Whitehead’s symbolic reference as a theory of embodied semiotics: from causal efficacy to meaning

Abstract Contemporary embodied cognition theories often assume the existence of a mental representation of bodily experience, without explaining how this representation emerges from pre-reflective bodily processes. This paper turns to Alfred North Whitehead’s theory of symbolic reference, developed in Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect. Whitehead distinguishes two modes of perception: causal efficacy (the vague, affective, bodily feeling of the world acting upon us) and presentational immediacy (the clear, spatialized presentation of sensory data). Symbolic reference is the dynamic integration of these two modes, generating the embodied facts that constitute conscious experience. We argue that Whitehead’s framework offers a non-mentalistic, process-based account of how bodily feelings become meaningful symbols, thereby shedding light on the residual Cartesianism in both phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty) and cognitive linguistics (conceptual metaphor theory). The paper concludes by outlining implications for a Whiteheadian cognitive semiotics, in which meaning emerges from the environment’s causal efficacy on the living body.