1 Introduction

To a certain extent, science is a product of human intelligence and curiosity, but philosophers and historians have long recognized that the scientific enterprise is a more specific and complex phenomenon (Godfrey-Smith, 2020). From its beginnings among Mesopotamian scribes and priests some 5,000 years ago, when it was connected closely with mythological beliefs (Rochberg, 2018), science has been concerned with discovering the underlying order of the natural world. Over ensuing millennia and following the formative influence of the Ancient Greeks that culminated in the scientific revolution after the Renaissance (Lindberg, 2007), scientific enquiry came to be viewed as the use of rational thought and observation to uncover the hidden structure of nature:

Truth may perhaps be veiled. But it may reveal itself. And if it does not reveal itself, it may be revealed by us. Removing the veil may not be easy. But once the naked truth stands revealed before us, we have the power to see it, to distinguish it from falsehood… The birth of modern science and modern technology was inspired by this optimistic epistemology… (Popper, 1965, p. 5).

Without engaging in debates about how science works (or should work) or what lessons can be learned from the history of science, the scientific endeavour is clearly a more nuanced enterprise than any simplistic notion of accumulating reliable knowledge based upon observable facts (Weinberg, 2015). Nor can science be conceived as the use of logical reasoning or rational thought, or the application of any particular standards of precision or methodological rules (Feyerabend, 2010). Furthermore, it would be naïve to think that facts are ever completely independent of the observer or separate from theories about those facts (Hacking, 2012), or that scientific knowledge is acquired independently of its social, cultural and historical contexts (Foucault, 2002).

1.1 Clothing and Science

The psychology of science involves a number of distinctive elements which could be related to the presence of clothing. As a covering and enclosure of the body, clothing tends to detach humans sensually from their surroundings and promote a covered perception of nature. The scientific quest can arise as a consequence of these effects of clothing, as a desire to uncover what lies beneath the surface of nature and, in a detached intellectual fashion, reconnect with nature.

1.2 Definitions

Before exploring each of these three processes and how they may derive from the presence of clothing, definitions are given for curiosity, science, clothing, and dress.

1.2.1 Curiosity

Like science, curiosity is exploratory but unlike science, curiosity is not necessarily concerned with discovering any hidden truths about nature (Litman, 2005). Presumably, curiosity has been present throughout the course of hominin evolution, limited neither to Homo sapiens nor to higher primates; curiosity is evident in many animal species (Kidd & Hayden, 2015). Curiosity is most pronounced in childhood and has an exploratory motive that adopts a more cognitive approach than the simple sense of wonder, which includes an aesthetic appreciation of phenomena as presented to the senses:

Wonder touches the experience of naked being, while curiosity is more in the realm of rational exploration (Lindholm, 2018, p. 988)

In essence, wonder corresponds to asking the question ‘what?’ with regards to a phenomenon while the question ‘why?’ reflects curiosity; where curiosity begins to merge into a scientific quest is in seeking to discern the underlying causal relationships hidden beneath immediate perception:

Causal relationships are rarely obvious, but dwell behind veils of bewildering perceptions (ibid., p. 991).

1.2.2 Science

What distinguishes science is the attempt to look beneath the facts (however defined) to achieve a deeper understanding of the world:

A natural assumption to make about scientific knowledge is that it tells us much about the nature of the world that goes well beyond what it appears to be like on the surface… Science describes not just the observable world but also the world that lies behind the appearances (Chalmers, 2013, p. 209).

In addition to natural curiosity, science has three psychological elements, each of which may reflect the effects of clothing as cover:

  1. 1.

    detachment: clothing reduces sensual connection with nature;

  2. 2.

    covering: nature is seen as veiled, like the body;

  3. 3.

    uncovering: a desire to expose the hidden surface of nature.

1.2.3 Clothing

The proposed psychological repercussions of clothing result from an intrinsic property of clothing, namely cover. This property of cover corresponds to the precise definition of clothing in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary:

items worn to cover the body (Stevenson & Waite, 2011, p. 271).

Clothing differs from terms like ‘dress’ and ‘costume’ which do not necessarily involve any covering of the skin surface. Such terms are not synonymous with clothing, as they encompass a broader range of items and including modifications of the unclad surface of the body like tattooing, body painting, shaving, piercing and decorative scarification (Eicher & Evenson, 2015). The definition of clothing as cover distinguishes clothing from adornment of the body, or dress—a function acquired by clothes in the course of evolution.

1.2.4 Dress

The need to distinguish clothing from dress is widely acknowledged (Ember & Ember, 2015; Entwistle, 2023), although it is also argued that the appearance of clothing is paramount and hence clothing is always dress (Carter, 2017). A leading proponent of viewing clothing as dress was Roland Barthes, who privileged the social ‘meaning’ of clothes over the three standard theories about the origins of clothing—

…as protection against harsh weather, out of modesty for hiding nudity and for ornamentation to get noticed. This is all true. But we must add another function, which seems to me to be more important: the function of meaning. Man has dressed himself in order to carry out a signifying activity. The wearing of an item of clothing is fundamentally an act of meaning that goes beyond modesty, ornamentation and protection. It is an act of signification and therefore a profoundly social act at the very heart of the dialectic of society (Barthes, 2013, pp. 90–91).

Reflecting the contemporary situation in most of the world where clothing does function mainly as dress, the Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines dress primarily in relation to clothes, with decoration of the body a secondary meaning (Stevenson & Waite, 2011, p. 435). Furthermore, any garment can be used for different purposes depending on circumstances; in traditional Indigenous Australian societies, for example, kangaroo skins and possum fur cloaks were used variously as clothes, rugs, bags, and blankets, not usually as dress (Gilligan, 2007).

2 Psychological Elements

Insofar as the psychological attributes of science may derive originally from clothing, the origins of science will be located not in general predispositions like curiosity. Rather, the prehistoric origins of science can be sought in what is known, or can be inferred, about the evolution of clothing. Furthermore, the posited role of cover suggests that the beginnings of science are likely to be first detectible with the advent of substantial body covering (tailored garment assemblages, for instance), and more so with the emergence of modesty and genital concealment. Archaeological evidence for the development of clothing in the paleolithic and neolithic eras, along with possible precursors of scientific cognitions in prehistory, will be examined below. First, each of the three proposed psychological elements is considered: detachment, covering, and a desire to uncover, or discover.

2.1 Detachment

As opposed to mere curiosity, science involves a detachment of the human observer from nature, an intellectualised approach that is separated from subjective experience. Indeed, science involves a necessary distrust of sensual experience as a reliable way to understand the world. This need for detachment has long been recognized as a key requirement for science, although it has not hitherto been connected with clothing.

Historians and philosophers of science have highlighted a pivotal period in the seventeenth century designated as the scientific revolution, starting with the publication of Copernicus’ heliocentric model of the solar system (Kuhn, 1957). The key breakthrough came with the work of Galileo, whose discoveries with a telescope—notably the moons of Jupiter—demonstrated how a combination of careful observation and dispassionate logic could form the foundations of a more reliable route to knowledge, capable of revealing truths about nature that otherwise remain hidden from human eyes.

2.1.1 Galileo and Sensual Detachment

Galileo famously described the universe as a book written in the language of mathematics. In order to understand the universe, the first step is to learn its language. Not so well known, though, is that at this critical juncture in history—the dawn of modern science—Galileo insisted that sensory experience is not only unreliable but an impediment to establishing truth about the world. To be scientific, the scientist must discount all subjective sensations experienced in perception (such as touch and smell, along with any associated feelings of pleasure or disgust). According to Galileo in 1623, the universe

…cannot be understood unless one first learns to understand the language and knows the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures…

I do not believe that in order to stimulate in us tastes, odors, and sounds, external bodies require anything other than sizes, shapes, quantity, and slow or fast motions. I think that if one takes away ears, tongues, and noses, there indeed remains the shapes, numbers, and motions, but not the odors, tastes, or sounds; outside the living animal these are nothing but names, just as tickling and titillation are nothing but names if we remove the armpits and the skin…

Suppose I move my hand first over a marble statue and then over a living man. Regarding the action coming from my hand, from the point of view of the hand the action over one subject is the same as that over the other; it consists of primary attributes, namely, motion and touch, and we do not use any other names. But the animate body that receives such an action feels various sensations depending on where it is touched. For example, if it is touched on the soles of the feet, on the knees, or in the armpits, besides touch it feels another sensation to which we have given a particular name, calling it tickling. This sensation is entirely ours and not at all in the hand; I think it would be a great error to want to say that, besides motion and touching, the hand has within itself another property different from these, namely, the power to tickle, such that tickling is an attribute inherent in it. Similarly, a piece of paper or a feather lightly brushed over any part of our body… produces an almost intolerable titillation… That titillation is entirely in us and not in the feather, and if the animate and sensitive body is removed, it is nothing but an empty name. Now, I believe that many qualities that are attributed to natural bodies (such as tastes, odors, colors, and others) may have a similar and not greater reality [italics original] (Galilei, 2008, pp. 183–187).

These extraordinary remarks by Galileo illustrate the extent to which science relies on sensual detachment to achieve its objectivity. It is not simply that observations must be rendered independent of the observer, but the observations must be decontaminated from the sensual qualities of human perception. Decontamination is accomplished by applying pure logic and mathematical quantification, and this ideal mathematical universe discovered by Galileo in the seventeenth century marks the historical beginning of modern science (Husserl, 1970).

2.1.2 Science and the Lifeworld

Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, emphasized this requirement in science to make a mental ‘disconnexion from Nature’ (Husserl, 2012, p. 110). Husserl described humans as living within an actual context that he called the ‘lifeworld’ (Husserl, 1970, p. 49), which includes sensual experience. Husserl’s lifeworld stands opposed to the objective world of modern science with its prioritizing of mathematical numbers as disembodied entities that can ostensibly free humans from the limitations of a situated, embodied presence.

2.1.3 Logical Disconnection

Combined with dispassionate observation deprived of any sensuality, science relies on the use of dispassionate thinking in the form of logic. Again, the stress is on ensuring a disconnection from immediate experience to achieve reliability. In its ultimate formulation, analytic philosophy, even the most objective observations must be distrusted along with the inherent ambiguities of language. Only a mathematical or ‘pure’ kind of logic is deemed capable of yielding reliable knowledge:

Hence, if there is any knowledge of general truths at all, there must be some knowledge of general truths which is independent of empirical evidence, i.e. does not depend upon the data of sense…

Such general knowledge is to be found in logic… in such propositions of pure logic we have the self-evident general propositions of which we were in search…

Since it does not mention any particular thing, or even any particular quality or relation, it is wholly independent of the accidental facts of the existent world, and can be known, theoretically, without any experience of particular things or their qualities and relations [italics original] (Russell, 1914, pp. 56–57).

The purity of pure logic refers to the absence of any infection by sensory input. Likewise, the ideal quality of mathematics depends on a total lack of sensory connection to the world. As intellectual tools employed by objective science, logic and mathematics require detachment from immediate experience for their very existence.

2.1.4 Clothing and Detachment

Detachment raises the question of what attaches humans to the world in the first place. The answer is not only visual perception, important though vision may be with respect to cover. A more basic attachment is through the surface of the skin. The primary sensory function of skin is to facilitate direct tactile contact with the world, along with other functions that include detecting temperature, movement, and position of the body in space. Although the formative role of touch is ‘underrated’ in the contemporary human world, among other primates the role of touch is ‘central’ to social learning and crucial for young primates to develop a normal ‘experience’ of the world (Jablonski, 2013, p. 97). Tactile perception is inherently sensual and emotional, or hedonic, linked neurologically with feelings of pleasure and pain (McGlone et al., 2014; Zimmerman et al., 2014). In psychoanalytic terms, the ‘entire body surface, the whole skin, is equipped with a potential erotogeneity’ (Laplanche, 2011, p. 255). The skin is the human body’s largest sensory organ—in fact, the largest organ per se—and skin is what fundamentally attaches people to their surroundings, objectively and subjectively (Harvey, 2011; Classen, 2012).

Regrettably, no scientific studies have examined how clothing may affect somatosensory brain structure and modify the human capacity to connect with the immediate environment, although some recent studies are suggestive (e.g., Rezaei et al., 2021). Research on neuroplasticity would suggest that a lifelong reduction in tactile sensation due to clothes will have enduring effects on functional brain architecture and somatosensory capacity (Merzenich et al., 2013; Sieben et al., 2015; Fernández-Teruel, 2022).

A few experiments conducted in the 1960’s on the skin (using the forearm) reported that tactile acuity was increased rather than decreased after a week of sensory deprivation, whereas constant light pressure resulted in reduced acuity (Aftanus & Zubek, 1963). A subsequent study could not replicate the increased acuity when testing the hand rather than the forearm (Weinstein et al., 1967), and sensory deprivation research has since fallen into disrepute (Raz, 2013). The relevance of these limited experimental studies for speculating about long-term effects of wearing clothes are unclear, however, and specific research on clothing is needed. The sensory effects of clothing are likely to be complex and perhaps paradoxical in some respects, especially with regard to hedonic (pleasant) touch (Essick et al., 2010). Skin sensitivity may increase locally and/or transiently but the reduced stimulation and variation will reduce perceptual capacity at the cerebral level in the long term. Most importantly, regular covering of the skin surface will deprive the brain of affective (sensual) learning experiences derived from regular hedonic skin contacts, both with others and with the environment.

2.2 Covering

In addition to a reduction in tactile input, clothing has a massive impact on human visual perception. The psychological repercussions of covering the appearance of the body are profound and, as implied by the concept of an extended mind (discussed below), the sense of being covered is not restricted to the body surface but will spread into the surroundings. Ultimately, the whole world is covered.

Cover is the psychological aspect of clothing that grants scientific enquiry its unique quality. Science not only reflects a perception of nature as separate or detached from humans but also a perception that nature is clothed, as are humans. Together with sensual detachment, a perception of nature as being covered defines the scientific enterprise:

Scientific theories are to be seen as identifying the structure of reality underlying observable phenomena (Chalmers, 2013, p. 258).

Einstein described the covered quality of the world as a kind of natural clothing for the universe. Following Galileo, he said mathematics is an indispensable tool for uncovering the surface of nature. Einstein went further, though, hinting that the hidden surface of nature is actually made of mathematics. In which case, mathematics is the only possible means of making contact with the hidden surface. Just as the human body is naturally clothed (according to Einstein), so too is the surface of the universe clothed with the ‘ideas’ of geometry and mathematics:

For even if it should appear that the universe of ideas cannot be deduced from experience by logical means, but is, in a sense, a creation of the human mind, without which no science is possible, nevertheless this universe of ideas is just as little independent of the nature of our experiences as clothes are to the form of the human body (Einstein, 1922, p. 2).

2.2.1 Touching the Veil

Following Husserl’s lead, Derrida’s breakthrough began with his translation of Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry (Salmon, 2021, pp. 71–73). Derrida spoke about the need to remove the ‘ideal sedimentations of science’ (like geometry and mathematics) in order to ‘discover the nakedness of the pregeometrical world’ (Derrida, 1989, p. 119). Making a play on the French words silk (soie) and self (soi), Derrida linked woven cloth with the self, which seems to be veiled:

By virtue of this strange verdict… one would never again reach the thing itself, one would above all never touch it. Wouldn’t even touch the veil behind which a thing is supposed to be standing… Ah, how tired we are, how I would like finally to touch ‘veil’, the word and the thing thus named, the thing itself and the vocable!... For you must know right now: to touch ‘that’ which one calls ‘veil’ is to touch everything. You’ll leave nothing intact… as soon as you take on the word ‘veil’… (Derrida, 1996, p. 5).

2.2.2 A Phenomenological Recovery

Beginning with Galileo, Husserl described how the creation of an idealized representation of reality based on geometry and mathematics came to be mistaken for the world itself, fabricating an objective world that is subjectively detached from humans and covered over by the entities of geometry and mathematics—a ‘well-fitting garb of ideas’ (Husserl, 1970, p. 51). However, the covering of nature upon which science relies is not restricted to perceiving a mathematical and geometric structure, as Einstein maintained. Regardless of whether the underlying reality is actually mathematical, the appearance of nature is perceived as concealing a hidden structure. Clearly, this novel interpretation of perceptual covering as a product of wearing clothes represents a further and, arguably, more profound phenomenological reduction of science. In effect it is a double reduction, in that it uncovers the cause of cover.

Husserl’s student Heidegger spoke about the difficulty—if not the impossibility—of phenomenology’s attempt to establish a more realistic basis for science. Heidegger saw this difficulty as stemming from a frustrating refusal of phenomena in the lifeworld to appear openly or be revealed readily to humans. In Being and Time, Heidegger observed that all phenomena seem to be ‘concealed’ from our immediate perception, or ‘covered up’—and the task is to find some way around this ‘if we are to have any prospect of exposing being’ (Heidegger, 2010, pp. 34–35).

The apparent truth in this pessimistic prognosis for science—even a phenomenological form of science—derives from the fact that all perception seems to involve an unavoidable delay, a distancing, between a stimulus (or event) and its conscious apprehension. Since consciousness can only contact the rest of reality via an intervening process of perception, the conscious mind can never really make direct, immediate contact—the mind itself can never succeed in touching the surface of reality. In that sense, cover is an inevitable aspect of existence. However, this dismal prospect depends on certain conventional assumptions about consciousness and reality which may be mistaken. As discussed below, the solution may lie in recognizing that consciousness is both embodied—extending to the surface of the skin—and, also, extended beyond the skin into the surroundings—in theory to the edge of the universe, however attenuated. Perception, in other words, is more of a medium than a message. Freud toyed with this notion of an initial ‘oceanic’ state of the infant mind being at ‘one with the external world’ and, then, a subsequent disconnection during development—which Freud blamed on weaning from the breast, rupturing a primal, sensual bond between the mind and the world (Freud, 1964, pp. 65–67). Whether an initial oneness is illusory is not made entirely clear in Freud’s writing but, in any case, a better case can be made for clothing as the cause of the disruption. In that case, detachment is not necessarily intrinsic to perception and nor is it bundled with human existence but—as happens with science—the cognitive and sensual severing is historically situated.

The third component of science related to clothing is the psychological motive that drives scientific enquiry: the desire to uncover. A full phenomenological reduction of science involves exposing science as a desire to uncover. Although this desire to uncover is part of what Husserl might consider the natural attitude, it is contingent on being covered.

2.3 Scientific Desire

The desire to discover a hidden structure beneath the surface of the natural world comprises the very essence of science:

The notion of discovering an underlying order in matter is man’s basic concept for exploring nature. The architecture of things reveals a structure below the surface, a hidden grain which, when it is laid bare, makes it possible to take natural formations apart and assemble them in new arrangements. For me this is the step at which theoretical science begins (Bronowski, 1973, p. 95).

The hidden surface of nature is alluring, even sexually so, since it represents a projection of the human skin surface onto the surrounding world. The desire to uncover nature—to remove the cloak of mystery that shrouds the world—raises the issue of identifying the psychological drive itself. The drive process can be identified as sublimation, which is not unique to science.

2.3.1 Sublimation

Sublimation of the sexual drive was regarded by Freud as a prime psychological motivation for scientific enquiry, a proposition outlined in his biographical study of Leonardo da Vinci. Freud failed to pursue this novel insight about science, strangely; perhaps it was too close to home. In da Vinci’s case, the motive was repressed homosexual feelings, which Freud detected in da Vinci’s account of a childhood dream and in the sexual symbolism of his paintings:

He had merely converted his passion into a thirst for knowledge… He has investigated instead of loving… it found reinforcement from what were originally sexual instinctual forces, so that later it could take the place of a part of the subject’s sexual life… most people succeed in directing very considerable portions of their sexual instinctual forces to their professional activity. The sexual instinct is particularly well fitted to make contributions of this kind since it is endowed with a capacity for sublimation: that is, it has the power to replace its immediate aim by other aims which may be valued more highly and which are not sexual (Freud, 1957, pp. 74–78).

The quest to uncover nature makes science an attractive conduit for sublimation. The central element in this desire to uncover is a sexual motive, corresponding with the essential function of clothing in the contemporary world as concealing human genitalia. In classical psychoanalytic terms, the ultimate goal of the quest to uncover nature’s secrets is an uncovering of its sexual apparatus.

2.3.2 A Feminist Critique

The nature pursued by science is generally gendered as female, as in mother nature. The gendering of nature as a female object of desire reflects the male domination of science and, insofar as the male sex is privileged in science, the femininizing of nature reflects a heterosexual hegemony. The sublimated sexuality of scientific activity—a feminized nature possessing hidden secrets to be probed and penetrated by masculine science—is recognized in feminist critiques of science. Sexual metaphors have allegedly been exposed in the writings of leading figures in the Enlightenment, notably Francis Bacon, illustrating the sexualized psychology of the scientific worldview and its experimental methodology (Merchant, 2013).

The feminist interpretation of the experimental method as amounting to the ‘rape’ (Park, 2006) of nature may be open to criticism (Vickers, 2008). Nonetheless, it does raise ‘important questions’ about the nature of scientific enquiry (Sokal, 2008, pp. 119–123, 142). The scientific enterprise is portrayed with imagery of covered secrets and sexualized behaviors (Merchant, 2008) while the scientist—male or female—seeks to expose a world that is veiled.

2.3.3 Archaeology of Science

The sociological critique of science aims to unravel the historical roots of science as a culturally privileged discourse about the world, a discourse validated not so much by its undoubted achievements but by the dominance of Western culture and values. Foucault invoked archaeology as an analogical method to identify the layers (or ‘thresholds’) through which certain forms of knowledge have passed during the historical development of the modern sciences. These processes are hidden, or sedimented, in history, hence shielded from critical analysis. Mathematics is the classic case, a single momentous ‘rupture’ between the human and natural worlds which, as Foucault remarks, is actually a ‘bad example’ because it would seem that the origins of mathematics cannot be unearthed (Foucault, 2002, p. 208). For other sciences, it should be possible to uncover the historical sequences of events which have allowed certain discourses to become formalized (and legitimised) as science:

what one is trying to uncover are discursive practices in so far as they give rise to a corpus of knowledge, in so far as they assume the status and role of a science (ibid., p. 210).

Nevertheless, the sociological uncovering of science is hopelessly hamstrung since its scope is restricted to the historical era. The psychological foundations of science—beginning with geometry and mathematics—lie further back in time, in the prehistoric era. The appropriate strategy for uncovering the formative process is indeed archaeological, not as analogy but as the scientific means to expose the prehistoric foundations. In the next section, evidence from archaeology which might be relevant to the origins of science (and clothing) is reviewed. Indeed, the field of archaeology is almost an archetype for scientific activity: uncovering the visible surface of the earth by excavating hidden layers of sediment, analogous to removing layers of clothing. In digging, the archaeologist’s hands become dirty—symbolically engaging in a shameful activity, albeit in sublimated guise.

3 Evolutionary Aspects

If clothing is implicated, the emergence of science should be related to the advent of clothing in the past and also to the presence of clothing among different cultures. The elements of its psychological components should be found in a wider context than Western civilisation and its development will extend back further than the Renaissance, beyond even the Ancient Egyptians and Ancient Greeks. In fact, if clothing is implicated, the origin of science will extend back in time before the dawn of history, into prehistory.

The field of anthropology includes two disciplines, prehistory and ethnography, which offer strategies for assessing the proposed role of clothing in the psychological evolution of science. The first source is prehistory, where archaeology can shed light on the evolution of clothing and, perhaps, yield signs of proto-scientific thinking prior to the historical era. The second anthropological resource is ethnography, which studies the full range of human societies, including those societies where people were habitually naked—providing cross-cultural data to explore the claimed association between the presence of clothing and science. Before looking at the ethnographic picture, the evidence from prehistory is reviewed. Prehistory straddles two periods: the paleolithic era, extending from 3.3 million years ago until the end of the last ice age nearly 12,000 years ago, and the neolithic era, which includes the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture that led to the emergence of state-level social structures (‘civilization’) and the beginning of recorded history in Mesopotamia around 5,000 years ago.

3.1 Prehistoric Evidence

Any precursors of science before the historical era are difficult to recognize in the absence of written records, and the prehistoric foundations of scientific thinking are poorly understood. Problems of limited visibility arise also with clothing, a highly perishable class of artefact that has left few tangible traces of its prehistoric origins. Nonetheless, the proposed causal relationship between clothing and science can be explored by reference to available scientific evidence about the origins of clothing and, to a lesser extent, prehistoric evidence for psychological precursors of science.

3.1.1 Paleolithic Clothing

In the world today, clothes subserve a host of indispensable social and psychological functions, but evidence from multiple disciplines indicates that the origins of clothing in prehistory relate to its function as thermal insulation from cold (Gilligan, 2010). As a uniquely human behavioral adaption to cold, clothing resulted from two trends in hominin evolution. First, nakedness in the biological sense: loss of adequate fur cover, which probably was established by three million years ago, if not earlier (Rogers et al., 2004; Reed et al., 2007). Second was the onset of the Pleistocene ice ages 2.6 million years ago. As a consequence of this conjunction between climate change and reduced effective fur cover, a biologically naked primate found itself exposed in a world where it was no longer welcome without clothes. At least, that was the case for hominins who ventured beyond the tropics.

During the Pleistocene, hominin populations gradually expanded out of Africa into the middle latitudes of Eurasia during warm interglacial periods, retracting southwards when colder conditions returned. After an unusually warm, prolonged interglacial from 400,000 years ago, hominins began to remain in middle latitudes during the cold climate phases. Their stone toolkits increasingly comprised hide-scrapers, providing evidence for the manufacture of simple clothes in the form of loose capes and cloaks. Throughout the Pleistocene, the presence of hide-scrapers at archaeological sites fluctuated in concert with the changing climates, suggesting that simple, rudimentary clothes were used when required and discarded when not needed for warmth (Hoffecker, 2017; Hosfield, 2020).

Regular and more complete body cover was established only in the latter part of the last ice age, following the development of fitted garments that enclosed the limbs and torso, with the option of adding extra layers—complex clothes (Gilligan, 2010; Collard et al., 2016). This complex form of clothing afforded superior insulation from cold weather and protection from wind chill. Consistent with the development of complex clothing in response to cold climate phases, the archaeological record has yielded evidence for the technological advances associated with tailoring garments to cover the body more completely. The key technologies were bone awls, appearing first in southern Africa as the global climate began to cool during early phases of the last glacial cycle around 100,000 years ago (Backwell et al., 2008). As H. sapiens expanded into the Caucasus and southern Europe, bone awls featured in the toolkits and accompanied populations that pushed across Eurasia to Russia (Anikovich et al., 2007) and China (Zhang et al., 2023). Production of finely-sewn, closely-fitted garments was facilitated by the advent of eyed needles which began to appear in Russia (Shunkov et al., 2020) and China (Wang et al., 2020) from 50,000 years ago, as northern mid-latitude environments experienced colder conditions, during a series of severe fluctuations in the global climate leading into the LGM—the Last Glacial Maximum—22,000 years ago (Golovanova et al., 2010; Hoffecker, 2017; d’Errico et al., 2018).

3.1.2 Body Decoration and Dress

Archaeological evidence for body adornment in prehistory includes the use of ochre (Roebroeks et al., 2012), implements for body tattooing (Gates St-Pierre, 2018), and pieced shells and beads (Stiner et al., 2013). Beads are found with the advent of complex, tailored clothes in Eurasia. The most remarkable example occurs at the Sungir burial site near Moscow 30,000 years ago, where thousands of mammoth ivory beads were arranged in patterns on the skeletons indicating that the beads were sewn onto tailored garments (Trinkaus & Buzhilova, 2018).

The evolution of ornamentation with clothing reflects the transfer of adornment from the exposed skin surface onto the surface of clothing, as the skin became unavailable due to routine covering by fitted clothing. The tipping point in this pivotal transformation of clothing into dress came in the latter part of the last ice age, in the middle and high latitudes of Eurasia where complex clothing was crucial to human survival. Over subsequent millennia, clothing acquired the important social functions of body decoration, which meant that body covering would continue thereafter regardless of climate. Furthermore, this routine covering was geographically and culturally localised, as were the psychological sequelae.

3.1.3 Neolithic Detachment

With the onset of the post-glacial Holocene epoch 11,700 years ago, among the descendants of mid-latitude Eurasian populations that had experienced LGM conditions, the human body was covered by clothes for reasons other than thermal protection. Agriculture began to develop in some of these communities, providing natural fibres like wool and cotton to make warm-weather apparel from woven cloth (Gilligan, 2019). The technology of weaving was not new; weaving is well-documented in the last ice age (Soffer, 2004) and weaving was utilized widely among hunter-gatherers into recent times, mainly to manufacture baskets, strings and ropes (Adovasio et al., 2014; Balme et al., 2022). What was new was the shift in clothing material, from animal hides and furs to making clothes from woven cloth.

Along with a new kind of clothing, agriculture ushered in a new kind of human existence where all of the basic resources required for food and clothes could be obtained within an enclosed ecosystem. Detachment from nature was a prerequisite for the transition to agriculture and, equally, a reduced engagement with nature was a repercussion of the demise of hunting and gathering (Barker & Janowski, 2011; Naveh & Bird-David, 2014). Among the proto-scientific cognitions involved in neolithic agriculture was the abstraction of time perception, first witnessed with notational markings in the upper paleolithic and formalized with the first calendars in farming communities (Aveni, 2002). Temporal distancing from the present opened up a future perspective, necessary for the planning and anticipation of delayed rewards upon which agriculture is predicated. Together with the trend towards a sedentary lifestyle (Hayden, 2000), these momentous postglacial developments signified a human retreat from nature, effectively adding another layer—an ecological layer—to the layer of clothing that already demarcated humans from the natural environment.

A further layer was added with urbanisation, as permanent villages and then cities arose in the agrarian settlements. Fences and walls acted as a ‘third skin’ (Drake, 2007)—clothing being the second skin—enclosing and detaching humans from the environment in a more concrete form. Psychologically, the walls and fences were an external projection or duplication of clothing, with textiles possibly implicated in the initial fabrication of these outer enclosures:

The art of dressing the body’s nakedness (if one does not count the painting of one’s skin…) is presumably a more recent invention than the use of coverings for encampments and spatial enclosures.

The wall is the architectural element that formally represents and makes visible enclosed space as such, absolutely, as it were…

Whether the gradual development of these inventions occurred in this order or not matters little to us here, for it is certain that a kind of crude weaving began with the pen, as a means of dividing the “home,” the inner life from the outer life, as a formal construct of the spatial idea. It preceded the simple wall made from stone or another material [italics original] (Semper, 2004, pp. 247–248).

Collectively, these trends—sedentism, agriculture, and urbanisation—combined to enclose humanity psychologically. The mid-Holocene coalescence of these interrelated trends (related ultimately to clothing) created the crucible in which science began to congeal around 5,000 years ago.

3.1.4 Paleolithic Precursors

The first inklings of paleolithic proto-science may be detectable in ice age Eurasia from 40,000 years ago, during the upper paleolithic. Aside from the famous artworks in France and Spain with life-like depictions of animals on cave walls, there are enigmatic marks carved on animal bones that appear to be notations. As symbolic or cognitive representations, the regularly-arranged markings and notches may refer, for instance, to phases of the moon (Marshack, 1972, pp. 268–269), serving as early time-keepers or as calendars (Bacon et al., 2023). Other markings may suggest the beginnings of geometric and mathematical abstraction:

What we may have, more accurately, is a tradition in which the artist is no longer referring for his models, stories, and ceremonies to real animals and plants… but is working rather with traditional, mythological, geometricized, and abstracted images and concepts… Obviously something had changed and was changing… Time and space had begun to be divided and extended in increasingly complex human terms (Marshack, 1972, pp. 343, 374).

The clues which hint at proto-scientific thinking in the paleolithic era are found in cooler regions and during cooler climate phases of the last ice age, notably in France and in southern Africa around 40,000 years ago (d’Errico et al., 2017; Bacon et al., 2023). By inference, these earliest archaeological signs of symbolic abstraction may signal the beginnings of an intellectual detachment from immediate sensory experience of the world. Coincidentally, these possible precursors of scientific thinking occurred where people needed to wear more substantial clothes.

The timing and location of evidence for proto-scientific thinking in the late paleolithic is noteworthy since neither in Europe nor in southern Africa do the earliest signs correspond with any major biological changes—no increased cranial capacity, for example. In both instances, the earliest evidence appears long after the emergence of H. sapiens around 300,000 years ago (Hublin et al., 2017; Schlebusch et al., 2017). Instead, the archaeological evidence is consistent with proto-scientific cognitions corresponding to a heightened need for cover. In the case of southern Africa, a notched bone artefact was found at the site of Border Cave where, among the tools excavated by archaeologists, there were bone awls for sewing tailored clothes (d’Errico et al., 2017).

3.2 Ethnographic Evidence

Societies where clothes are largely absent are conceptualized in anthropology mainly in terms of their economic and social dimensions: a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and an egalitarian social structure. With respect to the psychology of science, though, these aspects are less relevant than another aspect that attracts less academic attention: lack of enclosure by clothing.

3.2.1 A Naked View of Nature

The relationship between nakedness and a close connection to the natural environment is illustrated by the Australian Aborigines. The Indigenous Tasmanians, for instance, were not separated from the environment by a routine use of clothes, nor by any other enduring fabrications (Péron, 1809; Gilligan, 2007). Little can be said about how they perceived themselves and their world but, in all likelihood, they experienced themselves as living entirely within nature. Aboriginal conceptions of reality did not need a linear notion of time—the Tasmanians had no word for time (Plomley, 1976)—and neither did they need an abstract idea of space (as distance and empty void). Without romanticising this Indigenous existence as ‘the veritable youth of the world’ (Rousseau, 2011, p. 74), these routinely unclad people lived in the timeless present and occupied place rather than space, with place inhabited and animate (Kohn, 2013). Similarly, the traditional mobility of hunter-gatherers served to collapse distance and merge people with the landscape:

Time and space are axiomatic philosophical concepts… But even to the extent that humans have made them into mathematically universal concepts, they are not habitable as such. We live in places and times (places more than times, as I contend), and certainly not spaces… movement is more important to Aboriginal modes of being than territoriality, and lines (or pathways of movement) more than boundaries… Being and belonging have not yet been prised loose from country… The indigenous emphasis on participation and a world lived-in means an absence of the reflective distance that allows terms such as ‘cosmos’ and ‘cosmology’… a dangerous dislocation from place and reorientation of being in time (Muecke, 2004, pp. 13–18).

Anthropologists and philosophers of science have demonstrated how the sense of being separate from nature—which underlies the detachment of science—is projected onto other cultures which may not share this view of reality (Latour, 1993). Not only does this assumption of a shared objective worldview devalue the perspective of others, it deprives science of the opportunity to use an outsider’s position to problematize science and, paradoxically, to analyse the scientific approach more objectively:

The exaltation of Science as the archetype of valid knowledge and the transcendent source of truth inhibits any reflexive thought on this bizarre cosmology that the Moderns have created, since the very principle of its configuration—namely, the dissociation between an homogenous nature whose mysteries we have the means of penetrating and heterogeneous cultures prone to arbitrariness—cannot be questioned without threatening the equilibrium of this majestic modern edifice… My purpose is not to denounce scientific or technical activity—a futile task—but rather to emphasize how difficult it is to grasp this central dimension of our own society with the kind of “view from afar” through which ethnologists observe and analyze non-modern societies… In fact, the analyst of modern societies, immersed like those he studies in a naturalist cosmology presumed to be coextensive with all of humanity, does not have the boost of a decentred point of view from where he could turn back upon himself, making him a stranger to himself, and invite him to question more vigorously the foundations of his own position in the world... ethnologists who have an experience of non-modern societies find themselves in a situation more favourable to overcoming their own myopia, because they are confronted by systems of objectification of the world which do not coincide with their own and which shed a different light on the latter, thus making its oddities and characteristic traits stand out (Descola, 2011, pp. 61–63).

As intimated by Descola, the decentred ethnographic view—the view from outside the Western scientific narrative—can be deployed to critically examine the very nature of science. However, the mainstream narrative tends to normalize an ‘opposition between nature and culture’ and hence reify an historical hegemony that makes it difficult to ‘situate our own exoticism’ (Descola, 2005, pp. 85–88). Compared to settled agricultural communities, a mobile hunter-gatherer economy will connect people more closely to the natural environment. That this economic aspect of agriculture contributes to human disconnection from the natural environment is reasonably obvious, but anthropologists are also beginning to appreciate the enormous implications of the psychological dimension. Hunter-gatherer societies—especially those where clothes are not worn routinely—do not share the same scientific sense of detachment, the perception of nature as veiled, and nor do they necessarily harbor a desire to reveal its hidden secrets.

3.2.2 Indigenous Knowledge

The decolonizing of knowledge systems in anthropology has shown how hunter-gatherers adopt a different approach to understanding nature based on engaging more intimately with their surroundings, psychologically as well as economically. Indigenous societies encompass a wide cultural spectrum: some communities are sedentary and may engage in agricultural activities, and those with hunter-gatherer economies vary in terms of mobility and social relations—the egalitarianism that typified Australian Aborigines and African foragers in their traditional lifestyles was not shared by the ‘complex’ hunter-gatherer societies found in North America, for instance (Kelly, 2007, 302–331). Similarly, levels of body covering vary enormously. Nevertheless, non-Western societies in Africa, Asia and the Americas have developed sophisticated knowledge systems that, collectively, reflect different ways of perceiving the natural world (e.g., Aikenhead and Ogawa, 2007; Delbourgo, 2019). Until recently, an appreciation of these alternative knowledge systems was hampered by a Western academic hegemony which regarded them as inferior and ‘unscientific’ (Ogungbure, 2013). Due to the immense prestige of Western science, to merely acknowledge that Indigenous knowledge systems do not embody the psychological qualities that distinguish science can be misconstrued as demeaning. Without implying any such value judgement, Indigenous knowledge systems generally lack the detachment of science, and instead they utilize an intimate involvement with nature to obtain knowledge. These attributes are illustrated by Native Americans, whose ‘Native science’ prioritizes sensory engagement and aims for a detailed mapping of the world as it is given to the senses, rather than seeking to remove a perceptual cover and expose a hidden surface:

Native science is based on the perception gained from using the entire body of our senses in direct participation with the natural world… it is a map of natural reality… The Indigenous “physicist” not only observes nature, but also participates in it with all his or her sensual being… This practiced ability to enter into a heightened sense of awareness of the natural world allows the Indigenous physicist intimate understanding of the processes of nature… (Cajete, 2000, pp. 2–20).

The purpose in Indigenous ‘science’ is to enhance the quality of an existing sense of contact with nature through a heightened sensory awareness. Such ‘science’ assumes and requires a feeling of closeness, not a distancing. Rather than distrusting sensuality à la Galileo, sensual elements of perception are considered indispensable to gaining a better appreciation of the myriad qualities of nature. Instead of perceiving nature as hidden from humans, Indigenous ‘science’ sees nature as already open and available to human perception. There is no cover or veil to be removed, and the scientific task is not to expose the naked surface of nature but to experience its subtleties more closely and intensely:

Native science reflects the understanding that objectivity is founded in subjectivity. There is a stress on direct subjective experience, predicated on a personal and collective closeness to nature, which will lead to an understanding of the subtle qualities of nature… Native science is about creating the inner sensibilities of humans, or the inner ear, which hears the subtle voice of nature… (ibid., pp. 67–73).

Unlike Western science, Indigenous knowledge is not a detached, intellectualized understanding of nature but an immersive, sensual experience. The individual does not need to be excluded in order to apprehend an ideal world of space that exists independently of the observer. On the contrary, Indigenous connection with nature is intrinsically personal and it is localised to the actual place in which the person is present (Williams & Snively, 2016, p. 34). This connection to ‘place’ is what ultimately defines Indigenous knowledge:

Indigenous people… experienced nature as a part of themselves and themselves as a part of nature. They were born of the earth of their place… This is the ultimate definition of being “indigenous” and forms the basis for a fully internalized bonding with that place. It is also a perception that is found in one variation or another among the traditions of Indigenous people throughout the world (Cajete, 2000, pp. 186–187).

3.2.3 Non-Indigenous, Non-Western Science

Situated between Indigenous knowledge systems and Western science lies a third category of knowledge systems, which can be termed non-Indigenous, non-Western. In this category are included the Islamic, Indian and various East Asian knowledge traditions (Kim, 2004; Elman, 2006; Aikenhead & Ogawa, 2007; Gurevitch, 2020). All these cultural traditions are associated with agricultural economies, which means that they are disengaged from the natural world by virtue of their economies as well as by their traditional clothing. Compared to Western science, these in-between systems tend to make less of a demarcation between knowledge of the natural world gained through observation and a spiritual or religious understanding of nature (Subramaniam, 2019; Sterns, 2021). In the Islamic tradition, for example, science still attempts to see behind the outward appearance of the world but the process of revealing a hidden reality relies more on religious revelation than secular science:

In [the] Islamic view, natural sciences have a direct relationship with revelation. Getting to the truth is [the] same as the journey from appearance to the inward (esoteric) dimension. Only revelation can make this journey possible and draw man from the appearance of his existence to his inner dimension… (Montazeritabar 2019, p. 65).

4 Philosophical Insights

Philosophy and science were closely connected in Ancient Greece—Aristotle was reluctant to make a formal distinction (Falcon, 2005). The splitting of philosophy from science as two separate discourses began more recently, in the historical modern era, with the scientific revolution (Snow, 1959; Husserl, 1970; Matthews, 2023). The latter involved experimental intervention and a merging with mathematics to facilitate a more explicit and precise testing of ideas against observations (Ben-Chaim, 2004; Grant, 2007). Western science involves a physical—though suitably de-sensualized—engagement with an externalized nature, whereas philosophy retains a more intellectual approach to achieving the same goal. Empirical science based on experimentation emerged from natural philosophy (Gare, 2018), and its technological applications have underpinned the rise to global dominance of Western culture (Daly, 2021). The differences between Western science and philosophy can be delineated in various ways: as a difference between an experimental methodology versus observational analysis, for example—though the distinction between experiment and observation tends to diminish in practice (Malik, 2017). The differences are often exaggerated and are quite superficial, ultimately; as Merleau-Ponty observed, the difference ‘between philosophy and science when fully understood is imperceptible’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2002, p. 67). The psychological processes are essentially identical: both science and philosophy reflect an intellectual detachment and a desire to reconnect with the natural world by removing its covered appearance and revealing a hidden structure.

4.1 Platonic Detachment

For Plato, the human mind was ideally detached from direct physical contact with the world and also insulated from the degrading sensuality (and mortality) of the human body. This detachment is illustrated in his concept of the world of ideal forms as the basis of knowledge (Plato, 1991, pp. 365–401). In The Allegory of the Cave, Plato relates the teachings of Socrates as to these ideal human qualities:

…the prison-house is the world of sight… and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world… severed from those sensual pleasures, such as eating and drinking, which, like leaden weights, were attached to them at their birth, and which drag them down and turn the vision of their souls upon the things that are below… (ibid., pp. 449–451).

In Ancient Greek philosophy, the route to knowledge relied heavily on a detached intellect, although Aristotle diverged from the mainstream in arguing that the senses are still required to ‘disclose reality in a reliable way’ (Gregoric & Fink, 2022, p. 15). Among the five primary senses—vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch—vision was assigned the top position in the hierarchy of the senses, with tactile perception given the lowest ranking as the most basic (or ‘first’) sense (Aristotle, 2018, p. 23). The privileging of vision over touch in Western thinking has continued to the present, seen for instance in the perception of clothing as dress—which tends to conceal the role of cover in reducing body awareness and promoting a tactile detachment from nature. The amount of scientific research on tactual perception (e.g., Bergmann Tiest, 2010; Katz, 2013) is far exceeded by research on visual—and auditory—perception. One pragmatic justification for a research bias is medical: loss of visual perception (blindness) and auditory perception (deafness) is far more common than impairment of tactile perception, which is localised (in diabetes and leprosy, for example) and never involves a complete loss of touch (Krueger, 2013).

The scientific revolution resulted from a productive merging of the two Greek traditions, Platonic and Aristotelian, blending a detached intellectual approach (in logic and mathematics) with an empirical emphasis on tangible evidence gained through an active uncovering (or dis-covering) of the world, albeit more visually than tactually.

4.2 Descartes and Detachment

The ideal of perceptual detachment became formalized in the mind-body dualism of René Descartes, who effectively invented the mind as a separate entity, distinct from the body. For Descartes it was the intellect that defined human existence: cogito ergo sum—translated usually, if inaccurately, as ‘I think therefore I am’ (Descartes, 2006, p. 73). The dividing line between humanity and nature was drawn sharply and internally, at the imagined boundary between the conscious and the physical self. Descartes devalued bodily existence and he discounted sensory experience as unreliable and almost irrelevant as a way of learning about reality. In Descartes’ view, the only certainty is the existence of the mind and, similarly, the only reliable route to knowledge is the reasoning power of pure thought:

I am now aware that bodies themselves are not properly perceived by the senses or by the faculty of imagination, but only by the intellect, and are not perceived because they are touched or seen but only because they are understood (Descartes, 2013, p. 30).

Descartes described the intellectual process of seeking knowledge as like removing a deceptive cover from appearances, while science is a process akin to unclothing the natural world in order to expose it, to

…look at it as something naked, as if I had stripped off its clothing (ibid.).

Once clothing creates a sense of cover, the true or ‘naked’ surface of the world comes to lie beneath its appearances. Psychologically, covering spreads out beyond the boundary of the body into the surroundings and makes the whole world seem concealed and detached from immediate, sensual experience. Consequently, the detached world of nature appears shrouded in mystery. The veiled statue of Isis in Ancient Egypt, a classic symbol of nature, carried an inscription quoted famously by Kant in his Critique of Judgement:

I am all that is and that was and that shall be, and no mortal hath lifted my veil (Kant, 2005, p. 120).

4.3 Clothing and Embodiment

Before contemplating how clothing may have contributed to the Cartesian myth of a mind detached from the body—a myth that underpins the scientific reliability of logic and mathematics, severed from any sensory contact—an opposing view is gaining ground. Rather than being detached from a veiled world, the mind is fully embedded in the body and, furthermore, mental activity extends beyond the boundary of the body into the environment. As an antithesis to the Cartesian myth, the concept of an extended mind has its origins in the work of Merleau-Ponty, which in turn built upon the insights of Husserl about the artificiality of objective science.

4.3.1 Embodied Perception

In his monumental treatise Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty established that all human perception is embodied. In doing so, he emphasized that perception is infused with sexuality—sexuality is everywhere, ‘an ambiguous atmosphere… coexistent with life’ and therefore it ‘impossible’ to categorize anything as sexual or non-sexual (Merleau-Ponty, 2012, p. 172). Merleau-Ponty’s work has been immensely influential in many fields, ranging from cultural studies to the neurosciences (e.g., Howes, 2014; Craig, 2015; Linden, 2015). Whereas the visual modality perceives objects distant to the body, tactile perception is more intimate, although it is still embodied rather than residing within the mind:

Tactile experience, however, adheres to the surface of the body; we cannot spread it out before ourselves and it does not fully become an object. Correlatively, as the subject of touch… I cannot forget that it is through my body that I go toward the world, tactile experience is accomplished “out in front” of me, and is not centred in me (Merleau-Ponty, 2012, p. 330).

A neglected aspect of human embodiment is how embodiment typically entails the presence of clothes. The covering with clothes is visual and tactile: the bodies that we see (including our own) and the bodies that we touch are usually covered. Experimental studies have examined how tools and prosthetic limbs can become perceptually incorporated into the human body and how, for instance, touching inert limbs can be felt as touching the body (Serino & Haggard, 2010). Yet despite the almost constant presence of clothing on the body, incorporation of clothing into the body image (or schema) has somehow managed to evade scientific scrutiny. Paradoxically, while clothing is very visible as dress, the embodied presence of clothing remains virtually invisible:

Despite the intuitive nature of the idea, very little empirical work has addressed the incorporation of clothes into bodily representations (Holmes & Spence, 2006, p. 35).

To the extent that the body is covered, embodiment of human perception is a covered embodiment, meaning that our humanly-situated perception of the world is a covered perception. It may be true that people see the world with naked eyes (except when wearing sunglasses) and, except when wearing gloves, touch objects with exposed fingertips—although our fingertips constitute a tiny proportion of the total tactile surface and, neurologically, fingertips are geared more to accurate than sensual, or hedonic, sensation (McGlone et al., 2014; Zimmerman et al., 2014, p. 950). Nonetheless, the bodies perceived visually are predominantly covered and most of a person’s tactile surface is usually covered. The unclad skin itself is not a boundary of the body but a sensory opening onto the world (Ingold, 2008); it is the covering with clothing that creates a boundary.

The concept of embodiment is present in Freud’s theorizing about the development of the ego and, in particular, how the ego originates as a ‘projection’ of the body ‘surface’ into the mind (Freud, 1961, p. 26). Like the concept of sublimation (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973, pp. 432–433), this insight about the skin’s role in forming the mind was ‘under-developed’ by Freud (Lafrance, 2009, p. 6). It has since been elaborated in the concept of skin-ego, wherein the non-sensual process of thinking—an ego process—results from the ‘taboo on touching’ and relies on ‘giving up… the pleasures of the skin’ (Anzieu, 2016, p. 149). A role for clothing in this process would seem obvious, although existing notions of a ‘clothing-ego’ are limited to the superficial view of clothing as dress whereby ‘the decorative becomes the corporeal’ (North, 2013, p. 83).

Whether considered as visual or tactile, covering of the body surface has implications for the psychology of science. Since our bodies are fundamental to our perception of the entire world, visual covering makes the whole world appear covered. With regards to tactile perception, covering the body surface with inert material will reduce our sensual contact with the world—a detachment from the sensual which, as Galileo pointed out, is conducive to science.

4.3.2 Extended Mind

Moving beyond embodiment, recent theorizing has advanced further in conceptualizing the human mind as intricately interconnected with the world. Known variously as ‘extended mind’ and ‘E4 cognition’ (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended), the basic point is that mental processes like perception and cognition are actively engaged and interdependent with the world, not isolated in the brain (Rowlands, 2010; Clark, 2011; Carney, 2020). Extended mind—where cognition is ‘distributed among brain, body, and world’ (Clark, 2011, p. 137)—represents the antithesis of the Cartesian myth and, like Merleau-Ponty’s work, has been influential across many disciples, including archaeology (Renfrew, 2004; Hodder, 2012; Malafouris, 2016).

As the material with which people are most intimately and frequently in contact, engagement with clothing means that cover becomes incorporated into perception and cognition. This covering process is more profound than ‘enclothed cognition’ which refers merely to how wearing different types of clothes can affect human performance and behavior (Adam & Galinsky, 2012). In relation to tactile perception and sensuality, while contact with clothing certainly has affective elements (Perniola, 2017; Kyriacou et al., 2023), the nervous system becomes less responsive to recurring contact with familiar materials (Graziano et al., 2002). Moreover, contact with clothes is contact not with the living environment or with another person’s skin but with an inert material—the dead skin of an animal (typical of palaeolithic garments) or a fabricated woven cloth, typical of the historical era. As a consequence, the human attachment to clothes intervenes in the extended mind as a less sensual engagement with a world that becomes more inert, favoring a scientific outlook.

4.3.3 Clothing and the Cartesian Myth

Paralleling the extended mind synthesis, Descartes’ division of mind from body, along with the distinction between thinking and feeling, has come under increasing attack from neuroscientists (Hughes & Harding, 2014; Solms, 2019). Not only is the brain interconnected with the skin surface (and its sensuality) and with environmental stimuli, thought processes are inextricably embedded in, and influenced by, emotional content. Given the impact of clothing on perception and embodiment, this raises the question of whether clothing may have promoted an artificial separation of thought from emotion and led to the Cartesian myth, a myth that was instrumental in the scientific revolution (Serfati, 2008).

In essence, the implication with clothing is that the mind of a routinely clothed person is less embodied and, ultimately, almost disembodied. With sensory stimulation of the body surface reduced by inert covering, the body’s perceived presence is diminished. This leads to a mental life detached not just from the world which lies beyond the body but a mind detached from the body, a body not just visually but perceptually hidden. When taken to its logical conclusion, this disembodiment means that the mind can come to exist on its own, without a body or a world. That is what Plato sensed and what Descartes thought he had discovered, a perception which, for all of its subjective appeal, is nonetheless intellectually deceptive, historically situated, and contingent on clothing.

5 Conclusions

Scientific activity has a number of psychological elements. One is widely recognized, namely, a personal detachment on the part of the scientist from those aspects of the world under scrutiny. This requirement for disengagement on the part of the scientist facilitates the objectivity of science and serves to distinguish science from natural curiosity. Neither can science be viewed as an evolutionary product of H. sapiens’ high intelligence and nor is science the prerogative of Western culture.

In addition to detachment—an historical trend likely to accelerate with the digital revolution (Gross, 2019)—two other psychological processes intrinsic to science are postulated to be consequences of clothing. These two additional processes spring from the presence of clothing as cover:

  1. 1.

    The world is perceived as covered, as a projection of humans being covered;

  2. 2.

    A desire to uncover (or discover) arises because hidden aspects of nature acquire the alluring qualities of the human skin surface covered by clothes.

Understanding science as a psychological repercussion of clothing can facilitate further progress in the history and philosophy of science. First, the evolution of science can be extended beyond the historical era and situated with the prehistoric origin of clothing. Second, in the phenomenology of science, two key aspects—seeing the world as covered and wanting to uncover it—can be appreciated as reflecting the fact that humans are covered. In effect, the world is seen in the same way as we see ourselves (as covered), and we are fascinated by what lies beneath the cover.

Psychological effects of clothing developed quite late in human evolution, following the invention of complex (fitted, tailored) clothes for thermal insulation in the last ice age. In that particular context, the human body was covered almost completely and continuously for the first time. After the end of the Pleistocene epoch around 12,000 years ago, the use of clothing persisted because it had acquired decorative functions and promoted a sense of modesty—with concealment of the external genitalia dictating the minimum level of cover. The focus on covering the sexual organs serves also to highlight how the scientific motive to expose whatever lies beneath the cover derives from a sublimated pleasure drive. A psychoanalytic interpretation will prioritize the sexual appeal of rendering nature exposed, although the sexuality rests upon a more general covered sensuality of the naked skin surface.

Scientific evidence on clothing can pinpoint the psychological consequences of cover as a localized event in human evolution, not a universal trend. This same evidence accommodates the ethnographic pattern, where cross-cultural variation in psychological elements constituting science coincide with variation in social requirements to cover the body with clothes. At one end of the cultural spectrum, in societies where nakedness is not sanctioned and no clothes are worn routinely, people are not detached from nature and the true surface of the world is perceived as open and contactable by humans, not closed and hidden mysteriously from view.

Philosophical insights into science have identified the phenomenon of cover as a definitive attribute of science, and the practice of science entails a process of uncovering the hidden structure of the world. Husserl showed how science requires a disconnection from immediate human experience and also a covering of the world with ideal entities from geometry and mathematics, thereby excluding a wealth of actual knowledge about the world. Husserl attempted to trace the historical origins of science beyond traditional sources in Ancient Greece and Mesopotamia, and he considered that any authentic attempt to approach reality methodically should have psychology as its foundation. Once the covering of nature is recognized as a psychological effect of clothing, science can be identified as a culturally-contingent consequence of clothing, with ancient origins in the later stages of human prehistory. In identifying the psychological role of clothing as cover, this represents a phenomenological and a scientific discovery of science.