the expert without the expert needing
to think things through.9
This jibes quite well with many of Merleau-Ponty’s examples in Phenom-
enology of Perception. There, skill competences are clearly described as
non-cognitive, and have rather to do with bodily adaptation to an environ-
ment. One might take, for example, Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the
organist who after mastering the instrument takes only an hour or so to
adapt to an organ, with differently arranged keyboards and stops, that he
has never before played. He says of this fact:

Are we to maintain that the organist analyzes the organ, that he

conjures up and retains a representation of the stops, pedals and
manuals and their relation to each other in space? But during the short
rehearsal preceding the concert, he does not act like a person about to
draw up a plan. He sits on the seat, works the pedals, pulls out the
stops, get the measure of the instrument with his body, incorporates
within himself the relevant directions and dimensions, settles into the
organ as one settles into a house.10

This passage generally supports Dreyfus’s view that expertise is tied to an

ability to move beyond representational thought to a kind of bodily engage-
ment with one’s situation. The key for the organist is not to think through
the playing but to feel his way into the ‘world’ of the new organ, and to adapt
his bodily skill to a new environment. In this way, the interface of the organ-
ist’s acquired skills and the ‘environment’ provided by the new organ makes
up a background that supports his ability to play.
Merleau-Ponty describes the acquisition of skills in terms of ‘sedimenta-
tion’, which refers to the ways that the body takes on habits that are carried
along in our everyday lives.11 These habits then inform our perception of
the world; as we get used to acting in certain ways, we see our environment
as the place that enables us so to act. In having this set of abilities, we ‘have
a world’:

[T]he actual subject must in the first place have a world or be in the
world, that is, sustain round about it a system of meanings whose
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reciprocities, relationships, and involvements do not require to be

made explicit in order to be exploited. When I move about my house,
I know without thinking about it that walking towards the bathroom
means passing near the bedroom, that looking at the window means
having the fireplace on my left, and in this small world each gesture,
each perception is immediately located in relation to a great number
of possible coordinates.12

This ‘world’, or ‘system of meanings’, thus acts as the supporting back-

ground for our various actions. It is important to note that this system is
dynamic; while the ‘sediment’ metaphor is apt insofar as our habits and
acquired skills and abilities take on a kind of weight, it is also in a way
inappropriate. Merleau-Ponty warns that sedimentation does not result in
‘an inert mass’; as we engage with the world, we continually pick up new
ways of acting which further refine the possibilities that we perceive in the
environment.13
Merleau-Ponty further links this notion of the world as a dynamic, sedi-
mented system of meanings to something he calls the ‘intentional arc’, and
this is a concept that figures prominently in Dreyfus’s work. He commonly
cites the following passage by Merleau-Ponty on the intentional arc:14

The life of consciousness – cognitive life, the life of desire or percep-

tual life – is subtended by an ‘intentional arc’ which projects round
about us our past, our future, [and] our human setting.15

Dreyfus describes the arc as a ‘feedback loop’, which is a metaphor for the
dynamism discussed above.16 The relationship between embodied actor and
environment forms a kind of circuit that continually enriches the back-
ground that supports our activities.
At this point, coping looks like a late achievement only gained by a select
few experts. That may seem to be the case when playing chess or a musical
instrument is used as an example, but consider that most everyone is
‘expert’ at myriad everyday actions such as sitting in a chair, walking around
town, drinking from a cup, or using a doorknob. Dreyfus thinks that all of
these activities, and others that make up the vast majority of our everyday
actions, involve an expert intuitive openness to the world. While examples
of difficult activities like playing chess might help make the structure of such
action manifest, it is really everyday activity that supports his phenomeno-
logical foundationalism.17
This everyday coping may be non-cognitive, but it is not mere reflex
action or instinct because it is meaningful. Dreyfus explains the meaningful-
ness of coping in terms of ‘affordances’ and ‘solicitations’. The idea of
affordances is borrowed from J. J. Gibson, who used it to describe the
way in which an animal’s environment offers the animal various action
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possibilities. For Gibson, an affordance ‘implies the complementarity of the

animal and the environment’, so animal coping involves the animal finding
a proper fit in its world.18 But as Dreyfus notes in his exchange with
McDowell, the concept of affordances as Gibson presented it is not entirely
adequate, because affordances can be taken as objective facts about the
world independent of one’s interests. He thus uses the term ‘solicitation’ to
stress the connection between the environment and our interests.19 In
connection with the notion of solicitations, Dreyfus makes much of
Merleau-Ponty’s talk of being ‘at grips with the world’.20 The dynamic activ-
ity of perception can take place because the body is ‘geared into the world’,
and Merleau-Ponty often describes our activity as an attempt to refine that
‘gearing in’, or to get a better ‘grip’ on the world, so that some kind of
‘maximum grip’ can be reached.
A bit more needs to be said about what makes solicitations meaningful.
Part of the point is that elements in our environment have a practical
relevance for us. And this relevance is experienced as relevant; we take the
environment to afford particular things at particular moments depending on
our interests. Consider Merleau-Ponty’s discussion, in The Structure of
Behavior, of the football (soccer) player:

For the player in action the football field is not an ‘object’. … It is

pervaded with lines of force (the ‘yard lines’; those which demarcate
the ‘penalty area’) and articulated in sectors (for example, the ‘open-
ings’ between the adversaries) which call for a certain mode of action
as if the player were unaware of it. The field itself is not given to him,
but present as the immanent term of his practical intentions; the player
becomes one with it and feels the direction of the ‘goal’, for example,
just as immediately as the vertical and horizontal planes of his own
body.21

The field solicits various movements along its ‘lines of force’ and sectors
according to the particular interests of the player. In another context, a
space between two other people may take on quite a different significance,
but in this context, that space ‘means’ that there is an option to attack the
defence. And this meaning is clearly experienced by the footballer in the
context of play.
Coping with such solicitations cannot involve mere reflex because of the
complexity of the action situation. In the football game, for instance, the
elements that solicit our actions are so situation-specific and dynamic that a
great deal of flexibility and specificity is necessary, and this is possible
because of our sedimented skills. As Dreyfus puts it, ‘the objective universe
does not simply cause me to grasp the umbrella and turn the doorknob;
there must be something in my world that solicits this action’.22 Further-
more, solicitations take on a clearly normative import. One can fit into an
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environment in better or worse ways, and one can gain or lose a ‘grip’ on the
world. Clearly, Merleau-Ponty’s footballer can come to grips with the game
in better or worse ways (i.e. he can split the defence and put the ball in the
goal, or have the ball stripped from his feet).
But, as Dreyfus emphasizes, such sporting examples also show that we
can have a view of perception and action that is normative without relying
on the notion that the subject represents to him or herself the success condi-
tions for that action/perception. Merleau-Ponty’s player is said to be
‘unaware’; this is also suggested by the notion that he becomes ‘one’ with
the field.23 The flexibility required for coming to grips with the game does
not depend on a rational assessment of the situation. Rather, the player
senses ‘the body’s tendency to acquire a maximum grip on the world’, and
normativity lies in our ability to comport ourselves to the world in a success-
ful way.24
These considerations thus are taken to support Dreyfus’s phenomeno-
logical foundationalism. It is on the basis of our everyday coping activity
that acts of thinking can occur. But active thinking has no part of coping’s
basic operations, and expert coping goes better without active thought. If
this is true, and if the reading of Phenomenology of Perception described in
this section is correct (and the passages cited certainly lend credence to
such an interpretation), perhaps Merleau-Ponty does take a foundational-
ist view of human experience, with coping at the bottom supporting the
whole edifice.

II
Merleau-Ponty is clearly not a cognitivist or a conceptualist insofar as he
does not believe that human experience is constantly marked by active
thought, or that it is fully divided up into propositionally expressible
conceptual units. But as will be shown below, Phenomenology of Perception
does present the view that all human experience contains cultural aspects
that are characteristically marked by linguistic, and thus conceptual,
elements. Because of this, the phenomenological foundationalist view is not
rightly associated with Merleau-Ponty’s work.
The best way to begin showing this is to examine one of Dreyfus’s
favoured Merleau-Pontian ideas, the intentional arc. Consider again the
passage that Dreyfus frequently quotes on the intentional arc:

The life of consciousness – cognitive life, the life of desire or percep-

tual life – is subtended by an ‘intentional arc’ which projects round
about us our past, our future, [and] our human setting…

Dreyfus actually cuts off the passage at a crucial point. Here is how
Merleau-Ponty continues:
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…our physical, ideological, and moral situation, or rather which

results in our being situated in all these respects. It is this intentional
arc which brings about the unity of the senses, of intelligence, of sensi-
bility and motility.25

This extended passage throws up a red flag for the foundationalist view.
The fact that ‘intelligence’ is one of the elements the arc unifies does not
really fit. On Dreyfus’s use, the intentional arc serves primarily to describe
how the learner of a skill can acquire an increasingly refined perception of
the action situation; intelligence plays little part in this story. But the
passage taken as a whole suggests that the intentional arc is meant to
describe more than the way we develop pragmatic coping skills. Morality
and ideology must have strong connections to conceptual activity, and
involve concepts, not just practical abilities and skills. While more support
is required, this extended passage provides the beginning of an argument
that Merleau-Ponty means to tie together embodied coping and concep-
tual activities.
But the precise relation between coping and the conceptual is not defined
here. Also, It should be noted that the above passage on the intentional arc
is ambiguous. One might interpret the part of that passage that says ‘or
rather which results in our being situated in all these respects’ as softening
the blow to the foundationalist interpretation. What Merleau-Ponty might
mean to say in that passage is not that conceptual contents are included
within the intentional arc, but that intelligence and thought are things we
can be situated in because of the prior existence of the intentional arc. So
we should read beyond this particular passage.
One can first examine other discussions of the intentional arc. The term
only appears twice in Phenomenology of Perception, the first in the passage
Dreyfus cites, and the second in the chapter ‘The Body in its Sexual Being’.
This second instance occurs in a discussion of the brain-injury patient
Schneider, who, along with various other problems, suffered from a partial
loss of sexual functioning.26 Merleau-Ponty provides arguments to show
that this loss cannot be explained in purely physical or mental terms, and the
upshot is that sexuality cannot be described as an autonomous element of
human existence. In this regard, Merleau-Ponty lauds Freud for making ‘a
discovery in sexuality of relations and attitudes which had previously been
held to reside in consciousness’.27 Thus he is clearly trying to establish that
sexuality is not primarily cognitive: ‘erotic perception is not a cogitatio
which aims at a cogitatum; through one body it aims at another body, and
takes place in the world, not in a consciousness’.28
One might understand these passages as replacing one kind of founda-
tionalism with its opposite; the view that consciousness is the foundation of
our sexual life is supplanted by the view that embodied coping is founda-
tional. But while it is clear that Merleau-Ponty wants to do away with the
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cognitivist form of foundationalism, it is a mistake to think that he must

support the opposite view. Consider the following passage, which immedi-
ately follows the sentence in which the intentional arc is mentioned:

Thus sexuality is not an autonomous cycle. It has internal links with

the whole active and cognitive being, these three sectors of behavior
displaying but a single typical structure, and standing in a relationship
to each other of reciprocal expression.29

In the ‘normal subject’, sexuality is tied up with our general way of perceiv-
ing; it is one part of the ‘system of significances’ mentioned in section I
above. A major point of the discussion of sexuality is to argue that our
‘world’, i.e. our system of significances, is holistic in nature. Various threads
run through it and work together as all parts of human life engage with one
another in a reciprocal interchange.30 Merleau-Ponty also makes it clear in
the discussion of sexuality that our bodily lives are always tied up with this
‘world’, so that ‘even if I become absorbed in the experience of my body’, I
cannot ‘abolish all reference of my life to a world’.31 The system of
significances is always present in our experience.
Notably, the quotation regarding the intentional arc taken from the
discussion of sexuality ties together the ‘whole active and cognitive being’;
here again we have a passage on the intentional arc that speaks against the
foundationalist view. This passage also helps clear up the possible ambiguity
with the first intentional arc passage. The point is not to argue that there is
some foundational coping layer that allows us to engage in higher-level
activities. The ‘three sectors’ discussed above (sexuality, ‘active being’, and
‘cognitive being’) have the same structure and are reciprocally related. One
might, in support of Dreyfus, argue that the ‘single typical structure’ that the
three sectors share just is our foundational layer of bodily coping. But the
idea that the cognitive and active are reciprocally interrelated makes this an
implausible reading. Surely it is stretching the very notion of a foundation
to the breaking point if we conceive of a foundation as being structurally the
same as, and reciprocally related to, the thing it supports.
This leaves us with a problem, however, regarding Merleau-Ponty’s clear
rejection of consciousness as primary in sexual experience. If we are to hold
on to that point and at the same time deny coping-centred foundationalism,
there must be some way of describing the conceptual elements woven
together by the intentional arc in such a way that they are always present,
but not always explicit in the sense of being manifest to consciousness.32 As
it turns out, Merleau-Ponty has a way of expressing just such a view, and this
can be seen in the discussion of ‘sedimentation’.
Previously, sedimentation was spoken of in relation to the acquisition of
skills and abilities manifested in practical coping activity. But for Merleau-
Ponty it is more than that; he also stresses that ‘there is a “world of
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thoughts”, or a sediment left by our mental processes, which enables us to

rely on our concepts and acquired judgements’.33 Not only do we take on
various skills that enrich our perception of our environments, and allow us
to act in various ways, but we also take on various thoughts or concepts that
enrich our perception.
This claim could be taken in one of two ways. On the one hand, Merleau-
Ponty might mean that there are two processes (the sedimenting of skills
and the sedimenting of concepts) that can be similarly described but are in
fact separate. On the other hand, he might mean that the two processes fit
together; bodily skills and concepts come together in one sedimented mass,
so to speak. The notion that the various parts of human experience stand
together in a relationship of ‘reciprocal expression’ would suggest that
Merleau-Ponty intends the latter interpretation. The point is not that the
idiom of sedimentation can be used to describe two separate parts of human
experience. Rather, the idiom is fitting as a way to describe how practical
embodied action and mental conceptual processes mix together and affect
one another. Also, the notion that conceptual content is somehow
‘sedimented’ into our experience could help describe the point, necessitated
by the discussion of the intentional arc above, that such content could be
present and yet not explicitly taken up in active conscious thought. As it
stands, though, this talk of sedimentation is quite vague. But the idea that
coping skills and concepts are sedimented together can be further substan-
tiated by examining what Merleau-Ponty says about language. That is the
aim of the next section.

III
The chapter of Phenomenology of Perception that is most clearly about
language, ‘The Body as Expression, and Speech’, focuses on linguistic
expression (thus the emphasis on ‘speech’) as opposed to language’s system-
atic elements. The chapter further distinguishes between first-order, or
‘authentic’ speech, and second-order speech. The latter is easier to explain;
for those of us steeped in a linguistic tradition, language provides a store of
meanings that we take for granted. Along these lines Merleau-Ponty says that
‘we live in a world where speech is an institution. For all these many common-
place utterances, we possess within ourselves ready-made meanings.’34 To
say that speech is an ‘institution’ is to say that through its history it has taken
on an abiding quality; it has stability that we can rely on, and we can thus use
language to express and communicate myriad meanings without problem.
Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of first-order speech, on the other hand, runs
together a few different issues all connected with the idea of expressing
meanings that are not ‘ready-made’. In one regard, the issue of first-order
speech is construed in phylogenetic terms; the problem is to describe how
humans came to have language in the first place, and thus Merleau-Ponty
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mentions the ‘first man to speak’.35 But he is also concerned with the onto-
genetic question of how children come to learn language. Finally, he
connects authentic speech with the very different issue of an adult speaker
expressing something unique. In fact, Merleau-Ponty runs all three of these
issues together in a footnote where under the heading of ‘first-hand speech’
he lists ‘that of the child uttering its first word, of the lover revealing his
feelings, of the “first man who spoke”’.36
For present purposes the phylogenetic and ontogenetic questions need to
be separated and further developed. They seem to support the foundation-
alist view, because they have to do with the notion that language springs out
of a non-linguistic source.
After discussing second-order speech, Merleau-Ponty asserts:

Our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back

to that origin, so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words,
the primordial silence, and as long as we do not describe the action
which breaks this silence.37

The talk of origins and ‘primordial silence’ seems to raise the phylogenetic
question first; to understand expressive human activity fully, we need to
understand how language could develop out of an earlier, ‘silent’ (qua pre-
linguistic) source. The key to Merleau-Ponty’s argument is the notion that
language is prefigured by ‘gestural’ expression.38 Language has its roots in
our practical activity, and as we engage in such activity, we simultaneously
begin engaging in a kind of expressive activity that, through gesture,
communicates something of our perspective on the world in which we act.
This gestural communication is the genetic precursor to language.
This view is directly tied to Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts on intersubjectiv-
ity. He notes that ‘in so far as I have sensory functions … I am already in
communication with others as psycho-physical subjects’.39 Thus he tries to
undercut the problem of other minds by assuming a tacit bodily recognition
of other persons that is always present. The crucial argument for this, put
briefly, is that the intermodality of the senses (the fact that the senses work
together) allows us to understand the actions of others as we understand our
own. In particular, because the outwardly directed sense of sight works
together with our sensing of our own bodily movements, when we see
another body moving, we can sense that movement as possible for
ourselves. For example, if a child sees her mother stick out her tongue, that
visual experience is directly linked to the child’s experience of her own abil-
ity to engage in the same action.40 Thus, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, ‘I can
meet things in the actions of another and find in them a meaning, because
they are themes of possible action for my own body.’41 Insofar as we have a
sense of the other person as capable of our own actions, we have a basic,
bodily sense of intersubjectivity.
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So Merleau-Ponty’s answer to the phylogenetic question would, in short,

be as follows. First, human beings share an action context, or world, in the
obvious sense that we live together. But that context is shared in a deeper
sense, insofar as we have a pre-linguistic ability to grasp each other’s motor
capabilities as like our own. This shared context provided the basis on which
pre-linguistic humans could communicate through gestures, and out of all of
our various bodily gestures, vocal gestures somehow developed into
language. This also provides a key to the ontogenetic question, insofar as
babies are born with the same pre-linguistic abilities to grasp other people’s
motor capabilities and relate them to their own, and to engage in gestural
expression.42 This then enables them to learn language.
At this point, it would seem as though we could add the discussion of
language development as an extension of Dreyfus’s phenomenological
foundationalism. So far, the discussion of intersubjectivity has remained
entirely on the level of bodily coping, having to do with the arrangement of
our sensory modalities and the way this arrangement enables us to engage
with other people’s possibilities for action. So, we have largely established
that we are enabled, from infancy, to be able to cope with other people’s
coping. Language, via gesture, springs out of the basis of this particular
coping ability. This would seem to fit with, and enrich, the idea that there is
a primary level of coping activity that supports higher-level mental
activities.
But it is crucial to note that the supposed ‘first man who spoke’ is in a very
different position from the average child, who is born into a world where
language is an institution. Thus the child does not have to cope with devel-
oping non-linguistic gestures into linguistic gestures so much as it has to
learn to cope with a world that is already saturated with language. This
important difference comes out more clearly in Consciousness and the
Acquisition of Language, which contains notes from a lecture course of the
same name given at the University of Paris a few years after the publication
of Phenomenology of Perception.43 There, while Merleau-Ponty stresses
that babies have certain expressive abilities prior to language (for example,
he notes facial expressions and babbling), he also emphasizes that the
baby’s normal environment is already filled with the language of the adults
around it. In this regard he repeats the claim of another psychologist that
‘the child bathes in language’.44 Language thus extends to even the earliest
moments of human experience.
Not only is language always present in our experience, but it transforms
our experience:

Language is the indissoluble extension of all physical activity, and at

the same time it is quite new in relation to that physical activity.
Speech emerges from the ‘total language’ as constituted by gestures,
mimicries, etc. … But speech transforms. … Language introduces itself
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as a superstructure, that is, as a phenomenon that is already a witness

to another order.45

Prima facie, this passage might be taken to support foundationalism. The

first sentences suggest that language comes from the foundation of coping
activity, and thus constitutes something new on top of that foundation. But
while Merleau-Ponty might think that works as a description of the phylo-
genesis of language, it is not a description of what life is like for those of us
who, since birth, have ‘bathed’ in language. Our experience is transformed
by language, and brought to another order. One must also understand the
use of the term ‘superstructure’ (which suggests foundationalism) along
these lines. The relationship discussed here is between the pre-linguistic
child (the ‘base’, so to speak) and the person who has learned a language.
That superstructure transforms the pre-linguistic base upon which it is built;
that other order to which language is a witness is the life of the human being
who speaks a language.
This point can be seen in various references to the uniqueness of the
human world or human order, and this again sets things apart from
Dreyfus’s view. For Dreyfus, embodied coping matches up with ‘the more
basic perceptual capacities we seem to share with pre-linguistic infants
and higher animals’, but Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that there is some-
thing importantly different about human experience, despite all we share
with other animals. This is first emphasized in The Structure of Behavior,
where he describes ‘amovable’ animal behaviour as never achieving the
level of the ‘symbolic’ which is characteristic of human behaviour, and he
stresses that ‘the word “life” does not have the same meaning in animality
and humanity’.46 Furthermore, the discussion there of the ‘human order’
makes clear that language plays a crucial role; the ontogenetic question
comes to the fore here, and Merleau-Ponty stresses that children must in
some way be predisposed to engage in linguistic activity. We should not
‘forget the role which language plays in the constitution of the perceived
world’.47
This same point regarding the special nature of the human world, and the
importance of language in shaping this world, is repeated in Phenomenol-
ogy of Perception. This is stated most clearly in the following passage from
the chapter on speech:

It is impossible to superimpose on man a lower layer of behavior

which one chooses to call ‘natural’, followed by a manufactured
cultural or spiritual world. Everything is both manufactured and
natural in man, as it were, in the sense that there is not a word, not a
form of behavior which does not owe something to purely biological
being–and which at the same time does not elude the simplicity of
animal life.48
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This is close to an explicit rejection of Dreyfus’s foundationalism. There is

no ‘natural’ lower layer that we might share with non-human animals. There
are certainly elements that we share, but no shared layer. Because ‘every-
thing is both manufactured and natural in man’, that supposed bottom layer
is transformed for human beings.
Immediately after the just-quoted passage, Merleau-Ponty notes that
linguistic meaning does not exhaust all forms of meaning-giving activity we
have at our disposal. And this would have to be the case, given his gestural
theory of expression discussed above. But he goes on to say that language
justly seems special to us, because ‘alone of all expressive processes, speech
is able to settle into a sediment and constitute an acquisition for use in
human relationships’.49 And he further notes that ‘there is one particular
cultural object which is destined to play a crucial role in the perception of
other people: language’.50 It is important that he says language plays a role
in the perception of the other; this implies that language is not a layer on top
of our basic perceptual activity, but is a crucial part of it.
In keeping with the assertion of the uniqueness of the human order, the
human relationships that are shaped by language are emphasized time and
again in Phenomenology of Perception. For example, very early in the text,
before the chapters that explicitly discuss language or intersubjectivity,
Merleau-Ponty criticizes empiricism in the following way:

It is, then, desirable to point out everything that is made incomprehen-

sible by empiricist constructions. … They hide from us in the first place
‘the cultural world’ or ‘human world’ in which nevertheless almost our
whole life is led. … There is nothing [for empiricism] in the appear-
ance of a landscape, an object or a body whereby it is predestined to
look ‘gay’ or ‘sad’, ‘lively’ or ‘dreary’, ‘elegant’ or ‘coarse’.51

This passage comes in the midst of an argument that is meant to show that
empiricism cannot account for the sense in which our encounter with the
world is meaningful. And as this passage shows, the kind of ‘meaning’ that
is tied into our basic perception of the world is not only the kind of pre-
linguistic meaning Dreyfus describes in terms of solicitations. The human
world is not just the world of pragmatic coping. It is the world of culture, the
world wherein things can be elegant or dreary. These are semantic contents
that must move us beyond Dreyfus’s descriptions of coping.
Culture may be a vague or diffuse idea generally, but no matter what it
means, it has to refer in some way to something that is created by and shared
amongst a human group, and sedimented through language. Merleau-Ponty
continues the critique of empiricism in this vein:

Empiricism excludes from perception the anger or the pain which I

nevertheless read in a face, the religion whose essence I seize in some
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hesitation or reticence, the city whose temper I recognize in the

attitude of a policeman or the style of a public building. There can no
longer be any objective spirit: mental life withdraws into isolated
consciousness … instead of extending, as it apparently does in fact,
over human space which is made up by those with whom I argue or
live.52

That Merleau-Ponty approvingly uses the Hegelian notion of objective

spirit against empiricism is quite telling. For Hegel, ‘objective spirit’ refers
in part to social, cultural, and political formations and institutions. Crucially,
what makes these institutions what they are is intersubjective interaction.
What Merleau-Ponty is telling us here is that one of the most important
elements of our everyday lives, which existential phenomenology can prop-
erly grasp but empiricism cannot, is our existence within intersubjective
institutions. This is, crucially, a human space wherein we not only cope with
others, but argue with others. As mentioned above, it is language which
enables such human institutions to arise; any life which is truly human is
replete with linguistic meaning.
There is another important instance of the term ‘objective spirit’:

Just as nature finds its way to the core of my personal life and becomes
inextricably linked with it, so behavior patterns settle into that nature,
being deposited in the form of a cultural world. … [Each part of this
world] spreads round it an atmosphere of humanity which may be
determinate in a low degree, in the case of a few footmarks in the sand,
or on the other hand highly determinate, if I go into every room from
top to bottom of a house recently evacuated. … An Objective Spirit
dwells in the remains and the scenery.53

This both echoes the discussion of the human world being woven in with
the natural world and, with the talk of ‘depositing’ and ‘settling,’ links up
with the general discussion of sedimentation. And we are now at a point
where we can make sense of the idea, proposed at the end of section II,
that pragmatic coping skills and conceptual contents are sedimented
together in human experience. This happens because of the fact that the
‘world’ of our practical skills and abilities is coextensive with the ‘world’
of culture and objective spirit. As we are raised within a linguistic
tradition, we pick up the concepts and acquired judgements that Merleau-
Ponty speaks of being sedimented. These concepts thus inform our
perception of the world, in such a way that the world is perceived as
meaningful for us (dreary, elegant, etc.) in the way discussed above. And
this meaning must be perceived alongside our perception of the world as
soliciting actions; the system of meanings is formed through coping
activity and conceptual activity.
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IV
It is important to be clear on the upshot of this criticism of Dreyfus’s reading
of Merleau-Ponty. From a scholarly point of view, it is worth while to show
that Dreyfus’s use of Merleau-Ponty is unduly narrow, and that if one is to
have a balanced reading of the latter, one needs to pay much more attention
to what he says about intersubjectivity, and the ways language and culture
shape the human world. Also, it should now be clear that Merleau-Ponty
should not be aligned with the type of foundationalism Dreyfus advocates.
So far, however, my critique has had a limited scope, perhaps not getting
to the heart of Dreyfus’s concerns. After all, he is not attempting to present
an overarching interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s work; rather, he is using
parts of Merleau-Ponty’s work to support his own phenomenological inves-
tigations, and to critique various forms of cognitivism and intellectualism. It
is thus important to consider what becomes of Dreyfus’s broader philosoph-
ical aims in light of the critique presented in this paper.
Notably, some of Dreyfus’s arguments come out relatively unscathed.
The main point of his rejection of representationalism, for example, is
something with which Merleau-Ponty would clearly agree. Consider, for
example, Dreyfus’s thesis that ‘as the agent acquires skills, those skills are
“stored”, not as representations in the mind, but as dispositions to respond
to the solicitations of situations in the world’.54 This basic idea is not
changed by the argument of sections II and III above, which would agree
and further stress that cultural and linguistic (and thus conceptual) contents
must be thought of as ‘stored’ in those dispositions as well. This broader
view does not change the fact that the elements that are ‘stored’ are not (at
least on a standard view55) representations in the mind.56
Other parts of Dreyfus’s arguments do not fare as well, however, and
his phenomenological investigations become strained precisely because of
his attempt to maintain the foundationalist view. For example, in his
description of the stages of learning, rational thought (and especially the
consideration and application of rules) occurs at the early stages, but is
jettisoned at the later stages. This leads him to argue that any attempt to
refine or revise our practices, once we have achieved expertise, amounts
to a regression. For example, he says that when ‘we are following the
advice of a coach … our behavior regresses to mere competence … it is
only after much practice, and after abandoning monitoring and letting
ourselves be drawn back into full involvement in our activity, that we can
regain our expertise’.57 But this is an odd, and unnecessarily cumbersome,
description. Elite athletes, to take one kind of ‘expert coper’, rely on
continual coaching throughout their careers (even Kobe Bryant goes to
practice, for instance). Why should the regular activity of someone at the
peak of a particular skill be described as involving a constant series of
regressions and advances?

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Part of the problem arises because Dreyfus’s analyses suffer from an

undue focus on narrow time-slices of our action. If one narrowly focuses on
instances of absorbed coping, everything Dreyfus says about the lack of
mental representations, active reasoning, and explicit success conditions
seems correct. But when we place these instances of coping into the broader
picture of a human life, his way of describing things seems much less apt.
Surely, the ability to accept coaching, review past performances, and make
continual adjustments to one’s skill set is as clearly a part of the life of the
elite athlete as the ability to perform ‘in the flow’ is. And these things are
(per the Merleau-Pontian view) reciprocally interrelated; coaching helps
support high-level performance, and that high-level performance in turn
allows for more sophisticated coaching techniques.
The problem in this construal of coaching might further rest on a false
dichotomy between active cognition and mindless coping. One need not, in
rejecting the intellectualist view that our experience is primarily marked by
active thinking, accept the opposing view that our experience is largely
separated from thought altogether. If we take seriously Merleau-Ponty’s
view that in living in a human (language-using) community we take on, or
have ‘sedimented’ in our lives, certain conceptual capacities, we can see our
way past this dichotomy. On this view of human life, the kind of rational
revision of our practices that happens in instances of coaching (and in
numerous other aspects of our lives) is not a regression followed by a return
to a more expert state. It is rather an instance of an always present, but often
latent, ability being put into operation.
Perhaps it would be right to think of a kind of regression occurring when
someone needs coaching to help them with everyday activities like opening
a door or drinking from a cup. But it is dubious to think that such mundane
activities amount to something that could be considered a self-sufficient
layer of human life, because such activity taken on its own would not be
sufficient to make up a human life. Dreyfus seems guilty of such a flattened
conception of the human, though, when he writes that ‘in principle … we
could go on coping in flow – changing from task to task – without ever facing
a breakdown and having to step back and reflect’.58 It is not clear why we
should believe that, even in principle, we could ever live the kind of life
where we go on coping in flow without ever having to step back and reflect.
That would seem to be a kind of superhuman life, free of errors that need
reconsideration to be corrected. It would also be a non-human life because
it would be a life without a history like our own, wherein our practices have
been continually called into question. So Dreyfus is wrong to suggest, as he
does in connection with this passage, that thought and reflection in the
service of things like explaining and criticizing are somehow optional, or
added on to, normal human life. Contra Dreyfus, the fact that reflection,
revision, and criticism play such a crucial role in human life and human
history does seem like a perfectly good reason to reject the notion that there
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is a foundational layer to any truly human life that can do entirely without
these things.
At the end of the recent exchange with McDowell, Dreyfus seems to
begrudgingly concede this point, and to give up his foundationalism. He
thus writes, ‘to avoid any suggestion of an indubitable ground-floor from
which other phenomena are derived, we could, following Heidegger and
Merleau-Ponty, call this a horizontal rather than a ground-floor/upper-story
dependency relation’.59 But this is a very unsatisfactory note for Dreyfus to
end on, because he does not explain how this change radically affects his
view. The change from vertical to horizontal dependency marks a large
difference; presumably the latter would include the kind of reciprocal
interrelation of which Merleau-Ponty speaks. It should also lead him to give
up much of his other rhetoric, such as the talk of a human life that can in
principle involve only coping in flow.
There is thus a more important matter here than the scholarly one of
balancing one’s reading of Merleau-Ponty. Even if we set Merleau-Ponty to
one side, we can see that Dreyfus’s phenomenological foundationalism has
lead to an imbalanced phenomenology of human experience. The phenom-
enology of embodied coping is important in that it can provide useful
critiques of certain strands of representationalism and cognitivism. But if it
is over-stressed, it can skew one’s picture of the human world. The aim of
phenomenology should be, as it was for Merleau-Ponty, to understand
human experience in the richness of its total context.

Loyola University New Orleans, USA

Notes
1 Hubert Dreyfus, ‘Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can
Profit From the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise’, Proceedings and
Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 79(2) (2005), pp. 47–65.
2 Hubert Dreyfus, ‘The Return of the Myth of the Mental’, Inquiry, 50(4) (2007),
pp. 352–65. Dreyfus is happy, in this text, to refer to his view as foundationalist,
though he claims that it is free of the problems of ‘traditional foundationalisms’.
He ends his response to McDowell (Dreyfus, ‘Response to McDowell’, Inquiry,
50(4) (2007), pp. 371–7), which comes later in the same exchange, with a cryptic
attempt to soften his foundationalism; this will be further discussed at the end of
this paper.
3 Robert Brandom, ‘Dasein, the Being that Thematizes’, in Tales of the Mighty
Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 324–47, makes a similar argument against
Dreyfus’s interpretation of Heidegger’s Being and Time. There Brandom refers
to the foundationalist view as the ‘layer-cake’ view.
4 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith
(London: Routledge, 2002), p. 36.
5 Ibid., pp. xi–xii.
6 Ibid., p. 4.

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7 Hubert Dreyfus, ‘Intelligence Without Representation–Merleau-Ponty’s

Critique of Mental Representation: The Relevance of Phenomenology to
Scientific Explanation’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1(4) (2002),
pp. 367–83.
8 Ibid.
9 While the point of the phenomenological account is to describe that this is the
case rather than explain how this happens, Dreyfus holds out hope that neural-
net models of the brain can provide an empirical explanation that matches his
phenomenology. On this point see both ibid. and Dreyfus, ‘Merleau-Ponty and
Recent Cognitive Science’, in T. Carman (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to
Merleau-Ponty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 129–50.
10 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 168.
11 See, for example, ibid., pp. 149–50. The talk of sedimentation is adapted from
Husserl, and in particular the essay ‘The Origin of Geometry’. For Husserl’s
essay, and Merleau-Ponty’s notes on the essay written for a course he gave at
the Collège de France in 1960, see Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of
Phenomenology, Including Texts by Edmund Husserl, ed. L. Lawlor and B.
Bergo (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002). Husserl’s discussion of
sedimentation in ‘The Origin of Geometry’ can be found on pp. 100–1, 104–6.
12 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 149.
13 Ibid., p. 150.
14 For example, the passage is found, as written here, in Dreyfus, ‘Merleau-Ponty
and Recent Cognitive Science’, p. 132, and in Dreyfus, ‘Intelligence Without
Representation’.
15 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 157.
16 Dreyfus, ‘Merleau-Ponty and Recent Cognitive Science’, p. 132.
17 The connection between expert activity and everyday actions is explicitly stated,
for example, in Dreyfus, ‘Response to McDowell’.
18 J. J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986), p. 127. Gibson, like Merleau-Ponty, is
drawing on Gestalt psychology, and notes that the concept of affordance is
particularly drawn from Kurt Lewin’s discussions of Aufforderungscharakter;
see p. 138.
19 On the distinction between ‘affordance’ and ‘solicitation’, see Dreyfus, ‘The
Return of the Myth of the Mental’, and Dreyfus, ‘Response to McDowell’.
20 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 353.
21 Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. A. Fisher (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1983), p. 168.
22 Dreyfus, ‘Refocusing the Question: Can There Be Skillful Coping Without
Propositional Representations or Brain Representations?’, Phenomenology and
the Cognitive Sciences, 1(4) (2002), pp. 413–25.
23 It is worth noting that talk of this general type, regarding athletes who are in the
‘flow’ or ‘zone’ and do not require conscious thought for action, is fairly
commonplace. For an example in popular literature see A. Park, ‘Getting and
Staying in the Zone’, TIME, 167(3) (8 January 2006), pp. 102–3.
24 See Dreyfus, ‘Intelligence Without Representation’, where he gives an example
of a tennis player that is quite similar in tone to Merleau-Ponty’s description of
the footballer.
25 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 157.
26 Schneider was a patient of the Gestaltists Adhemar Gelb and Kurt Goldstein,
whose writings were used extensively by Merleau-Ponty. He is generally consid-
ered to have had visual agnosia (Merleau-Ponty says that traditional psychiatry
would diagnose him with ‘psychic blindness’: see Phenomenology of Perception,
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p. 118), though there is a debate in the literature about the specific diagnosis.
There is also much debate over the proper interpretation of Schneider’s case,
and of Merleau-Ponty’s use of the case. For a very helpful overview of these
issues (which also argues that Merleau-Ponty’s use of the case is ambiguous), see
Rasmus Thybo Jensen, ‘Motor Intentionality and the Case of Schneider’,
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 8(3) (2009), pp. 371–88.
27 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 182.
28 Ibid., p. 181.
29 Ibid., p. 182.
30 In this regard it is noteworthy that Merleau-Ponty ends the chapter on sexuality
with a long footnote on historical materialism that is, prima facie, off topic. But
the note fits, insofar as Merleau-Ponty wants to show how certain conceptions of
Freudianism, with their emphasis on sexuality, and certain conceptions of
Marxism, with their emphasis on economics, are equally problematic in that they
see their main concern as being the single driving force in human life.
31 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 191.
32 On this point we can see a similarity between Merleau-Ponty and McDowell,
insofar as McDowell insists that one should not conflate the act of thinking with
the content of thinking; his belief that all parts of our experience are conceptual
does not entail that all such parts are actively being conceptualized by a
conscious mind. On this point see John McDowell, Mind and World: With a New
Introduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 28–9, and
John McDowell, ‘Comments’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology,
31(3) (2000), pp. 330–43.
33 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 149.
34 Ibid., p. 213.
35 Ibid., p. 217.
36 Ibid., p. 208 n. 5.
37 Ibid., p. 214.
38 See ibid., pp. 214–20.
39 Ibid., p. 411.
40 For a helpful and much more developed discussion of the intermodality
argument, see Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005). Examples of the type used here can be found in
the discussion at pp. 75–84, and the issue is also discussed at pp. 225–8. Gallagher
discusses Merleau-Ponty’s use of the intermodality argument at pp. 82–4, and
argues that such intermodal linkages happen at an earlier age (from birth, in fact)
than Merleau-Ponty thought.
41 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Child’s Relations with Others’, in The Primacy
of Perception, trans. W. Cobb (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964),
p. 117. While this general argument is made in Phenomenology of Perception
(see pp. 410–12), the point regarding the intermodality of the senses is made
most directly in ‘The Child’s Relations with Others’. It is important to note that
the claim being made here is not that the problem of other minds is entirely
settled by the intermodality argument. The point is rather that any discussion of
intersubjectivity must take into account the fact that we have (possibly from
infancy–see n. 39) an embodied grasp of other people as agents like ourselves
before the issue of other minds arises.
42 Merleau-Ponty actually spends much more time discussing the ontogenetic
question, and focuses on the intersubjective and communicative aspects of
babies’ and children’s experience. The very title of ‘The Child’s Relations
with Others’ displays this; for another example see Phenomenology of
Perception, p. 410.
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43 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, trans.

H. J. Silverman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). Phenomenol-
ogy of Perception was originally published in 1945, while the Consciousness and
the Acquisition of Language course was given in the 1949–50 school year.
44 Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, pp. 11–15. The quotation is from
Henri Delacroix, Le Langage et la pensée (Paris: Alcan, 1924).
45 Ibid., p. 12; my italics.
46 Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior. The discussion of amovable and
symbolic behaviour is found on pp. 105–24, and the quotation about the meaning
of ‘life’ is on p. 174.
47 Ibid., p. 167.
48 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 220.
49 Ibid., p. 220.
50 Ibid., p. 413.
51 Ibid., p. 27.
52 Ibid., pp. 27–8.
53 Ibid., p. 405.
54 Dreyfus, ‘Intelligence Without Representation’, p. 367.
55 See Andy Clark, ‘Skills, Spills and the Nature of Mindful Action’, Phenomenol-
ogy and the Cognitive Sciences, 1(4) (2002), pp. 385–7. In this response to
Dreyfus, Clark notes that while Dreyfus gives a good argument against represen-
tations construed as ‘inner propositional data structures’, that does not do away
with all senses of representation. He further argues that the connectionist picture
of the mind Dreyfus favours still seems to rely on the idea that brain states
correspond to the world in some way, but do not do so in an ‘objectivist’ sense
that is detached from situated action. In ‘Refocusing the Question’, Dreyfus
more or less agrees with Clark, but notes that this new use of ‘representation’ is
weaker than the form that holds there to be a one-to-one correlation between
brain states and items in the world.
56 Of course, this leaves open the empirical question of how the ‘storage’ takes
place. Perhaps Dreyfus is right that neural-net models of the brain can help
provide a Merleau-Pontyian answer. What is clear, though, is that a Merleau-
Pontyian answer would involve more than the brain, given his insistence that
human experience can only be explained by taking the whole body and environ-
ment to be intertwined. To put the issue in contemporary terms, Merleau-Ponty
would be an advocate of the ‘extended mind hypothesis’ in some form; Clark,
‘Skills, Spills’, is clearly right to suggest this in relation to Dreyfus’s work.
57 Dreyfus, ‘The Return of the Myth of the Mental’, p. 335.
58 Ibid.
59 Dreyfus, ‘Response to McDowell’, p. 377.

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