Relation between Embodied practices and Reflective practices --> figure-ground relation (Gestalt), to avoid hierarchisation - Gallagher

4An anonymous reviewer suggested that “we have still to give a place in this very framework to

abstraction, generalization, theory and formalization as useful tools—for planning coordinated

actions, for extending previous methods to new situations and new domains, for making revisions

in order to restore coherence in a belief base, etc.” I agree. We can argue for a kind of continuity

between embodied practices and reflective practices even if the former are considered more

concrete than the latter. We do not have to conceive of the continuity as hierarchically organized.

Consider the suggestion made by Goldstein and Scheerer: “Although the normal person’s behaviour

is prevailingly concrete, this concreteness can be considered normal only as long as it is

embedded in and codetermined by the abstract attitude. For instance, in the normal person both

attitudes are always present in a definite figure-ground relation” (Goldstein and Scheerer 1964, 8;

see Gallagher (2017), for more on this gestalt view of the relations between embodied and

reflective practices