Incorporated Means Symbolic and Embodied

In a response to our contribution, Geeraerts, who we would like to thank for his provocative insights, argues that we confuse theoretical and metho-dological contrasts: We " equate a theoretical opposition between a 'sym-bolical' and an 'embodied' framework with a methodological contrast between an empirical and an intuitive approach, but [he argues] such an equation is unmotivated ". Let us first get rid of one misconception. By no means do we equate an embodied framework with an intuitive approach. We explicitly refer to It is undoubtedly true that we have not given a complete overview of all the experimental psychological and neuroscientific evidence for an embodied account of language comprehension, simply because this would fill an edited volume in itself (see Pecher and Zwaan, 2005 for an overview). However, nothing is further beyond the truth than that we argued that an embodiment account is intuitive. So if we do not equate a theoretical opposition between a " symbolical " and an " embodied " framework with a methodological contrast between an empirical and an intuitive approach, do we equate anything at all? In fact, we equate a theoretical opposition between a " symbolical " and an " embodied " framework with a methodological contrast between an empirical and an experimental psychology approach (and we can only hope that experimental psychology is not what Geeraerts meant by " intuitive "). Such an observation is in fact very much motivated. There is far more computational linguistic than experimental work available that can be identified as symbolic, and there is far more experimental than computational work available that can be identified as embodied. Exceptions are available for the embodiment approach (see Louwerse, Cai, Hu, Jeuniaux, and Ventura, 2006 for an overview). There is no valid reason why methodology has followed the theoretical distinction (other than that computers are simply more symbolic than embodied), but it has.