Interactional Expertise and Embodiment

Abstract: In Part 1 of this paper, I introduce the idea of interactional expertise while in Part 2, I focus on its implications for philosophical theories of the importance of the body in forming our conceptual world. I argue that the way philosophers have dealt with the body turns attention away from the most important questions and that we cannot answer these questions without making the notion of socialisation, and therefore interactional expertise, a central concept in our thinking. This makes language at least as important, and often more important than bodily practice in our understanding of the world. The notion of a disembodied socialised agent leads in the direction of interesting questions while the notion of an embodied but unsocialised human actor is unimaginable.