"Philosophy in the Flesh"

About

subtitle:THE EMBODIED MIND AND ITS CHALLENGE TO WESTERN THOUGHT --by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.

"The public nature of linguistic meaning and those aspects of meaning that are universal across cultures arise from the commonalities of our bodies and our bodily and social experience in the world. From the commonalities of our visual systems and motor systems, universal features of spatial relations (image schemas) arise. From our shared capacities for gestalt perception and motor programs, basic-level concepts arise. From the common color cones in our retinas and shared neural architecture for color vision, the commonalities of color concepts arise. Our natural capacity for metaphorical thought arises from the neural projections from the sensory and motor parts of our brain to higher cortical regions responsible for abstract thought. Whatever universals of metaphor there are arise because our experience in the world regularly makes certain conceptual domains coactive in our brains, allowing for the establishment of connections between them. This commonality of bodies, brains, minds and experience makes much (though not all) of meaning public.

There is no abstract realm of disembodied senses and no mystical relations between such supposed senses and objects and categories in a supposed mind-independent world. Our brains and minds do not operate using abstract formal symbols that are given meaning by correlations to an allegedly mind-independent world that comes with categories and essences built in. The body and brain are where meanings arise in and through our interactions with the environment and other people.

It is not true that all thought is conscious and that we can know it completely through a priori philosophical reflection. Most of our thought is unconscious and empirical investigation is necessary if we are ever to understand its nature.

Finally, the existence of metaphorical concepts and metaphorical thought does not gibe with the analytic and formalist world views, in which all concepts must be literal, defined by a purely objective relation between Fregean senses or abstract symbols and a mind-independent world. Metaphors are products of body, brain, mind, and experience. They are pervasive in our everyday thought and in philosophy itself. They could only get their meaning through embodied experience...the central theses of analytic and formalist philosophy cannot be, since analytic philosophy must necessarily deny the existence of conceptual metaphor."