Part II is concerned to show how some of our most basic ideas about human reality are based in primary metaphor and then reasoned about through metaphorical extension (the development of conceptual metaphor). For example, our concepts of time are all based on things like movement, perceived distance (3D space), and events (or change in objects or relations between objects). This is because we don’t experience time, we experience movement, objects and distance. We use the logics of these bodily experiences to reason about time.

When I move from the picnic table to the car and back again, time is experienced as the “thing” which separates the elements of these movements. Time is the “ground” which separates picnic table and parking lot. So time has steps, has discernable intervals, because I take steps, have discernable intervals. Consequently, if I was a being that experience movement, object re-location and space quite differently (an orca?), I would conceive of and think about time quite differently. I might not, for example, develop clocks with hours and minute intervals even if I had the “intelligence” to do so.

What the authors of the text show is that our ideas of cause, mind, self, morality, etc. all work like this. We begin with a physical experience of being human in both human (family, society) and non-human environments (field, forest) and based on those most basic experiences (grasping, moving, forcing the movement of objects, etc.), we reason about our world.

About what’s real: the fact that we reason and conceptualize metaphorically based on our bodily experience and reach an idea of what “cause” is doesn’t mean there are no causes in the world outside the human mind. One of the things the authors do is point out that “there do appear to be real determining factors in the world, determining factors of many different sorts” and so the existence of a mind is not a prerequisite for this literal form of causality. But care is needed with the word “causality” because any idea or thought or theory we can imagine or have about this literal causality necessarily extends the various logics of our various basic bodily experiences (primary metaphors) of causation.

So, I move from the car lot to the picnic ground and its logic involves some idea of agency with causation. There must be a first cause, for example. Well there is a first cause in human terms—I have to get up and move. But this doesn’t make it so with respect to the literal universe. The literal universe is not human.

Another kind of causal logic involves me lifting the food basket and moving it from one place to another, and of me slipping while walking down the hill. This sort of causation involves imposed forces and when used to reason about what is “really” the “true” cause, leads to a completely different conceptual paradigm than the one involving necessary agency.

All this metaphorical building is based on the simple, literal existence of a “determining factor.” And without our metaphors? Really what can be said about the requirement of a “determining factor” without resorting to them?

The consequence of all this applied to philosophical questions is what Part III of the text is about.

Chapter 8 ends section 1 of their argument. The have been at pains here to show how the basic system of embodied reason works and why the fact of metaphorical concepts destroys the footing of much of analytic philosophy. In effect ,chapter 8 works as a bit of a summary and set up for the following section so here I’ll just block-quote the final paragraphs on the chapter.

Some Philosophical Implications of Metaphorical Thought

Even the few simple examples we have looked at so far have radical implications for philosophy. It is no small matter to say that ordinary, everyday reason can be metaphorical. Even at this preliminary stage, before we go on to analyze philosophically important concepts, we can see a great many implications for philosophy:

• Correlations in our everyday experience inevitably lead us to acquire primary metaphors, which link our subjective experiences and judgments to our sensorimotor experience. These primary metaphors supply the logic, the imagery, and the qualitative feel of sensorimotor experience to abstract concepts. We all acquire these metaphorical modes of thought automatically and unconsciously and have no choice as to whether to use them.

• Many, if not all, of our abstract concepts are defined in significant part by conceptual metaphor. Abstract concepts have two parts: (1) an inherent, literal, nonmetaphorical skeleton, which is simply not rich enough to serve as a full-fledged concept; and (2) a collection of stable, conventional metaphorical extensions that flesh out the conceptual skeleton in a variety of ways (often inconsistently with one another).

• The fundamental role of metaphor is to project inference patterns from the source domain to the target domain. Much of our reasoning is therefore metaphorical.

• Metaphorical thought is what makes abstract scientific theorizing possible.

• Metaphorical concepts are inconsistent with the classical correspondence theory of truth. Instead, what is required is embodied truth.

• Formal logic has no resources for characterizing any of the aspects of human concepts and human reason discussed so far in this book. The reason is that formal logic is disembodied, literal, nonimagistic, and nonmetaphorical

• Reason and conceptual structure are shaped by our bodies, brains, and modes of functioning in the world. Reason and concepts are therefore not transcendent, that is, not utterly independent of the body.

• Much of everyday metaphysics arises from metaphor.

The analyses to follow in the rest of the book will give more substance to these claims. They will also allow us to explore more fully the far-ranging implications for philosophy of unconscious metaphorical thought.

As we shall see, our most fundamental concepts—time, events causation, the mind, the self, and morality—are multiply metaphorical. So much of the ontology and inferential structure of these concepts is metaphorical that, if one somehow managed to eliminate metaphorical thought, the remaining skeletal concepts would be so impoverished that none of us could do any substantial everyday reasoning.

Eliminating metaphor would eliminate philosophy. Without a very large range of conceptual metaphors, philosophy could not get off the ground.

The metaphoric character of philosophy is not unique to philosophic thought. It is true of all abstract human thought, especially science. Conceptual metaphor is what makes most abstract thought possible. Not only can it not be avoided, but it is not something to be lamented. On the contrary, it is the very means by which we are able to make sense of our experience. Conceptual metaphor is one of the greatest of our intellectual gifts.

There’s quite a bit in this chapter dealing with the philosophical fundamentals of things like what it means to say “realism.” In brief, “Realism is fundamentally about our success in functioning in the world.” By defining realism like this the authors make embodied realism the only possible sort. I mean I’d like to see a mind that is without a body kiss my hand. Really, would a mind raised up without a body even know what a hand was?

The authors have argumentation for this version of realism, but you can read too so I won’t outline it here. They do take pains to say that what they are suggesting is not a form of extreme relativism, whilst still maintaining a ban on absolutism of the sort that one often finds in idealism or dualism. What they say, as discussed in chapter 6, is that there are stable sorts of knowledge, such as the existence of cells, or stars, or the earth’s rotundity. They also show that “directly embodied concepts” such as up/down, back/front have an “evolutionary origin and enable us to function extremely successfully in our everyday interactions in the world. They also form the basis of our stable scientific knowledge.”

It is so refreshing to find someone fascinated by the mind to grock that this means the body-working-in-the world.

The authors do talk about “precursors” to embodied realism. (Delightful, that word “precursor.” Oh what it suggests!) They talk about, for example, correspondence theory and how it only allows for one level of truth, or at least for the dominance of one level of experience to be seen as the “real” truth.  Showing that this won’t work, the section establishes that there are levels at which something can be true, whilst being false at another. The example they use is “green.”

The levels are cognitive, neurocomputational and neurobiological. Cognitive: “includes notions such as phonemes, verbs and concepts.” Neurocomputation: links the other two and is associated with their cognitive unconscious already discussed in earlier chapters. Neurobiological:  “notions of ion channels, axons, dendrites, synapses.”

So green: there is no such thing as green at the neurobiological level. Does that mean green does not exist? No, of course not. Green certainly exists at the cognitive level, we know this because I can write “green” and you know that it doesn’t refer to “red.” The big question is whether it exists at the neurocomputational level. The authors are going to suggest it does in the last section of the chapter called “The Efficacious Cognitive Unconscious.”

In short, the cognitive unconscious is thoroughly efficacious: intentional, representational, propositional, truth characterizing, inference generating, imaginative, and causal. The fact that it is efficacious indicates that it is real. The mode of its efficaciousness indicates that it has real conceptual structure—structure at the level of intentionality, representation, propositions, truth, and inference—and not just structure at the neural level.

One of the fun things about this chapter was the argument. Searle’s name is mentioned repeatedly, for example. (Go back to the use of the word “precursor.” Love that. So cheeky.) I also really like the definition of “real.” It’s fundamentally what enables the whole chapter. In that quote above, for example, their definition of “real” is what makes them able to say “the fact that it is efficacious” indicates that it is real.” Once they do that they knock Searle and his objections right out of the ring.

More than that though, I like the idea that truth is stable within its “level” of experience.  There are things we can count on and yet change is possible; we know the world because we are embodied, not despite that. I’ve always had a problem with philosophy if it can’t take into account the evolution of life and what that must mean to how and what we know.