I am currently reading Philosophy in the Flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. Authored by Cognitive Scientists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, this book asks 1) What do major lines of Western philosophical thought assume about the mind? 2) What has cognitive science learned about the mind through rigorous research? 3) Are there discrepancies between Western philosophical assumptions about the mind and leading cognitive scientific theories of the mind? and 4) What implications do these discrepancies have for various streams of Western philosophy that build upon what now appear to be shaky premises regarding the mind?

Philosophy…

In terms of philosophy, Lakoff and Johnson go broad. They consider metaphysics (what is real), ethics (what is moral), who are we (e.g., the self, the mind, the brain and nervous system), and epistemology (what is knowledge, what do we know, can we know, how can we know). They consider the philosophies of the Pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and Noam Chomsky’s views on mind and language.

I’m about to start into one of the chapters that I was most intrigued by when I picked up this book: the one dedicated to cognition and metaphysics of time.

…in the flesh. The Embodied Mind…

Lakoff and Johnson consider cognitive scientific research findings on the nature and development of our conceptual systems, linguistic cognition, and cognition about the abstract, symbolic and social (e.g., time, causation, money, social relations and status, morality). The “embodied mind” refers to the authors’ well-supported description of the mind as being shaped by our physical bodies, sensorimotor systems, and how we physically interact with the physical world.The mind is also embodied in the sense that the qualities of the mind are shaped by the physical properties of the brain. This latter aspect of embodiment, however, is far from novel.

The embodied mind is one of the three core foundational concepts of the book. The next pillar is that cognition/thought is mostly unconscious. Our conscious experience is the metaphorical tip of an iceberg which is almost entirely below sea-level submerged in our unconscious. This extremely well supported idea is far from new.

The third pillar is that, like every sentence in the preceding paragraph, abstract cognition is fundamentally metaphorical. That is, metaphor is not just a matter of rhetorical or poetic flourish meant to decorate our more basic thoughts. Rather, metaphor plays a foundational role in how we make sense of the abstract. For example, we may speak of saving UP money, FALLING in love, RUNNING OUT of time, getting LEFT BEHIND, being at a CROSSROADS in one’s life, CATCHING a cold, GRASPING an idea or having it GO OVER our heads, SEEING what someone means, DROPPING the ball, being LOST, STAYING THE COURSE, being ON TRACK, or getting a very WARM vibe from someone.

As is evident the several examples above, the metaphorical cores that underlie our more abstract concepts tend to be rooted in our physical, sensorimotor experiences of the world. Evolutionarily, this could hardly be more perfect. The evolutionary heritage of humanity is rich in physical cognition. Evolution is a tinkerer that works with what is there. Alongside opposable thumbs and bipedalism, distinctive human adaptations include our advanced social, symbolic and abstract cognition. That these evolutionarily newer cognitive adaptations would be built upon a longstanding framework for physical/concrete (i.e., non-abstract, non-symbolic) cognition is more than plausible.

In The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, Steven Pinker discussed how the linguistic behaviour of verbs (i.e., action words like go, throw, think, send) is critically determined by the sort of concrete action pattern that the verb is (metaphorically) based on. For example, fax, send, throw, and give take on similar sentence structures (e.g., Throw/fax/send/give me the ball; I threw/sent/faxed/gave Jim the document. They also disallow the same types of constructions; e.g., we can say I ate. But we can’t say *I threw/faxed/sent/gave). Why? Because they are all rooted in the same concrete concept of one agent causing an item to go from one place in space to another.

In the case of give, the object need not actually move (e.g., I can give you my house). In this case, we can see that the concept of ownership is being metaphorically mapped onto space. When the house is owned by me, it is present at one point in the ownership landscape – the point that corresponds to me. If I give the house to you, I transmit ownership of the house from my point in ownership space to your point. But in all of this, the house stayed firmly planted.

Research has shown that people (including young children) 1) implicitly grasp the concrete concepts underlying their more abstract verbs, 2) that the underlying conceptual backbone of abstract concepts is a central component to how people learn, think about and recall these concepts and how they use the corresponding words in language. Indeed, a young child’s ability to pick up the semantic foundations of concepts is a huge source of information for them to employ with respect to language acquisition, social/cultural learning more broadly, and learning about the world through others.

As I once said in a cognitive science graduate seminar – to the annoyance of some of my linguist peers – the Chomskyan view of linguistic modularity is dying a brutal death. Chomsky was absolutely right that Behaviourism was positively wrong. There needs to be structure in the mind beyond a general learning mechanism and a Cartesian blank slate if one is to learn a language. Where Chomsky appears to have been wrong, however, was when he postulated a dedicated linguistic module in the brain that was built ready to tag and set parameters for noun and verb phrases. In recent decades, researchers have found that the requisite internal cognitive structure is coming from such non-linguistic domains as the conceptual system (as well as theory of mind). Researchers such as Michael Tomasello – my cognitive science hero back when I was a grad student studying the cognitive science of language development – have also done a good job of demonstrating major problems that are created if one assumes a dedicated language module (e.g., where is the dividing line between a syntax and semantics, words and rules – because the more we look, the more they all blend into one another; how does the language module identify noun phrases in nature – they don’t come tagged).

…and its Challenge to Western Thought

Lakoff and Johnson cross reference their three well supported pillars of cognitive science with corresponding but disagreeing ideas on the mind from Western philosophy. They point to Cartesian dualism (i.e., that the mind is separate from the body), more ideally objective symbolic accounts of mind and reality (i.e., that the mind is comprised of symbolic representations that adequately correspond to what is truly out there in an objective, independent-of-the-perceiver sense), and that metaphor is a decorative prop of language, not a core element of thought. To varying degrees, several of these lines of thought have diminished in popularity, particularly among cognitive scientists and cognitive philosophers. However, given that these perspectives were well entrenched during the eras in which still-influential foundations of Western philosophy were first penned, it surely made sense for Lakoff and Johnson to reconsider vast swaths of Western philosophy from their embodied cognitive perspective.

Feel free to share any thoughts you may have on Lakoff and Johnson’s book, Cognitive Linguistics, cognitive modularity, the linguistic nativist debate, or this post.