This concept of embodiment "refers to understanding the role of an agent's own body in its everyday, situated cognition".
[1] Gibbs discusses the relationship between body and consciousness from many different viewpoints and talks about the epistemological opposition between realism and idealism.
Gibbs' claim that abstract concepts arise by metaphor from embodied reality is sometimes hard to distinguish from the traditional empiricist view.
Gibbs states that the original experience persists in a schematic form called an image schema.
For instance, in Hamlet's speech "To be or not to be", Gibbs says that "one quickly recognizes" is an allusion to the balance schema because it involves making a difficult decision.
[2] More recently Gibbs conducted an experiment in order to examine people's embodied understanding of metaphorical narratives.
These walking and imagining differences disappeared when the metaphorical statement "moving along in a good direction" was replaced by a nonmetaphorical expression.
[3] Gibbs and Marlene Johansson Falck, in order to help solidify his position on embodiment of metaphorical meanings also used other studies to help show this.
Roads were found to be thought of as complete opposite, such as they are viewed as straight, wide, paved, and have a specific destination that they lead too.
Gibbs states that these shows that people understanding of paths and roads leans more towards the central aspects of their bodily actions.
But as a way to infer that lawyers and sharks share the same qualities such as aggressiveness, and ceaseless effort to attain their goals with little regard to others in their path.
Gibbs conducted a couple experiments in order to examine whether people inferred different pragmatic message when reading both metaphors and non-metaphors, the speed in which they could understand them.
[6] A comparison view says that people begin processing a metaphor by first lining up the representations of both the source and the target concepts.
He also mentions that there is an alternative view that claims metaphors are understood better when using class-inclusion categorization processes instead of comparison statement.
[8] Gibbs proposes a dynamical view of intentional action that explains more thoroughly the psychological complexities of how ironic acts are created and understood.
Gibbs however, says that there are cases in which a speaker's speech is understood as ironic even though there is clear recognition that the comment was not meant to be taken in that manner.
He then did this same procedure except omitted the story and just had the participants read the idiomatic expression, this time he noticed that more incorrect understanding of the meaning of the idiom was occurring when there was no context.