Abstract

Recent findings in Cognitive Science — the multidisciplinary scientific study of the mind — have radically changed the views of human thought and conceptual systems. Ever since Aristotle, and later, through the legacy of Descartes and Leibniz, human thought was considered to be rational, conscious, monolithic, consistent, literal, and based on universal disembodied abstract laws. This long-lasting view, however, is now untenable in the light of recent scientific findings. Convergent evidence coming from different scientific disciplines, from neuroscience to anthropology, and from psychology to linguistics, show that the human mind is intrinsically embodied, that is, it arises from the peculiarities of the biology of our bodies and brains, and from the way we interact with our (social and physical) environments. In the last decades, it has been clearly established that human thought is by no means purely rational, and further, is mostly unconscious. Research has shown that thought is not literal nor based on abstract rules and categories, but rather it is essentially metaphorical in nature. Abstract thinking is based on cognitive mechanisms which allow the making of precise inferences in one conceptual domain based on the inferential structure of another domain (generally more concrete and closer to bodily experience).