Cover of Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason
Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason How Our Bodies Give Rise to Understanding
by Mark Johnson
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Cloth: 978-0-226-50011-9 | Paper: 978-0-226-50025-6 | Electronic: 978-0-226-50039-3
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226500393.001.0001

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University of Chicago Press (paper, ebook)
ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Mark Johnson is one of the great thinkers of our time on how the body shapes the mind. This book brings together a selection of essays from the past two decades that build a powerful argument that any scientifically and philosophically satisfactory view of  mind and thought must ultimately explain how bodily perception and action give rise to cognition, meaning, language, action, and values.
 
A brief account of Johnson’s own intellectual journey, through which we track some of the most important discoveries in the field over the past forty years, sets the stage. Subsequent chapters set out Johnson’s important role in embodied cognition theory, including his cofounding (with George Lakoff) of conceptual metaphor theory and, later, their theory of bodily structures and processes that underlie all meaning, conceptualization, and reasoning. A detailed account of how meaning arises from our physical engagement with our environments provides the basis for a nondualistic, nonreductive view of mind that he sees as most congruous with the latest cognitive science. A concluding section explores the implications of our embodiment for our understanding of knowledge, reason, and truth. The resulting book will be essential for all philosophers dealing with mind, thought, and language.
 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Mark Johnson is the Philip H. Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon.
 

REVIEWS

"Mark Johnson shows us what pragmatism can do, and especially its relevance to questions about the embodied mind. Building on his own groundbreaking work in the philosophy of language, he provides an insightful answer to the question of meaning: meaning emerges in the interactions of our bodies with our structured environments, and this meaning includes not only everyday pragmatic meaning, but philosophical and scientific reasoning as well."
— Shaun Gallagher, University of Memphis

"Mark Johnson’s early books, especially Metaphors We Live By and The Body in the Mind, were absolutely critical in the founding of embodied cognitive science. Somehow his work has gotten even better—deeper, more subtle, more historically informed—over the years. The essays collected here are essential reading for anyone interested in philosophical issues related to embodiment.”
— Anthony Chemero, University of Cincinnati

TABLE OF CONTENTS


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226500393.003.0001
[meaning;embodied cognition theory;embodied cognitive science;disembodied philosophy;linguistic philosophy;7-E cognition]
The Introduction begins with an account of the invasion of the body-snatchers, showing how mainstream analytic philosophy of mind and language presupposed a mostly disembodied view of mind and thought. This so-called “linguistic turn” in philosophy, from Frege to Rorty to Davidson, focused primarily on conceptual and propositional aspects of meaning and reasoning. This orientation has been critiqued and replaced by a “second-generation” cognitive science that recognizes the way our bodies and brains generate meaning and understanding. Some of the basic components of an embodiment theory of cognition are surveyed, providing a major recovery of meaning resources that go beneath and beyond our linguistic capacities. These include image schemas, conceptual metaphors, qualities, and emotions. The Introduction thus briefly describes the 7-E’s of cognition as embodied, embedded, enactive, extendend, evolutionary, exaptative, and emotional.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226500393.003.0002
[John Dewey;mind;thought;language;cognitive science;anti-dualism;naturalism;embodied cognition;pragmatist philosophy;neuroscience]
Dewey’s pragmatist orientation is presented as exemplary of the kind of philosophical perspective that criticizes the first-generation information processing conception of cognitive science and then lends experimental support for the second-generation cognitive science emphasis on the crucial role of the body in meaning and thought. Such a philosophy is experience-based, non-dualistic, non-reductive, and process-oriented. Each of these key dimensions of mind, thought, and language are explained and supported by recent research in embodied cognitive science.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226500393.003.0003
[William James;consciousness;Antonio Damasio;emotion;feeling;protoself;core consciousness;extended consciousness]
At the beginning of experimental psychology, William James provided a view of consciousness that has held up well in the face of cognitive science today. There is no fixed or substantial self, but only ongoing processes of feeling. James’s view is supported by the account of the conditions and development of consciousness and selfhood found in the works of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. In both, there is an emphasis on emergent functional organization and the key role of emotions and feelings in these processes of consciousness and self-formation.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226500393.003.0004
[embodied cognition;pragmatism;continuity principle;emergent functions;non-representational theory of mind;neural maps;neural plasticity;image schemas;conceptual metaphor]
The pragmatist theory of mind requires an account of how “higher” cognitive functions could arise, over evolutionary history and in individual ontogenesis, from “lower” organic bodily functions, in a continuous fashion. This chapter provides several examples to explain the emergence of higher levels of functional organization from lower levels, all the way from single-celled organism up to various animals and humans who engage in complex social and cultural interactions. At the human level, this continuity principle requires that our abstract conceptualization and reasoning are made possible through the exaptation of earlier functional capacities, such as sensory and motor abilities. The result is an embodied cognition conception of mind and thought that rejects the classical representational theory of mind and replaces it with an emergentist and non-reductive account of cognitive functions.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226500393.003.0005
[meaning;embodied cognition;image schemas;controller executing schemas;spatial relations;body-part projections;conceptual metaphor;grammatical constructions;conceptual blending]
This chapter provides a more detailed explanation of some of the most important body-based meaning structures and processes. It begins with image schemas – patterns of sensory-motor interactions with an environment – and moves through spatial relations, body-part projections, controller executing schemas for action, grammatical constructions, and conceptual metaphors. These are shown to be pervasive in meaning processes that are both prior to and extend beyond linguistic meaning. Higher conceptual and inferential processes are shown to be based on primary and complex conceptual metaphors and various kinds of body-based schematic structures.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226500393.003.0006
[image schemas;Kant;embodied cognition;sensory-motor function;meaning;conceptual metaphor;mathematics;Eugene Gendlin;felt sense]
The chapter starts with an account of how the notion of image schemas arose in the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in the late 1980s. It compares and contrasts their conception with Kant’s view of schemas. It then turns to the question of where image schemas come from and how that shape our conceptualization and reasoning. Given the nature of our bodies and brains, in interaction with the affordances of the environments we inhabit, image schemas arise as regular patterns of our sensory and motor interactions with our surroundings. They constitute a very basic level of pre-linguistic meaning that and they show up in languages around the world, even though there are different ways a language can appropriate image schematic structures. The source domains of conceptual metaphors have image-schematic structure, so that body-based meaning operates in defining the target domain and constraining the inferences we draw about the target domain. Examples of this process in simple mathematics are analyzed. The chapter ends with a cautionary note that we need to examine more deeply the role of emotions, feelings, and values in image schemas.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226500393.003.0007
[action;meaning;embodied concepts;multimodal concepts;controller executing schemas;neural modeling;canonical neurons;mirror neurons;cogs;conceptual metaphor]
Pragmatism has always emphasized the key role of action in everything we experience, think, and do. Drawing from neuroscience and computational neural modeling, this chapter shows concretely how action is so crucial to our capacity to experience meaning and to engage in abstract conceptualization and reasoning. The chapter tracks the account of embodied cognition developed by George Lakoff and Vittorio Gallese in their account of multimodal (as contrasted with supramodal) functional neuronal clusters. Most of our concrete concepts are realized in multiple perceptual and motor modalities, and so they are intrinsically embodied. Our concrete concepts involve activations of these multimodal clusters that have developed from our experience as actors operating within certain types of environments. Gallese and Lakoff’s detailed analysis of the Grasp schema is used as an example of the action-oriented, body-based nature of concrete concepts for physical objects and actions. It is then shown how the same executing schema for grasping can also be recruited for metaphorical senses of the term “grasp”.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226500393.003.0008
[knowledge;anti-foundationalism;embodied cognition;Richard Rorty;image schemas;body-based knowing;action;conceptual metaphor]
The traditional view of knowledge as conceptual and propositional, as well as transcending particular bodily experiences and functions is radically called into question by contemporary mind science. As discussed in the previous chapter, knowing needs to be conceived as a process that arises in the context of the action of an organism that is trying to survive and flourish in its environment. Richard Rorty did a fine job of demolishing foundationalist and absolutist conceptions of knowledge, but his inadequate account of meaning led him to relegate knowledge entirely to the realm of social discourse and justification. This chapter argues that only by bringing back in the central role of the body in everything we experience, think, and do, will we be able to give an adequate account of knowing that is neither foundationalist/objectivist nor merely a matter of constraints on speech acts within communities of inquirers. Knowing is an activity in which body-based meaning structures allow us to operate more or less successfully within our world. Consequently, knowledge, while not absolute, is constrained, situated, and potentially revisable, even as it is rooted in our embodiment.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226500393.003.0009
[truth;correspondence;embodied cognition;Richard Rorty;logical space;causes and reasons;metaphor;metaphysical realism;pluralism;causation]
Once meaning and thought are seen to be embodied, we have to rethink our cherished notions about objective knowledge and truth. The classical correspondence theory of truth will not hold up against the embodied conception of mind emerging within the cognitive sciences. Rorty has dismantled the objectivist views of knowledge and truth, but in their place he presents a relativist, language-based account of truth. Once again, this deflationary linguistic account leaves out body-based meaning and thought almost entirely. Bringing those back into the picture relativizes truth to our embodied understanding, which is different from Rorty’s view that truth is just a linguistic matter. A disembodied metaphysical realism and its attendant literalist theory of truth must be replaced with an embodied realism that supports an embodied understanding of truth. We are left with an experientialist conception of truth that is at once pluralistic (there may be multiple truths about a single situation) and yet constrained by our bodily structures of meaning and thought. Different, incompatible, truth claims may thus issue from the multiple levels of explanation possible within a single situation.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226500393.003.0010
[embodied cognition;mind;meaning;reason;knowledge;truth;philosophy;aesthetics]
This short concluding chapter summarizes why the body is so important for an understanding of experience, meaning, and thought. The body is not just a vehicle for cognitive processes; rather, bodily structures and processes are constitutive of mind, meaning, and reason. Some of the more important implications of the embodiment of mind are summarized. A non-dualistic theory of mind recognizes that our experience of meaning and all our thought processes are profoundly shaped by the structures of our bodies, brains, and environments. Knowledge is embodied, perspectival, and fallible, and so is truth. Philosophies are not products of pure reason, but rather historically situated creations of embodied human minds, with all that entails about mind, thought, and language. Philosophy and the cognitive sciences need to co-evolve through mutual critique and constructive dialogue. The philosophy of mind and language need to be reconceived in the light of our embodied conception of mind. Philosophy should begin and end with experience in its deepest, broadest, richest sense – a sense that gives pride of place to aesthetic dimensions of experience.

Book published by University of Chicago Press, 2017. Page maintained by BiblioVault.