In their book Philosophy in the Flesh Lakoff and Johnson argue that our understanding of the human mind, as developed in modern cognitive science, forces us to entirely reevaluate many philosophical ideas and assumptions which have shaped the debates over the millennia. They argue that since 1) the human mind as well as all reason and rationality is fully and inherently embodied, 2) the large majority of human thought is unconscious and 3) abstract concepts are for the most part metaphorical rather than literal that most of our ideas concerning metaphysics, epistemology, mind, language, ethics, etc. are based in an incorrect foundation. While I plan to dedicate a number of posts to considering these bold assertions in more detail, in this post I plan to outline the basic approach which the authors take through out the book.
It should be understood, that Lakoff and Johnson (L&J) see their claims as being more than a mere refutation of any individual philosopher’s ideas. For instance, consider Kant’s ideas of full autonomy and universal reason/morality. L&J argue that since all human reason is shaped by the physical body by way of our neural structure, we simply cannot be radically free in our actions or even in our thoughts. Since our thought depend upon a neural structure for their mere existence, this structure will limit what thoughts are even possible. Not only can we not do anything, we cannot even think anything, to say nothing of wanting anything.
But L&J are claiming something much more than that. They see the necessary embodiment of all thinking, not merely in the sense that all thoughts are in a brain of some kind but rather that the possibility of any given thought depends upon the physical structure of the brain, as precluding anything like a “transcendent, universal pure reason.” (5) They think that any idea of absolute and objective truth of any kind is completely out the window, leaving any such account as being but a mere reification of a very useful, yet completely embodied concept. That such a claim, and all the corollaries that they attempt to draw from it, is bold is to state the obvious.
In their third chapter, The Embodied Mind, they attempt to lay out way in which they see the idea of a fully embodied mind interacting with metaphysics. What they see as being absolutely fundamental to this interaction is that since, as we have already said, the very possibilities of conceptualization and categorization are fully embodied within the neural structure of the individual. Consequently, we cannot, as neural beings, have any kind of experience which transcends all conceptualization and categorization. Such a thing is simply impossible, and this fact, according to L&J, flies directly in the face of metaphysical realism. Here is a list of metaphysical claims which L&J claim to be false:
- Reality is divided up into categories which exist independent of the way in which any mind interacts with them.
- The world has a rational structure in the sense that there is a transcendent or universal reason which exists independent of the way in which any mind interacts with it.
- That this “objective” reason correctly describes these “objective” categories.
- Human rationality is the ability to use, at least a portion of this “objective” reason.
- Since human concepts are “objective”, they can be described independently of their interaction with human brains and bodies.
- Correct human reasoning consists in knowing and using the “objective” categories.
- It is this ability to engage in “objective” rationality which makes us essentially human, not our capacity for culture, interpersonal relations or our interaction with the material world by way of aesthetic endeavors. (21-22)
A significant portion of the book is dedicated to describing how exactly philosophers from the Pre-Socratics down through the Analytic Philosophy of the 20th century has adopted at least some of these beliefs and have thus been fundamentally flawed in one way or another. Such accounts will certainly receive our attention in future posts. What we will do in this post, however, is review the way in which L&J see the embodied mind as being in conflict with the first belief, upon which all the others depend, at least in part.
L&J begin with an illustration of what they are and are not proposing. While they are certainly rejecting an objectivist view of reality, they are at pains to make clear that they are not advocating full blown subjectivism either. Take the well-known and well-worn example of colors:
“Since colors are not things or substances in the world, metaphysical realism fails. The meaning of the word red cannot be just the relation between the word and something in the world… An adequate theory of conceptual structure of red, including an account of why it has the structure it has … cannot be constructed solely from the spectral properties of surfaces. It must make reference to color cones and neural circuitry. Since the cones and neural circuitry are embodied, the internal conceptual properties of red are correspondingly embodied.” (25)
Of course this is nothing new. John Locke recognized long ago that qualities such as color, taste and sound are secondary qualities. Nevertheless, L&J claim that nobody has properly recognized what implications this has for a theory of truth. The correspondence theory of truth holds that statements are true when they refer to the world “as it really is” objectively speaking. If such were true, then the statement “grass is green” could never be true, for green is not a part of the objective world. Thus, inasmuch as we hold statements concerning secondary qualities to be truth claims, to that same extent we are, at best, modifying the correspondence theory of truth.
It is at this point that L&J make what they take to be a philosophically bold claim:
“Cognitive science and neuroscience suggest that the world as we know it contain no primary qualities in Locke’s sense, because the qualities of things as we can experience and comprehend them depend crucially on our neural makeup, our bodily interactions with them, and our purposes and interests.” (26)
This seems to be a rather ambiguous claim, for it remains unclear whether they allow for primarily qualities in the world independent of how our embodied minds interact with it. How exactly is their view different from that of Locke himself who held that the world can itself never be known independent of our perceptions of it? The difference is, or so it would seem, that while Locke distinguished between those (secondary) properties which only existed as perceived properties, and those (primary) properties which exist independently of our perception of them.
What L&J seem to be claiming is that there is no significant difference between the two kinds of properties when it comes to the world of experience, meaning that truth claims about primarily properties are no different from those of secondary properties. Additionally, they also seem to be maintaining that most, indeed perhaps all properties which Locke would have labeled “primary” are actually secondary. In my view, while they make a compelling case that much of the realm of primary properties should be absorbed into the realm of secondary properties, the warrant for the claim that all properties are second would seem to be insurmountable, although we are not in a position to defend any such judgments at this point.
(While it may be the case that all emergent properties are indeed secondary, I simply do not see how the most basic of physical properties can be anything but primary. Indeed, at first glance there would seem to be little if any significant difference between “emergent” and “secondary” as we have here been using the term. If an emergent property is simply one which cannot be described by an account of the properties of the parts of the system, it would seem absurd that the properties of the parts must also all be emergent, ad infinitum. Of course, I do not see L&J as actually claiming such a thing, due to the qualifier “the world as we know it.” A world without any emergent features is certainly not the world as we know it. Such a world would simply be the most basic of stuff doing thing, but there would be no objects in any meaningful sense of the term.)
Where I think that L&J are on relatively safe ground is when they treat basic-level categorization as being exactly like color, metaphysically speaking. Basic-level categorization is the level at which we categorize objects most quickly, accurately and “naturally.” For instance, when we see a picture of a Golden Retriever, the basic-level is not animal, nor is it Golden Retriever, but is instead dog. L&J describe basic-level categorization as being 1) the highest (most general) level at which a single mental image can represent the category, 2) the highest level at which category member share a perceive overall shape, 3) the highest level at which a person interacts with category members with similar motor actions, and 4) the level at which most of our knowledge is organized.
L&J see such an account of basic-level categorization as having important philosophical implications. First and foremost:
“The division between basic-level and nonbasic-level categories is body-based, that is, based on gestalt perception, motor programs, and mental images. Because of this, classical metaphysical realism cannot be right, since the properties of categories are mediated by the body rather than determined directly by a mind-independent reality.” (28)
But is this really true? While reality “as we know it” is certainly structured by our abilities and tendencies to categorize the world in certain ways, the obvious counter-argument is that our abilities and tendencies to categorize the world in certain ways as opposed to others have been structured by the mind-independent reality and the way in which it really is carved up.
L&J’s response to this objection comes about in the second philosophical point which they take from basic-level categorization:
“The basic level is that level at which people interact optimally with their environments, given the kinds of bodies and brains they have and the kinds of environments they inhabit… The properties that make for basic-level categories are responses to the part-whole structure of physical beings and objects.” (28)
Thus, the basic-level category isn’t determined by a totally objective reality, but rather by the nature of our local environment as well as the nature of very bodies, and either of these could have possibly been very different. Thus we shouldn’t expect beings which evolved in a totally foreign environment and/or have totally foreign bodies to ours to have identical abilities and tendencies by way of basic-level categorization at all. The parallel here between basic-level categorization and our perception of color can illustrate their point quite nicely. Just as indigo is not a real color from our perspective due to our not having been forced to evolve the necessary apparatus for recognizing it as such, so too “evolution has not required us to be as accurate above and below the basic level as the basic level, and so we are not.” (30)
The third philosophical point which they take from basic-level categorization gets closer to the heart of the issue:
“Metaphysical realism seems to work primarily at the basic level. If you look only at examples of basic-level categories, at the level of category where we interact optimally with the world, then it appears as if our conceptual categories fit the categories of the world. If you look at categories at other levels, it does not.” (29)
If we were to imagine a being with a different basic-level categorization than ours entering our environment, it is highly dubitable that metaphysical realism would appear at all plausible to such a being. If it did, by chance find metaphysical realism to be tenable in such a context, it would seem that their account of metaphysically real categories would in all probability differ from ours. The same could be said of us entering a foreign environment as well.
Finally, according to L&J, the scientific description of reality by way of instrumentation as “extending [our] basic-level abilities to perceive, image, and intervene.” This is as it should be, according to L&J, for “basic-level categories are the source of our most stable knowledge, and the technological capacity to extend them allows us to extend our stable knowledge.” (29)
From this account we can see that while L&J argue strongly against metaphysical realism, while doing their best to avoid the position of radical metaphysical subjectivity. Instead, they argue that just as colors are objective qualities across similar beings interacting with similar environments, so too are metaphysical categories objective with such qualifications in place. They call this position “embodied realism.”
