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    The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason
    The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason
    The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason
    Ebook402 pages6 hours

    The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason

    By Mark Johnson

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    About this ebook

    "There are books—few and far between—which carefully, delightfully, and genuinely turn your head inside out. This is one of them. It ranges over some central issues in Western philosophy and begins the long overdue job of giving us a radically new account of meaning, rationality, and objectivity."—Yaakov Garb, San Francisco Chronicle
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateJan 31, 2013
    ISBN9780226177847
    The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason
    Author

    Mark Johnson

    Mark Johnson is a health and science reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where he has worked since 2000. He was a member of the Journal Sentinel team that won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting on the Nic Volker story in 2011. He is also a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and has won numerous other awards for his reporting. He lives with his wife and son in Fox Point, WI.

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      Book preview

      The Body in the Mind - Mark Johnson

      meaning.

      Introduction: The Context and Nature of This Study

      The Importance of the Body in Meaning and Reason

      We human beings have bodies. We are "rational animals, but we are also rational animals," which means that our rationality is embodied. The centrality of human embodiment directly influences what and how things can be meaningful for us, the ways in which these meanings can be developed and articulated, the ways we are able to comprehend and reason about our experience, and the actions we take. Our reality is shaped by the patterns of our bodily movement, the contours of our spatial and temporal orientation, and the forms of our interaction with objects. It is never merely a matter of abstract conceptualizations and propositional judgments.

      In this book I am going to explore some of the more important ways in which structures of our bodily experience work their way up into abstract meanings and patterns of inference. Special attention is devoted to imaginative structuring and projection, as they affect human meaning, understanding, and rationality. My argument begins by showing that human bodily movement, manipulation of objects, and perceptual interactions involve recurring patterns without which our experience would be chaotic and incomprehensible. I call these patterns image schemata, because they function primarily as abstract structures of images. They are gestalt structures, consisting of parts standing in relations and organized into unified wholes, by means of which our experience manifests discernible order. When we seek to comprehend this order and to reason about it, such bodily based schemata play a central role. For although a given image schema may emerge first as a structure of bodily interactions, it can be figuratively developed and extended as a structure around which meaning is organized at more abstract levels of cognition. This figurative extension and elaboration typically takes the form of metaphorical projection from the realm of physical bodily interactions onto so-called rational processes, such as reflection and the drawing of inferences from premises. I shall try to show that what are often thought of as abstract meanings and inferential patterns actually do depend on schemata derived from our bodily experience and problem-solving.

      There are two especially controversial aspects of the view I will be developing concerning the centrality of image schematic structures in the organization of meaning and in the nature of our inferences. The first is their apparently nonpropositional, analog nature. The second is their figurative character, as structures of embodied imagination.

      I cannot overemphasize the importance of these two aspects. This book consists chiefly in an extended development of these characteristics of image schemata and their radical implications for a theory of human meaning, understanding, and rationality. The key terms to be explicated include: image schema, metaphor, imagination, nonpropositional, and embodied. Since my general perspective is partly at odds with the mainstream theories, it is important to guard against assuming that I employ these terms with their standard meanings. Although I intend to keep these key notions connected to their ordinary meanings, it is necessary to extend them beyond their usual scope. For example, I will not be using metaphor in the traditional sense as merely a figure of speech; rather, I shall identify it as a pervasive, indispensable structure of human understanding by means of which we figuratively comprehend our world. And I shall argue that imagination is a basic image-schematic capacity for ordering our experience; it is not merely a wild, non-rule-governed faculty for fantasy and creativity. Furthermore, I will eventually show that certain image-schematic meaning structures are not propositional in the traditional sense, and yet they are propositional in a special sense that makes them central to our rationality. At the end of my account, I hope to have given these terms meanings that are both connected to standard or ordinary usage but that make better sense of our experience of meaning and reasoning than the received views do.

      According to the dominant philosophical views of meaning and rationality, neither of the above two characteristics of image schemata (i.e., their nonpropositional and imaginative character) is considered relevant to the proper conceptual and propositional nature of meaning. Virtually everyone agrees that human experience and meaning depend in some way upon the body, for it is our contact with the entire spatiotemporal world that surrounds us. However, the received notion of the role of bodily input (into meaning and inference patterns) does not include a place for nonpropositional, figuratively elaborated schematic structures.

      In the Preface I gave the name Objectivism to the tradition that treats meaning and rationality as purely conceptual, propositional, and algorithmic, and therefore in no way dependent on metaphorical extensions of nonpropositional image schemata. Since Objectivists think that meaning and rationality transcend the way individuals might happen to grasp meanings or understand reasoning processes, they tend to view reason in abstract and absolute terms, as if it operated in a realm free of bodily constraints and governed only by its own logical rules. In other words, reason is regarded as master of its own autonomous realm, subject only to its own structures, and providing a universally valid basis for rational analysis and criticism. And, as we shall see later, this Objectivist vision of abstract reason lends support to the argument that humans have access to a value-neutral, ahistorical framework for correctly describing reality.

      My central purpose is to develop a constructive theory of imagination and understanding that emphasizes our embodiment as the key to dealing adequately with meaning and reason (and which, incidentally, solves or dissolves certain problems intrinsic to Objectivism). I am going to explore a hitherto neglected domain of human cognition—an area in which what is typically regarded as the bodily works its way up into the conceptual and the rational by means of imagination.

      Since the view of meaning, understanding, and reason that I will be developing is largely at odds with the dominant Objectivist tradition in Western philosophy, I want to describe this tradition more fully, in order to explain why it neglects just those aspects of understanding that I shall be emphasizing, namely, operations on nonpropositional, figuratively developed schematic structures in the formation of meaning and in the drawing of inferences based on that meaning.

      Objectivist Theories of Meaning and Rationality

      So far, I have only described Objectivism as a loosely related cluster of assumptions that form a more or less commonsense view of relations among mind, language, and the physical world. It assumes a fixed and determinate mind-independent reality, with arbitrary symbols that get meaning by mapping directly onto that objective reality. Reasoning is a rule-governed manipulation of these symbols that gives us objective knowledge, when it functions correctly.

      It is now necessary to get more precise about Objectivist commitments, if we are to see why a theory of imagination is so badly needed. In particular, we need a statement of the chief implications of Objectivism for the theories of meaning and rationality that dominate contemporary cognitive science. What we find is not so much a list of assumptions attributable uniformly to every mainstream theory, but rather a general view that has fixed the context of discussion for these theories. The major framework has the following character.

      THE OBJECTIVIST THEORY OF MEANING

      1. Meaning is an abstract relation between symbolic representations (either words or mental representations) and objective (i.e., mind-independent) reality. These symbols get their meaning solely by virtue of their capacity to correspond to things, properties, and relations existing objectively in the world.

      2. Concepts are understood as general mental representations (Kant) or as logical entities (Frege)—in either case, highly abstract and well-defined—that can be used to identify what things or objects there are, what properties they have, and what relations they can stand in. Concepts must be relatively general in character if they are to contain or present what is common to several particular objects. The concept chair, for instance, applies to all chairs (specifies what all chairs share in common that makes them chairs), and so incidentally is not a particular image of this or that

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