5 Body Schema and Body Image in Metaphorical Cognition Valentina Cuccio* Chapter Preview Neurologists, philosophers, psychologists, and also linguists fre- quently employ the notion of the ‘body schema.’ Many divergent definitions of this notion were provided till Shaun Gallagher (1986) clarified the terminological and conceptual confusion by proposing a clear distinction between the two concepts of ‘body schema’ and ‘body image.’ I propose that two different roles played by the body in cognition can be identified on the basis of this distinction, corresponding to two different levels of embodiment. In this account, a first level of embodiment is constituted by invisible metonymies that have aspects of the body schema as their source domain. Visible metaphors occur at a second level of embodiment and take their source domains from aspects of the body image. In the first case, the mapping is directly from sensorimotor abilities to perception; in the second case, the mapping is from concepts that are related to our bodily experiences to abstract concepts. 1 Introduction: The Role of the Body in Cognition What is the role, if any, that our body plays in metaphorical cognition? No doubt, this question is of vital importance to research on conceptual metaphors and embodiment more generally. However, the answer is far from simple. A consistent answer to this question requires a clarification of what we mean by “body.” Although defining the notion of body may seem trivial, the literature on this topic is quite controversial. In the embodiment literature, the notion of body has been defined in many different ways; consequently, many different roles have been ascribed to the body in human cognition. According to some authors, for example, the body directly affects cognition. According to others it contributes to cognition by being the object of a representation. In this latter view, representations of the body, and not the body in itself, have a role in the structuring of our conceptual system (for a survey, see Alsmith & de Vignemont 2012). 82 terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108182324.006 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 80.82.77.83, on 08 Jul 2017 at 23:47:57, subject to the Cambridge Core