Cover of The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought
The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought The Bodily Roots of Philosophy, Science, Morality, and Art
by Mark Johnson
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Cloth: 978-0-226-53880-8 | Paper: 978-0-226-53894-5 | Electronic: 978-0-226-53913-3
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226539133.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

All too often, we think of our minds and bodies separately. The reality couldn’t be more different: the fundamental fact about our mind is that it is embodied. We have a deep visceral, emotional, and qualitative relationship to the world—and any scientifically and philosophically satisfactory view of the mind must take into account the ways that cognition, meaning, language, action, and values are grounded in and shaped by that embodiment.

This book gathers the best of philosopher Mark Johnson’s essays addressing questions of our embodiment as they deal with aesthetics—which, he argues, we need to rethink so that it takes into account the central role of body-based meaning. Viewed that way, the arts can give us profound insights into the processes of meaning making that underlie our conceptual systems and cultural practices. Johnson shows how our embodiment shapes our philosophy, science, morality, and art; what emerges is a view of humans as aesthetic, meaning-making creatures who draw on their deepest physical processes to make sense of the world around them.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Mark Johnson is the Philip H. Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon and the author of numerous books.

TABLE OF CONTENTS


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226539133.003.0001
[aesthetics;embodiment;qualities;bodily schemas;emotions;meaning;Kant]
If aesthetic dimensions are so crucially important in everything we experience, think, do, and say, then why has this not been appreciated in Western intellectual traditions? The chapter begins, therefore, with an account of disembodied conceptions of mind and thought, showing how they lead to the marginalization of aesthetics, which is regarded as unimportant for conceptualization, reasoning, and knowledge. The counter-argument to this dismissal of aesthetics is a brief survey of many of the most important aesthetic dimensions of meaning and understanding, including bodily schemas, qualities, emotions, and feeling contours. This survey reveals how experience is shaped by aesthetic considerations, which provide the basis for our higher cognitive activities. Consequently, any adequate account of mind, meaning, or thought must be grounded in this new conception of aesthetics, which was most incisively worked out by John Dewey.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226539133.003.0002
[pragmatism;cognitive science;naturalism;embodiment;theory of mind;meaning;non-dualism]
Classical Pragmatism and cognitive science have often been at odds with each other, but recently, with the emergence of an embodied-mind focus in cognitive science, a much more constructive and cooperative relation has developed. This chapter explores a number of areas of convergent research between these two orientations. They both support a naturalistic, yet non-reductionist, theory of mind. They argue against dualism and challenge the representational theory of mind. There is a focus on organism-environment interaction as they key to understanding human thought and values. There is recognition of the need for a meaning-rich and complex account of experience. Both traditions support a embodied view of meaning, concepts, and reasoning. There is a recognition of the central role of emotions and feelings in reasoning. Finally, all of these dimensions of understanding are seen to be aesthetic. Meaning and cognition are characterized by seven E's: embodied, embedded, enactive, extended, emotional, evolutionary, and exaptative. The cognitive science research tends to support and add to a pragmatist perspective, whereas pragmatist philosophy reveals and critiques the limits of various scientific methods, while exploring the implications of the cognitive sciences for our lives.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226539133.003.0003
[conceptual metaphor;metaphor theory;embodiment;meaning;causation;reason]
Forty years of research in Conceptual Metaphor Theory has revealed that our abstract concepts and reasoning are structured by systematic experience-based metaphors. These metaphors are grounded in structures and processes of our sensory, motor, affective, and social experience. Consequently, our greatest intellectual,rational, theoretical, and creative achievements in the sciences, philosophy, and arts are not sets of absolute literal truths, but rather are based on multiple conceptual metaphors that shape how we understand and reason. An argument is made for this characterization of philosophy-as-metaphor by analyzing some of the key metaphors for events and causation that are adopted by various philosophical theories. Conceptual Metaphor Theory reveals the inadequacies of many popular contemporary philosophical accounts of metaphor, such as those of Searle, Davidson, and Rorty. The metaphorical character of philosophy is not a failure; instead, it explains how philosophical theories can be meaningful and relevant for our lives.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226539133.003.0004
[experiential pragmatism;linguistic (analytic) pragmatism;meaning;language;embodiment;Dewey;Rorty]
Pragmatist philosophy and cognitive science can support and enrich one another, but only if we utilize the right kind of pragmatism and the right kind of mind science. What is needed is classical experience-based pragmatism coupled with embodied cognitive science. However, a recently emerging philosophical perspective known as linguistic or analytical pragmatism has become popular. This orientation is fundamentally incompatible with some aspects of embodied cognitive science. Analytic pragmatism got its start from Richard Rorty's argument that our processes of communicating, assessing truth claims, and coordinating action involve language, and we cannot get behind or beneath language to some experiential ground of meaning, thought, and value. This chapter argues that, because linguistic pragmatism ignores the qualitatively rich experience and embodied meaning from which thought arises, it is doomed to provide a very partial and superficial account of mind, thought, and language. There is no language without an experience of meaning, and therefore we cannot jettison attention to experience if we would construct a psychologically sound account of mind, meaning, and language.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226539133.003.0005
[pragmatism;neuropragmatism;non-dualism;anti-reductionism;cognitive science;organism-environment;explanation]
"Neuropragmatism" is the result of the recent attempt to find common themes between classical pragmatism and the neuroscience of embodied mind. This chapter identifies key similarities between these two perspectives. They both stress organism-environment interactions, the continuity of experience, antidualism with respect to mind and thought, the intertwining of reason and emotion, non-reductive accounts of experience, and the need for multiple levels of explanation. However, neuropragmatism is not just neuroscience on steroids, for an ineliminable philosophical perspective is necessary. We need to keep the prgamatism in neuropragmatism for three reasons. First, pragmatism allows us to understand the underlying assumptions, values, and goals of different scientific approaches, and it gives us the proper critical perspective on different scientific methods of inquiry. Second, since multiple levels of explanation are always required, pragmatism helps us understand how those various levels fit together. Third, it reveals the implications of the mind sciences for our lives. So, pragmatism without neuroscience is (partially) empty, while neuroscience without pragmatism is (partially) blind.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226539133.003.0006
[metaphor;science;psychology;attention;values]
Since conceptual metaphor is crucial for all abstract conceptualization and reasoning, we should expect to find it at the heart of every scientific theory, too. And we do. This chapter provides evidence for the central role of metaphor in science by analyzing some of the key metaphors that define the psychology of attention. Analyses are given of three major metaphors: ATTENTION IS A SPOTLIGHT, ATTENTION IS A LIMITED RESOURCE, and ATTENTION IS RESOURCE COMPETITION. Such metaphors are not just ways of talking about attention. Instead, they determine what phenomena will be discussed, how those phenomena are individuated, and what counts as an adequate explanation of those phenomena. In other words, the metaphors are constitutive of the phenomena and correlative explanatory frameworks. Moreover, each metaphor embeds or presupposes different basic values of scientific inquiry, such as generalization, comprehensiveness, empirical testability, relevance, importance, simplicity, and elegance. The values that define different scientific views come from our everyday bodily engagement with our world. Insofar as the psychology of attention is characteristic of scientific inquiry, then all science is based on conceptual metaphors and is shaped by underlying values.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226539133.003.0007
[morality;cognitive science;concepts;moral reasoning;emotions;empathy;ethical naturalism]
Contrary to the traditional dismissal of the relevance of science for normative ethics, the importance of cognitive science for our moral understanding has recently become a central topic of debate, especially with the rising popularity of ethical naturalism. Cognitive science research is relevant not just in the negative, critical sense of challenging the founding assumptions of various moral theories. It is equally important in the positive sense of helping us better understand moral values and how moral cognition actually works. For example, the cognitive sciences have given us a more psychologically realistic view of moral concepts, rules, and principles. They have provided key insights about moral judgment and reasoning, including the crucial role of emotions and empathy. They have improved our knowledge of moral development and the role of gender in moral cognition. They have helped us bridge the alleged "is/ought" and "fact/value" gap. A scientifically informed understanding of morality can provide important moral guidance for our lives.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226539133.003.0008
[imagination;morality;deliberation;empathy;simulation;moral cognition]
For centuries in Western philosophy, the term "moral imagination" has been regarded as an oxymoron, mostly because morality has been conceived as a system of rational principles, whereas imagination was taken to be an irrational free play of images. Today, fortunately, we are finally coming to appreciate the central role of imaginative processes in moral deliberation.The chapter begins with a brief account of historically important treatments of imagination, in the works of Adam Smith and David Hume. It then marches forward toward the present day, discussing several philosophers who have not fully appreciated the constitutive role of imagination in moral reasoning. This culminates in the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey, who argued that moral deliberation is an imaginative exploration of how experience would play out under the sway of different habits, principles, ends, and values. Dewey's view receives some validation from recent cognitive neuroscience, with its focus on empathy, emotions, mirror neurons, and simulation accounts of meaning and thought. Recognition of the central role of imagination in moral deliberation requires a fairly substantial rethinking of the nature of morality and moral cognition.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226539133.003.0009
[law;legal reasoning;prototypes;radial categories;conceptual metaphor;conceptual structure]
Human law is a many-splendored creation of human mind. The cognitive sciences provide some of the best resources for understanding mind and cognition. Therefore, their contribution to our understanding of legal reasoning is substantial and important. One of the most significant discoveries of the mind sciences has been that concepts and reasoning do not function the way we have traditionally thought. Concepts cannot typically be defined by some literal core list of essential properties. Instead, human concepts are built around cognitive prototypes and have a radial structure that includes metaphor and metonymy, and that cannot be reduced to a univocal meaning. With respect to law, this changes everything, because we have to jettison the idea of core literal concepts embedded in legal principles that determine eternally what is and is not permitted. Legal concepts, like everything else in the world, are subject to change in light of newly emerging conditions. Legal reasoning, like all reasoning, traffics in radial categories, conceptual metaphors, and metonymies. A good example of this is the legal concept of property. Radially structured, metaphoric concepts are precisely what allow law to grow and to remain relevant in the face of changing conditions.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226539133.003.0010
[aesthetics;art;meaning;embodiment;self-identity;emotion;felt sense]
In Western philosophical traditions, we have mostly inherited a fixed view of the self that constructs experiences out of its internal structures. In stark contrast, the pragmatist view proposes a self-in-process, always in transformation as the result of changing conditions in our surroundings and in our bodily constitution. The former view has a difficult time giving aesthetic experience and engagement with art a serious place in what and who we are, because the self is regarded as pre-given and defined mostly by its rationality, rather than by feelings or other bodily processes. So-called "aesthetic experience" thus comes to be disparaged and dismissed. John Dewey realized that everything we think of as "aesthetic" and central to art and beauty (e.g., qualities, form, bodily schemas, imagination, emotions, feelings), is actually what makes any sort of meaning possible for creatures like us. Our very selfhood is the result of ongoing aesthetic processes of meaning-making. Such an embodied, aesthetically grounded perspective gives us a way to understand how the arts and other aesthetic realities can constitute and transform our self identity.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226539133.003.0011
[aesthetics;qualities;qualitative unity;meaning;art;relevance;Dewey]
John Dewey had several major ideas about the importance of aesthetic elements and processes in everything we experience, think, and do. Three in particular stand out: (1) philosophy should begin, and end, with experience, taken in its deepest and richest sense, (2) aesthetic dimensions constitute the character of any fully developed and meaningful experience, and (3) attention to the qualitative aspects of experience is the key to any adequate understanding of mind, thought, language, and value. Dewey's "Big Idea for Aesthetics" is that every meaningful experience is characterized and individualized by a pervasive unifying quality. This chapter unpacks that idea, arguing that all our implicit and explicit acts of conceptualization and reasoning are based on, and get their relevance from, the felt qualitative unity of the given situation that is the occasion of any act of thinking. This argument requires an explanation of the nature of a situation, the role of qualities in our lives, and how the pervasive unifying quality determines what we think and do in a situation. From this perspective, the arts are seen to be intensified enactments of possibilities for meaning that are available in our lives. Aesthetic considerations thus become the crux of experience.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226539133.003.0012
[architecture;art;embodiment;meaning;affordances;environment;flourishing]
Human experience arises from the interaction of our bodily organism with its environment. Given the nature of our bodies and the structure of our surroundings, dimensions of our environment provide meaningful affordances, that is, various possibilities for meaningful engagement with our world. Architecture, which organizes the constructed spaces within which we live, move, and have our being, is a primary example of how the arts can provide both the conditions of our survival (e.g., dwelling, shelter, safety, comfort) and possibilities for meaningful and fulfilling dwelling in the world (i.e., a sense of well-being and growth of meaning). This chapter explores some of the body-based meaning structures that can be appropriated in the architectural design of our living environment.Architecture at its best goes beyond the mere expression of a world to creatively transform the conditions of our human habitation and interaction.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226539133.003.0013
[philosophy;art;morality;law;science;meaning;embodiment]
To most philosophers trained in Anglo-American analytic philosophy the idea that philosophy, science, morality, and law are based on deep conceptual metaphors and operate via aesthetic dimensions such as image schemas, qualities, emotions, and feelings will seem like a huge blow to the dignity and importance of these noble enterprises. But not so. Recognition of the bodily sources of meaning, thought, language, and values challenges the mistaken idea that there are eternal, absolute, and transcendent foundations of human cognition. On the positive side, though, the embodied cognition and aesthetics of meaning approaches humanize all of our most exalted and important acts of meaning-making, thought, and action. As Dewey said, we are not little gods. We are embodied, social human animals. Philosophy becomes the human quest for meaning and value in our lives -- the means by which we can make sense of, criticize, and expand and enrich our experience from a broad and pluralistic perspective. Morality is embodied, imaginative human problem-solving. Aesthetics concerns all of the elements and processes by which we make and experience meaning, with all the possibilities for enrichment and growth of meaning available to us. Aesthetics is thus the basis from which our cognitive achievements arise.

Book published by University of Chicago Press, 2018. Page maintained by BiblioVault.