Chapter six accomplishes two things, creating an opening for their definition of “embodied realism.” (Nice phrase that.)

The two things are a successful disputation with respect to the idea of concepts as entities independent of body and brain, and the slicing off of the (silly) idea that science is no more than just another culturally controlled way of seeing things, equivalent to a personal mythology of matter.

As part of this the authors discuss the difference between a priori philosophical assumptions and the ones underlying methodologies – an important distinction. They also talk about stable forms of knowledge whilst still rejecting the idea of pure objectivity.

Accordingly, we reject the simpleminded ideas that all science is purely objective, that issues of power and politics never enter into science, that science progresses linearly, and that it can always be trusted. Moreover, we strongly reject the myths that science provides the ultimate means of understanding everything and that humanistic knowledge has no standing relative to anything that calls itself science.

But this does not mean that there is no reliable or sable science at all and that there can be no lasting scientific results…we are not likely to discover that there are no such things as cells or that DNA does not have a double-helix structure. Many scientific results are stable.

In other words, just because scientists are people first, and therefore have preconceptions and histories which colour their thinking, does not mean that knowledge is not possible. That would be a bit like saying  because humans dream, the world is therefore a dreamscape. Not. You might survive being hit by a bus in a dream. Don’t try it when you are awake.

The thing about knowledge stability is that it comes from multiple sources. And it is this approach that forms the heart of their suggested methodology. Lots of data from lots of sources will stabilize what we know about cognition, just as it has done with regard to our knowledge about the spherical nature of the earth, and our understanding of the distinction between the universe in the sleeping mind and that of the waking.

The authors end the chapter with a little section called “Beyond Subject and Object.” It’s three paragraphs long and I could have done with a bit more discussion, but perhaps they will get to it in future pages.

Following on from a discussion of primary metaphor, chapter five discusses the construction of complex metaphors, shows how these complex metaphors give meaning to raw experience and establishes how a metaphor for one domain can apply to another and therefore  deeply effect how we come to think about and experience the new domain.

The complex metaphor the authors use to talk about this process is A purposeful life is a journey. We have physical experiences of journeys, of moving from one place to another and what that requires of us.  This experience allows us to interpret the various experiences of our lives, and judge them according to the “rules” of a journey.

The complex metaphor is comprised of four submetaphors: “journey maps” onto “purposeful life”; “traveler” maps onto “person living a life”; “destinations” map onto “life goals”; “itinerary” maps onto “life plan”. Because we have this metaphorical map, if we run into a problem in our “journey” we have a pre-established set of ways to think about how we might “get back on the road.” I’m sure you can think of a number of ways that the skills we need to take an actual journey can aid us in assessing our lives—having appropriate and inappropriate destinations (for example.)

What is really fun about this chapter is that it takes this journey→life mapping and adds another layer, love.  Love is a journey. One fun question: can one map things at this complex level sideways? Is love a purposeful life? or is a purposeful life love?

They also look at idioms in this section, which I have to say, is really interesting. If you’ve ever tried to learn idioms in another language this will sing out to you. I mean la petite chou? I would love to see how that one maps back. An English idiom “spinning my wheels” is used to talk about how the mapping process makes sense of the idiom to us. We don’t have to think about it really because the mappings are there, shared by all of us, without training, without thought. That’s because they map back onto primary metaphors that are largely unconscious.

And finally, they show that complex, abstract concepts like love, time, causality, cannot be separated from their underlying metaphors — and that not all cultures share the same metaphorical networks. Some cultures, for example, don’t have a metaphorical network A purposeful life is a journey. But we all do. That, seems to me, is rather important.

In chapter 3 there are some pretty good examples of the “hidden hand” at work. The one I’m going to talk about is colour but before I do that I’d like to summarize briefly what the chapter achieves.

The chapter seeks, fairly simply, to show that the perceptual and sensory/motor neurological systems are almost certainly used to reason and conceptualize. This is what they mean by the embodiment of reason. They mean it literally. The structures by which we perceive (for example) form the concepts by which we reason about that which we perceive. They mention it repeatedly, but this is a huge thing. It seems obvious since this is how evolution works to develop new abilities, but such a claim does fly in the face of much Western ideology about the nature of rationality (as being ex-somatic).

The hand that shapes is the metaphor for these neurological structures and leads me to tell you a bit about how the authors talk about colour.

The first thing they do is establish that “neural beings must categorize.” It’s my slug in the garden example from the post on chapter 2. Once they do that they have made it possible to think of categorization as a physical ability. Otherwise we have to grant slugs the same ex-somatic reasoning we have granted human beings, since it is clear that they do discern between mates and food sources.

Once the authors physicalize categorization, they establish that concepts (categorizations about the world) are the same as the neurological structures—not that the neurological structures host the concepts but that they are the concepts. Once they do that they can say:

An embodied concept is a neural structure that is actually part of, or makes use of, the sensorimotor system of our brains. Much of conceptual inference is, therefore, sensorimotor inference.

Inference (that is, reason in action) is a physical thing – a neurological structure in action. They use colour as an example: the structure of our bodies/brains in interaction with the physical nature of the world (in and through which our bodies/brains evolved to thrive) is what colour is.

Our experience of color is created by a combination of four factors: wave-lengths of reflected light, lighting conditions, and two aspects of our bodies: (1) the tree kinds of color comes in our retinas, which absorb light of long, medium, and short wavelengths, and (2) the complex neural circuitry connected to those cones.

…and…

Color concepts are “interactional”; they arise from the interactions of our bodies, our brains, the reflective properties of objects, and electromagnetic radiation. Colors are not objective; there is in the grass or the sky no greenness or blueness independent of retinas, color cones, neural circuitry, and brains. Nor are colors purely subjective; they are neither a figment of our imaginations nor spontaneous creations of our brains.

Having established the “interactional” nature of the experience we call color, and having previously established the fact that neuronal structures shape the conceptual work that can be done by us, it leaves us to suspect that this “hand” (the neuronal and bodily (rods, cones) structures that are the human elements that make the experience of colour possible) also necessarily shapes how we can think about colour.

They give a brief example of how this works before moving on to show other examples with other perceptual and spatial concepts. The colour example talks about the category we have of “red” and the fact that there is a focal colour (why the category is called red and not orange (as an example.) This has to do with the way our brains process colors. The physical structures, the processing nets, correspond to our categorization of color. Our categories do not mimic the visible light spectrum, or the kinds of reflectant surfaces found in the human environment.

The human eye has three types of cones. They pick up specific waves lengths. Here’s the chart from Wikipedia:

Here is the visible light spectrum with wavelength.

So there’s the basic kind of colours we are (literally) wired to focus on (why those? – another interesting question, and to do with the environment I suspect), but there are also our groups of colours – the reds, the blues. How do we do that?

The category red, for instance, contains central red as well as noncentral, peripheral hues such as purplish red, pinkinsh red, and orangish red. The center-periphery structure of categories is a result of the neural response curves for color in our brains. Focal hues correspond to frequencies of maximal neural response.

So here is the “hand” at work, and an example of the physical structuring of colour perception that acts as an inference.  Long before we are thinking in the normal sense of the word, our bodily perceptors and the neuronal networks that allow the chosen signals to be further processed, we have already made huge “decisions” about how the experience of colour is going to be categorized. And any further concepts that might be built on this basic organization, well they will have to start from what already exists.

So on to the next chapter.

This chapter is called “The cognitive unconscious” and begins the process of defining things. Which is good because I’ve always wanted to know what consciousness, the unconscious, and cognition actually mean. That is, we all think we know what they mean but I suspect that the way I use the words differs from situation to situation, let alone what each term means when I compare my “content” with yours.

Hah! You suspect a trap!

I am playing with you, of course. But it is true that defining terms is critical (it’s how we know we are talking about the same thing) and it is also true that no closed definition is possible because meaning does depend to some degree on situation; and in the case of Lakeoff’s and Johnson’s theory, embodiedness, metaphor and situation matter a great deal.  So the best we can do is agree what is meant by certain terms for the purposes of this book and our conversation about it.

Consciousness seems to be the largest category.

Consciousness goes way beyond mere awareness of something, beyond the mere experience of qualia (the qualitative senses of, for example, pain or color), beyond the awareness that you are aware, and beyond the multiple takes on immediate experience provided by various centers of the brain. Consciousness certainly involves all of the above plus the immeasurable vaster constitutive framework provided by the cognitive unconscious, which must be operating for us to be aware of anything at all.

This is not the “consciousness” of everyday use. I will have to keep that in mind as I read.

So cognitive unconscious is something contained wholly within the category “consciousness”, and, further, something that acts as a kind of foundation for the processes mentioned above.

Cognitive as a term used in this book has a very broad meaning not limited to conceptual or propositional structures. For Lakoff and Johnson cognitive includes those things but also includes the sensory processing structures that allow us to see and hear, for example. Cognitive also includes “all aspects of thought and language, conscious or unconscious” as well as memory and attention. What is seems to include is anything that contributes to our ability to categorize the world in which we live – which means all our behaviours (conscious or otherwise) I should think. What isn’t cognitive? My stomach gurgle is not cognitive, but what I react to as “food” would be because it requires discrimination. My epilepsy isn’t cognitive since it is just a “wiring” issue, but the behavioural consequences would be. I think I’ve got this right. There are some pretty steep consequences to accepting this definition, it seems to me. In immediate jeopardy, for example, would be the idea that only human beings are exemplars of ongoing cognition. I mean a slug has to be able to tell the difference between a likely sexual partner and the food patch or there won’t be any baby slugs, and based on the state of my garden last summer, that is not a problem they are having. So they can categorize, and therefore by this definition are capable of cognition if not awareness.

So it would seem that the cognitive unconscious really includes all those processes which make what we normally think of as thinking possible. So the normal use of “thinking” is not what Lakoff and Johnson mean. What it takes to write this post, for example, includes what we normally think of as “thinking.” But what Lakoff and Johnson include in that term are all of those antecedent processes that are outside our awareness—those processes which categorize and differentiate and therefore direct our responses. To Lakoff and Johnson these unconscious processes are all still “thinking.” In fact, the vast majority of thinking is unconscious according to Lakoff and Johnson. I have to say I like this. Partly this is because I have always been convinced that the body thinks and I like being “proved” right. One possible problem though: what’s the difference between “thinking” and “cognitive” as defined by Lakoff and Johnson? And if there isn’t one, does it matter?

It is interesting that we cannot become aware of the vast majority of our cognitive processes. This leads to the conclusion that the roots of our thinking are beyond our capacity to touch directly, and would lead to a host of narratives constructed by us ad hoc to explain ourselves to ourselves. The idea of the “true self” as one of those ad hoc narratives? I’ve always thought so but it would make sense if the “self-ing” processes are fundamentally untouchable by our awareness. How incredibly irritating that would be to a function that needs to know the answer to everything!  However funny such “untouchability” is, that doesn’t mean we can’t come to understand the cognitive unconscious and to know of the “entities” and the processes. That’s what science is for—particularly in the shape of cognitive science, at least it is for Lakeoff and Johnson. (Which leads to some interesting speculation on the future scope of philosophy—but I’m sure they are going to address that later in the book.)

Lakoff and Johnson use the metaphor a hidden hand to describe the shaping activity of the myriad processes that constitute the cognitive unconscious. I have to say I like this. It is a hilariously appropriate instance of anthropomorphizing. Here’s what they say about the hand:

This hidden hand gives form to the metaphysics that is built into our ordinary conceptual systems. It creates the entities that inhabit the cognitive unconscious—abstract entities like friendships, bargains, failures, and lies—that we use in ordinary unconscious reasoning. It thus shapes how we automatically and unconsciously comprehend what we experience. It constitutes our unreflective common sense.

That’s a useful explanation I think. And apparently, a good deal of the rest of the book is going to show the “hidden hand” at work. Nice. I’m looking forward to it.

I have begun Philosophy in the Flesh by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson and am so delighted with how it has begun that I am going to go through chapter by chapter talking about what delights me (or peeves me). A conversation in the comments would be welcome should you feel like it.

One lovely thing about the book is it’s style. It’s accessible; it doesn’t rely on a specialized vocabulary that only a few understand and even fewer are qualified to speak about. The second lovely thing (just from chapter 1 mind you), is that the chapters are relatively short and allow for some synthesis time between big doses of new ideas and information. And given what Lakoff and Johnson claim they are going to do, this synthesis time is going to be important.

Chapter 1 is really their introduction; it’s only 5 pages long and spends most of that time demolishing 2 millennia of Western thought. It’s delightful. Here are some quoted bits:

·there is no Cartesian dualistic person

·there exists no Kantian radically autonomous person

·the utilitarian person, for whom rationality is economic rationality…does not exist

·the phenomenological person, who through phenomenological introspection alone can discover everything there is to know about the mind and the nature of experience, is a fiction

·there is no poststructuralist person—no completely decentered subject for whom all meaning is arbitrary, totally relative, and purely historically contingent, unconstrained by body and brain

·there exists no Fregean person—as posed by analytic philosophy—for whom thought has been extruded from the body

·there exists no such thing as a computational person, whose mind is like computer software, able to work on any suitable computer or neural hardware—whose mind somehow derives meaning from taking meaningless symbols as input, manipulating them by rule, and giving meaningless symbols as output

·there is no Comskyan person for whom language is pure syntax, pure form insulated from and independent of all meaning, context, perception, emotion, memory, attention, action, and the dynamic nature of communication

See what I mean. In a blip, more than 2000 years of philosophy—kerblooie! Of course, one line of potential niggle is whether or not this is in fact what each of these theories really says. I mean that is a lot of history in a few pages!

Lakoff and Johnson’s premise is that since we now understand reason in a completely new way (thanks to cognitive science), and since our previous understanding of reason is a central support for all of the above philosophical systems, they must all be re-evaluated given the devastating weakness of our previous understanding of reason. What they intend for the book is to ask the basic philosophical questions given what we now understand about how reason actually works.

If you’re going to reopen basic philosophical issues, here’s the minimum you have to do. First, you need a method of investigation. Second, you have to use that method to understand basic philosophical concepts. Third, you have to apply that method to previous philosophies to understand what they are about and what makes them hang together. And fourth, you have to use that method to ask the big questions: What is it to be a person? What is morality? How do we understand the causal structure of the universe? And so on.

So method is key. OK. One has to start somewhere. And where they begin is with the assumption that whatever the purpose of philosophy, it must be in accord with what we know about the empirical world. One can ask any kind of question, but if the assumptions that underlie the question are in direct contradiction with what empirical evidence tells us, then they are not really philosophical questions – not given this methodological stance. That means asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin is not a philosophical question any longer. Nor, I think, are any number of standard metaphysical questions—any more than asking (for example) who would better fit into our new temple, Zeus or Mithra?

It’s going to be fun reading Philosophy in the Flesh, and an on-going personal project will be applying these new criteria to Jungian thought. I think it might help me with my personal quest to re-site archetypal theory on something other than the notion of the “soul.”