Observations such as, “The body knows how to protect itself,” are what I would like to flesh out here. When I went to Guatemala to pick up one of my children whom we adopted, she was malnourished. I will not go into the details, but one of the observations our pediatrician made was that the head and organ systems ‘get’ nourished first in a situation of resource scarcity. So that a normal child can be malnourished for months and not have it permanently affect cognition and their major systems. It is one of the reasons that our daughter had no muscle tone in her extremities, but a rather enlarged torso. To this, our pediatrician commented, “The body knows how to protect itself.”
But what kind of epistemological claim is this? I would be tempted to dismiss this as an issue of anthropomorphism (except that it’s exactly the matter at stake). Maybe personification better fits such a claim, but there is a way in which our bodies know exactly what to do, even when we are clueless or hapless. I’ve already given some example rife in medical research (e.g. fetal development and blood clotting), but are there other ways in which our bodies express an epistemology? Continue reading ‘What does the body ‘know’?’
