Philosophy In The Flesh 

by George Lakoff

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Last annotated on June 21, 2016

Part 1.

How the embodied mind challenges the western philosophical tradition 

Chapter 1.  Introduction: Who Are We?

How Cognitive Science Reopens Central Philosophical Questions  

********** (Note:  premise)   The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. These are three major findings of cognitive science.  Read more at location 57

these three findings from the science of the mind are inconsistent with central parts of Western philosophy.  Read more at location 58

• Reason is not disembodied, as the tradition has largely held, but arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experience. This is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason; rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment.  Read more at location 67

• Reason is evolutionary, in that abstract reason builds on and makes use of forms of perceptual and motor inference present in "lower" animals. The result is a Darwinism of reason, a rational Darwinism: Reason, even in its most abstract form, makes use of, rather than transcends, our animal nature.  Read more at location 73

• Reason is not "universal" in the transcendent sense; that is, it is not part of the structure of the universe. It is universal, however, in that it is a capacity shared universally by all human beings.  Read more at location 76

• Reason is not completely conscious, but mostly unconscious. • Reason is not purely literal, but largely metaphorical and imaginative. • Reason is not dispassionate, but emotionally engaged.   Read more at location 77

(Note: Reason and consciousness seem like they could be potentially uncorrelated... unconscious reasoning and unreasoning consciousness)  Reason, arising from the body, doesn't transcend the body. What universal aspects of reason there are arise from the commonalities of our bodies and brains and the environments we inhabit.  Read more at location 83

In addition, once we have learned a conceptual system, it is neurally instantiated in our brains and we are not free to think just anything. Hence, we have no absolute freedom in Kant's sense, no full autonomy.  Read more at location 86

The utilitarian person, for whom rationality is economic rationality-the maximization of utility-does not exist. Real human beings are not, for the most part, in conscious control of-or even consciously aware of-their reasoning.  Read more at location 88

we have no direct conscious access to its operation and therefore to most of our thought. Phenomenological reflection, though valuable in revealing the structure of experience, must be supplemented by empirical research  Read more at location 91

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. The mind is not merely embodied, but embodied in such a way that our conceptual systems draw largely upon the commonalities of our bodies and of the environments we live in.  Read more at location 93

****  Because a vast range of our concepts are metaphorical, meaning is not entirely literal and the classical correspondence theory of truth is false. The correspondence theory holds that statements are true or false objectively, depending on how they map directly onto the world-independent of any human understanding  Read more at location 100

truth is mediated by embodied understanding and imagination. That does not mean that truth is purely subjective or that there is no stable truth. Rather, our common embodiment allows for common, stable truths.   Read more at location 102

Real people have embodied minds whose conceptual systems arise from, are shaped by, and are given meaning through living human bodies. The neural structures of our brains produce conceptual systems and linguistic structures that cannot be adequately accounted for by formal systems that only manipulate symbols.   Read more at location 105

there is no Chomskyan 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.  Read more at location 106

Asking Philosophical Questions Requires Using Human Reason  

***********  As human beings, we have no special access to any form of purely objective or transcendent reason. We must necessarily use common human cognitive and neural mechanisms. Because most of our thought is unconscious, a priori philosophizing provides no privileged direct access to knowledge of our own mind and how our experience is constituted.   Read more at location 112

****  we use a reason shaped by the body, a cognitive unconscious to which we have no direct access, and metaphorical thought of which we are largely unaware. The fact that abstract thought is mostly metaphorical means that answers to philosophical questions have always been, and always will be, mostly metaphorical.  Read more at location 114

Metaphorical thought is the principal tool that makes philosophical insight possible and that constrains the forms that philosophy can take.  Read more at location 117

Chapter 2.  The Cognitive Unconscious 

Every thought we have, every decision we make, and every act we perform is based upon philosophical assumptions so numerous we couldn't possibly list them all. We go around armed with a host of presuppositions about what is real, what counts as knowledge, how the mind works, who we are, and how we should act. Such questions, which arise out of our daily concerns, form the basic subject matter of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, ethics, and so on.   Read more at location 135

The Cognitive Unconscious  

Why "Cognitive" Unconscious?  

In cognitive science, the term cognitive is used for any kind of mental operation or structure that can be studied in precise terms. Most of these structures and operations have been found to be unconscious.  Read more at location 163

Confusion sometimes arises because the term cognitive is often used in a very different way in certain philosophical traditions. For philosophers in these traditions, cognitive means only conceptual or propositional structure. It also includes rule-governed operations on such conceptual and propositional structures.  Read more at location 169

As is the practice in cognitive science, we will use the term cognitive in the richest possible sense, to describe any mental operations and structures that are involved in language, meaning, perception, conceptual systems, and reason. Because our conceptual systems and our reason arise from our bodies, we will also use the term cognitive for aspects of our sensorimotor system that contribute to our abilities to conceptualize and to reason.  Read more at location 172

The Hidden Hand That Shapes Conscious Thought  

****  Conscious thought is the tip of an enormous iceberg. It is the rule of thumb among cognitive scientists that unconscious thought is 95 percent of all thought-and that may be a serious underestimate. Moreover, the 95 percent below the surface of conscious awareness shapes and structures all conscious thought. If the cognitive unconscious were not there doing this shaping, there could be no conscious thought.   Read more at location 182

Our unconscious conceptual system functions like a "hidden hand" that shapes how we conceptualize all aspects of our experience. This hidden hand gives form to the metaphysics that is built into our ordinary conceptual systems.  Read more at location 186

Metaphysics as Metaphor  

In short, philosophical theories are largely the product of the hidden hand of the cognitive unconscious. Throughout history it has been virtually impossible for philosophers to do metaphysics without such metaphors.  Read more at location 200

****  Metaphysics in philosophy is, of course, supposed to characterize what is real-literally real. The irony is that such a conception of the real depends upon unconscious metaphors.   Read more at location 203

Empirically Responsible Philosophy: Beyond Naturalized Epistemology  

Unless we know our cognitive unconscious fully and intimately, we can neither know ourselves nor truly understand the basis of our moral judgments, our conscious deliberations, and our philosophy.   Read more at location 213

Chapter 3. The Embodied Mind

Any reasoning you do using a concept requires that the neural structures of the brain carry out that reasoning. Accordingly, the architecture of your brain's neural networks determines what concepts you have and hence the kind of reasoning you can do.  Read more at location 216

"Can rational inferences be computed by the same neural architecture used in perception or bodily movement?" We now know that, in some cases, the answer to this question is yes.  Read more at location 220

Flow the Body and Brain Shape Reason  

We have inherited from the Western philosophical tradition a theory of faculty psychology, in which we have a "faculty" of reason that is separate from and independent of what we do with our bodies.  Read more at location 221

In the Western tradition, this autonomous capacity of reason is regarded as what makes us essentially human, distinguishing us from all other animals. If reason were not autonomous, that is, not independent of perception, motion, emotion, and other bodily capacities, then the philosophical demarcation between us and all other animals would be less clearly drawn.  Read more at location 224

The evidence from cognitive science shows that classical faculty psychology is wrong.  Read more at location 226

****  fundamentally embodied. These findings of cognitive science are profoundly disquieting in two respects. First, they tell us that human reason is a form of animal reason, a reason inextricably tied to our bodies and the peculiarities of our brains. Second, these results tell us that our bodies, brains, and interactions with our environment provide the mostly unconscious basis for our everyday metaphysics, that is, our sense of what is real.  Read more at location 229

Neural Beings Must Categorize  

Every living being categorizes. Even the amoeba categorizes the things it encounters into food or nonfood, what it moves toward or moves away from.  Read more at location 234

The first and most important thing to realize about categorization is that it is an inescapable consequence of our biological makeup. We are neural beings. Our brains each have 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synaptic connections. It is common in the brain for information to be passed from one dense ensemble of neurons to another via a relatively sparse set of connections.  Read more at location 239

****  a concrete example, each human eye has 100 million light-sensing cells, but only about 1 million fibers leading to the brain. Each incoming image must therefore be reduced in complexity by a factor of 100.  Read more at location 243

****  it is not just that our bodies and brains determine that we will categorize; they also determine what kinds of categories we will have and what their structure will be. Think of the properties of the human body that contribute to the peculiarities of our conceptual system. We have eyes and ears, arms and legs that work in certain very definite ways and not in others. We have a visual system, with topographic maps and orientation-sensitive cells, that provides structure for our ability to conceptualize spatial relations. Our abilities to move in the ways we do and to track the motion of other things give motion a major role in our conceptual system. The fact that we have muscles and use them to apply force in certain ways leads to the structure of our system of causal concepts.  Read more at location 249

The Inseparability of Categories, Concepts, and Experience

**** (Note: **** non duality of mind + body)  the categories we form are part of our experience! They are the structures that differentiate aspects of our experience into discernible kinds. Categorization is thus not a purely intellectual matter, occurring after the fact of experience. Rather, the formation and use of categories is the stuff of experience.  Read more at location 256

****  (Note:   Curious to play out Lakoff physicalism vs. Mystical experience. I suspect physicalism dictates symbolic recounting of experience (thus challenge of "ineffable"), but experience itself may indeed transcend body)  We cannot, as some meditative traditions suggest, "get beyond" our categories and have a purely uncategorized and unconceptualized experience.  Read more at location 258

****  What we call concepts are neural structures that allow us to mentally characterize our categories and reason about them. Human categories are typically conceptualized in more than one way, in terms of what are called prototypes.  Read more at location 259

Typical-case prototypes are used in drawing inferences about category members in the absence of any special contextual information. Ideal-case prototypes allow us to evaluate category members relative to some conceptual standard. (To see the difference, compare the prototypes for the ideal husband and the typical husband.) Social stereotypes are used to make snap judgments, usually about people.  Read more at location 261

prototype-based reasoning constitutes a large proportion of the actual reasoning that we do.  Read more at location 264

graded norms are described by what are called linguistic hedges (A4, Lakoff 1972), for example, very, pretty, kind of, barely, and so on.  Read more at location 266

When we conceptualize categories in this way, we often envision them using a spatial metaphor, as if they were containers, with an interior, an exterior, and a boundary. When we conceptualize categories as containers, we also impose complex hierarchical systems on them, with some category-containers inside other category-containers.  Read more at location 268

(Note: Just to say it once: Throughout, what he calls neural causation, I translate as neural correlation)  All of these conceptual structures are, of course, neural structures in our brains. This makes them embodied in the trivial sense that any mental construct is realized neurally.  Read more at location 271

**********  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.   Read more at location 273

Realism, Inference, and Embodiment  

Mainstream Western philosophy adds to this picture certain claims that we will argue are false. Not trivially false, but so false as to drastically distort our understanding of what human beings are, what the mind and reason are, what causation and morality are, and what our place is in the universe.  Read more at location 282

1. Reality comes divided up into categories that exist independent of the specific properties of human minds, brains, or bodies.

2. The world has a rational structure: The relationships among categories in the world are characterized by a transcendent or universal reason, which is independent of any peculiarities of human minds, brains, and bodies.   Read more at location 284

(Note: He lists 9 total, but they are largely derivatives of these first two ideas)

4. Human reason is the capacity of the human mind to use transcendent reason, or at least a portion of it. 

5. Human concepts are the concepts of transcendent reason. 

6. Human concepts therefore characterize the objective categories of mind-, brain, and body-free reality. That is, the world has a unique, fixed category structure, and we all know it and use it when we are reasoning correctly.   Read more at location 289

At the heart of this worldview are tenets 4, 5, and 6-that human reason and human concepts are mind-, brain-, and body-free and characterize objective, external reality. If these tenets are false, the whole worldview collapses.  Read more at location 298

Embodied Concepts  

Color Concepts  

cognitive science tells us that colors do not exist in the external world.  Read more at location 310

Color concepts have internal structure, with certain colors being "focal." The category red, for instance, contains central red as well as noncentral, peripheral hues such as purplish red, pinkish 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.  Read more at location 324

our color concepts, their internal structures, and the relationships between them are inextricably tied to our embodiment. They are a consequence of four interacting factors: lighting conditions, wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, color cones, and neural processing.  Read more at location 328

****  Since colors are not things or substances in the world, metaphysical realism fails.  Read more at location 337

(Note: Again, nondual)  Subjectivism in its various forms-radical relativism and social constructionism-also fails to explain color, since color is created jointly by our biology and the world, not by our culture.  Read more at location 340

**** color is a function of the world and our biology interacting.   Read more at location 342

color and color concepts make sense only in something like an embodied realism, a form of interactionism that is neither purely objective nor purely subjective.  Read more at location 342

We have evolved within these limitations to have the color systems we have, and they allow us to function well in the world. Plant life has been important to our evolution, and so the ability to place in one category the things that are green has apparent value for survival and flourishing. The same goes for blood and the color red,  Read more at location 344

****  (Note:   insightful)  It means abandoning the correspondence theory of truth, the idea that truth lies in the relationship between words and the metaphysically and objectively real world external to any perceiver. Since there is no color in the world in itself, a sentence like "Blood is red," which we all take to be true, would not be true according to the correspondence theory.   Read more at location 354

Getting philosophers to give up on the correspondence theory of truth will not be easy.  Read more at location 360

For an account of the general philosophical implications of color research, see Varela, Thompson, and Rosch [C2, 1991], who argue, as we do, that color is interactional in nature and hence neither objective nor subjective.  Read more at location 361

*********  Cognitive science and neuroscience suggest that the world as we know it contains 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. For real human beings, the only realism is an embodied realism. Basic-Level Categories   Read more at location 364

Why is it so common to feel that our concepts reflect the world as it is-that our categories of mind fit the categories of the world? One reason is that we have evolved to form at least one important class of categories that optimally fit our bodily experiences of entities and certain extremely important differences in the natural environment-what are called basic-level categories.   Read more at location 366

the categories we distinguish among most readily are the folk versions of biological genera, namely, those that have evolved significantly distinct shapes so as to take advantage of different features of their environments.  Read more at location 369

****  (Note:   primary categories)  Consider the categories chair and car, which are "in the middle" of the category hierarchies furniture-chair-rocking chair and vehicle-car-sports car. In the mid-1970s, Brent Berlin, Eleanor Rosch, Carolyn Mervis, and their coworkers discovered that such mid-level categories are cognitively "basic"-that is, they have a kind of cognitive priority, as contrasted with "superordinate" categories like furniture and vehicle and with "subordinate" categories like rocking chair and sports car (A4, Berlin et at. 1974; Mervis and Rosch 1981).   Read more at location 372

The Body-Based Properties of Basic-Level Categories

Condition 1: It is the highest level at which a single mental image can represent the entire category. 

Condition 2: It is the highest level at which category members have similarly perceived overall shapes.

Condition 3: It is the highest level at which a person uses similar motor actions for interacting with category members. 

Condition 4: It is the level at which most of our knowledge is organized. 

As a result of these characteristics, the basic level has other priorities over the superordinate and subordinate levels: It is named and understood earlier by children, enters a language earlier in its history, has the shortest primary lexemes, and is identified faster by subjects. The basic level also tends to he used in neutral contexts, that is, contexts in which there is no explicit indication of which level is most appropriate.  Read more at location 387

The Philosophical Significance of the Basic Level

First, the division between basic-level and nonbasic-level categories is body-based, that is, based on gestalt perception, motor programs, and mental images.  Read more at location 391

Second, the basic level is that level at which people interact optimally with their environments,  Read more at location 393

properties that make for basic-level categories are responses to the part-whole structure of physical beings and objects. Gestalt perception is about overall part-whole structure, as is mental imagery.  Read more at location 394

****  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  Read more at location 398

The basic level, of course, is not just about objects. There are basic-level actions, actions for which we have conventional mental images and motor programs, like swimming, walking, and grasping. We also have basic-level social concepts, like families, clubs, and baseball teams, as well as basic-level social actions, like arguing. And there are basic emotions, like happiness, anger, and sadness. Fourth, the properties of the basic level explain an important aspect of the stability of scientific knowledge. For basic-level physical objects and basic-level actions or relations, the link between human categories and divisions of things in the world is quite accurate.  Read more at location 403

Though the facts of basic-level categorization do not fit metaphysical realism, they do provide us with the basis for embodied realism, which is an improvement over metaphysical realism in that it provides a link between our ideas and the world, at least at the level that matters most for our survival. The facts of basic-level categorization also remind us that our bodies contribute to our sense of what is real.   Read more at location 416

Spatial-Relations Concepts  

We do not see nearness and farness. We see objects where they are and we attribute to them nearness and farness from some landmark. The relations in front of and in back of are imposed by us on space in a complex way.  Read more at location 421

what counts as across varies with the shape of the area crossed and the angle of crossing and is also a matter of degree. Spatial-relations concepts are not simple or straightforward, and they vary considerably from language to language. We use spatial-relations concepts unconsciously, and we impose them via our perceptual and conceptual systems. We just automatically and unconsciously "perceive" one entity as in, on, or across from another entity.  Read more at location 425

English into is a composite of the English elementary spatial relations in and to. English on in its central sense is a composite of above, in contact with, and supported by. Each of these is an elementary spatial relation.  Read more at location 431

a simple example. The Container Schema   Read more at location 434

Spatial relations also have built-in spatial "logics" by virtue of their image-schematic structures.  Read more at location 436

• Given two containers, A and B, and an object, X, if A is in B and X is in A, then X is in B.   Read more at location 437

A container schema has the following structure: an inside, a boundary, and an outside. This is a gestalt structure, in the sense that the parts make no sense without the whole.  Read more at location 439

A container schema, like any other image schema, is conceptual. Such a container schema can, however, be physically instantiated, either as a concrete object, like a room or a cup, or as bounded region in space, like a basketball court or a football field.   Read more at location 442

Container schemas, like other image schemas, are cross-modal.  Read more at location 445

The Source-Path-Goal Schema  

there is a spatial logic built into the source-path-goal schema  Read more at location 448

This schema is topological in the sense that a path can he expanded, shrunk, or deformed and still remain a path. Trajectories are imaginative insofar as they are not entities in the world; they are conceptualized as a linelike "trail" left by an object as it moves and projected forward in the direction of motion.   Read more at location 452

The source-path-goal schema also has an internal spatial "logic"  Read more at location 456

• If you have traversed a route to a current location, you have been at all previous locations on that route. • If you travel from A to B and from B to C, then you have traveled from A to C. • If there is a direct route from A to B and you are moving along that route toward B, then you will keep getting closer to B. • If X and Y are traveling along a direct route from A to B and X passes Y, then X is further from A and closer to B than Y is. • If X and Y start from A at the same time moving along the same route toward B and if X moves faster than Y, then X will arrive at B before Y.  Read more at location 456

Bodily Projections  

The concepts front and back are body-based. They make sense only for beings with fronts and hacks.  Read more at location 470

Other Image Schemas and Elements of Spatial Relations  

there is a relatively small collection of primitive image schemas that structure systems of spatial relations in the world's languages. Here are some examples, without the full detail given above: part-whole, center-periphery, link, cycle, iteration, contact, adjacency, forced motion (e.g., pushing, pulling, propelling), support, balance, straight-curved, and near-far. Orientations also used in the spatial-relations systems of the world's languages include vertical orientation, horizontal orientation, and front-hack orientation. (For a fuller discussion see A4, Lakoff 1987, case study 2; Al, Johnson 1987; A8, Talmy 1983; and B2, Regier 1996.)   Read more at location 484

the conceptual systems used in the world's languages make use of a relatively sma.11 number of basic image schemas, though the range of complex spatial relations that can be built out of these schemas is very large.  Read more at location 487

The Embodied Nature of Spatial-Relations Concepts

fundamental force-dynamic schemas: pushing, pulling, propelling, supporting, and balance. We comprehend these through the use of our body parts and our ability to move them,  Read more at location 492

Our bodies are containers that take in air and nutrients and emit wastes. We constantly orient our bodies with respect to containers-rooms, beds, buildings. We spend an inordinate amount of time putting things in and taking things out of containers. We also project abstract containers onto areas in space,  Read more at location 493

These forms of embodiment arise from the way we schematize our own bodies and things we interact with daily (C2, Gallagher 1995). We will refer to this as phenomenological embodiment. But there is also neural embodiment, as we saw in the case of color.  Read more at location 496

The Neural Modeling of Spatial and Motor Concepts  

there is assumed to be an absolute dichotomy between perception and conception. While perception has always been accepted as bodily in nature, just as movement is, conception-the formation and use of concepts-has traditionally been seen as purely mental and wholly separate from and independent of our abilities to perceive and move. We have already begun to get intimations that this picture is false.  Read more at location 504

Embodiment Not as Realization but as Shaping  

********  (Note:   embodiment provides conceptual forms)  the very properties of concepts are created as a result of the way the brain and body are structured and the way they function in interpersonal relations and in the physical world.   Read more at location 515

embodied-mind hypothesis therefore radically undercuts the perception/conception distinction.  Read more at location 516

the very mechanisms responsible for perception, movements, and object manipulation could be responsible for conceptualization and reasoning. Indeed, in recent neural modeling research, models of perceptual mechanisms and motor schemas can actually do conceptual work in language learning and in reasoning.  Read more at location 518

Neural Modeling as an Existence Proof for the Embodiment of Mind

we do not have any strong neurophysiological evidence, say from PET scan or functional MRI results, that the same neural mechanisms used in perception and movement are also used in abstract reasoning.  Read more at location 521

A neural. model of a perceptual or motor mechanism is constructed, and that very same mechanism is used for conceptual tasks as well. The conceptual tasks are of two sorts: (1) learning the structure of a semantic field of lexical items so as to get the relationships among the lexical items correct and (2) performing abstract inferences.   Read more at location 523

Models have been constructed for three kinds of concepts:

1. Spatial-relations concepts, 

2. Concepts of bodily movement, 

3. Concepts indicating the structure of actions or events 

****  The visual systems of our brains are used in characterizing spatial-relations concepts. Our actual motor schemas and motor synergies are involved in what verbs of motor movement mean. And the general form of motor control gives general form to all our actions and the events we perceive. The point is this: In such models, there is no absolute perceptual/conceptual distinction,  Read more at location 537

The Three Models  

Regier's Model for Learning Spatial-Relations Terms  

Regier's major insights were, first, that topographic maps of the visual field should be instrumental in the computation of image schemas that have topological properties (e.g., the container schema); second, that orientation-sensitive cell assemblies should he able compute the orientational aspects of spatial concepts that rely on bodily orientation (e.g., above); third, that center-surround receptive fields should be crucial to characterizing concepts like contact; and finally that the "filling-in" architecture discovered by Ramachandran and Gregory (B1, 1991) should play a central role in characterizing the notion of containment.   Read more at location 548

Bailey's Model for Learning Verbs of Hand Motion  

Verbs of hand action differ considerably around the world, categorizing actual hand actions in markedly different ways from language to language. Yet the categorization should depend on the actual motor schemas used in moving things with the hand and on parameters given by actual motor synergies. Thus, the actual motor mechanisms should also be doing the conceptual work of categorizing actions for the purpose of naming them.  Read more at location 557

Narayanan's Model of Motor Schemas, Linguistic Aspect, and Metaphor  

discovered that all motor schemas have the same high-level control structure: Getting into a state of readiness The initial state The starting process The main process (either instantaneous or prolonged) An option to stop An option to resume An option to iterate or continue the main process A check to see if a goal has been met The finishing process The final state   Read more at location 560

Aspect-the general structure of events-has a conceptual structure and a logic. What Narayanan discovered was that exactly the same neural structure that can perform motor control also characterizes the conceptual structure of linguistic aspect, and the same neural mechanism that can control bodily movements can perform logical inferences about the structure of actions in general.   Read more at location 569

The Body in the Mind  

From a biological perspective, it is eminently plausible that reason has grown out of the sensory and motor systems and that it still uses those systems or structures developed from them. This explains why we have the kinds of concepts we have and why our concepts have the properties they have. It explains why our spatial-relations concepts should be topological and orientational. And it explains why our system for structuring and reasoning about events of all kinds should have the structure of a motor-control system. It is only from a conservative philosophical position that one would want to believe in the old faculty psychology-in the idea that the human mind has nothing about it that animals share, that reason has nothing about it that smells of the body.   Read more at location 589

****  The embodiment of mind thus leads us to a philosophy of embodied realism. Our concepts cannot he a direct reflection of external, objective, mind-free reality because our sensorimotor system plays a crucial role in shaping them. On the other hand, it is the involvement of the sensorimotor system in the conceptual system that keeps the conceptual system very much in touch with the world.   Read more at location 595

Chapter 4. Primary Metaphor and Subjective Experience 

*******  Metaphor allows conventional mental imagery from sensorimotor domains to be used for domains of subjective experience.  Read more at location 602

The Integrated Theory of Primary Metaphor  

****  Part 1: Johnson's theory of conflation in the course of learning. For young children, subjective (nonsensorimotor) experiences and judgments, on the one hand, and sensorimotor experiences, on the other, are so regularly conflated-undifferentiated in experience-that for a time children do not distinguish between the two when they occur together.  Read more at location 610

Part 2: Grady's theory of primary metaphor. All complex metaphors are "molecular," made up of "atomic" metaphorical parts called primary metaphors. Each primary metaphor has a minimal structure and arises naturally, automatically, and unconsciously through everyday experience by means of conflation, during which cross-domain associations are formed. Complex metaphors are formed by conceptual blending.  Read more at location 615

Part 3: Narayanan's neural theory of metaphor. The "associations" made during the period of conflation are realized neurally in simultaneous activations that result in permanent neural connections  Read more at location 617

Part 4: Fauconnier and Turner's theory of conceptual blending. Distinct conceptual domains can be coactivated, and under certain conditions connections across the domains can be formed, leading to new inferences. Such "conceptual blends" may be either conventional or wholly original.  Read more at location 622

The Sensorimotor Structuring of Subjective Experience  

In More Is Up, a subjective judgment of quantity is conceptualized in terms of the sensorimotor experience of verticality. This correspondence between quantity and verticality arises from a correlation in our normal everyday experiences, like pouring more water into the glass and seeing the level go up.  Read more at location 628

Conflation

Johnson (Al, 1997b, c) studied the Shem corpus in detail. This is a well-known collection of the utterances of a child named Shem, recorded over the course of his language development (D, MacWhinney 1995).  Read more at location 633

Johnson discovered that, prior to using metaphor, Shem went through a stage in which the knowing and seeing domains were conflated. Since we normally get most of our knowledge from seeing, a conflation of these domains would have been expected.  Read more at location 638

Johnson hypothesizes that conceptual metaphor emerges in two stages: (1) the conflation stage, during which connections between coactive domains are established and the domains are not experienced as separate, and (2) the differentiation stage, during which domains that were previously coactive are differentiated into metaphorical sources and targets.   Read more at location 644

Grady's Theory of Primary Metaphor  

Complex metaphors are formed from primary ones through conventional conceptual blending, that is, the fitting together of small metaphorical "pieces" into larger wholes.  Read more at location 649

Primary Metaphor Within Narayanan's Neural Theory

********  Primary metaphors:  

affection is warmth, important is big, happy is up, intimacy is closeness, bad is stinky, difficulties are burdens,

more is up, categories are containers, similarity is closness, linear scales are paths, organization is physical structure, .help is support, time is motion, change is motion, states are locations, purposes are destinations, actions are self-propelled motions, purposes are desired objects, causes are physical forces, relationships are enclosures, control is up, knowing is seeing, seeing is touching, understanding is grasping.   

The Embodiment of Primary Metaphor  

Primary metaphors are part of the cognitive unconscious. We acquire them automatically and unconsciously via the normal process of neural learning  Read more at location 716

not all conceptual metaphors are manifested in the words of a language. Some are manifested in grammar, others in gesture, art, or ritual.  Read more at location 720

The Inevitability of Primary Metaphor  

Metaphor as Cross-Domain Conceptual Mapping  

From a conceptual point of view, primary metaphors are cross-domain mappings, from a source domain (the sensorimotor domain) to a target domain (the domain of subjective experience), preserving inference and sometimes preserving lexical representation. Indeed, the preservation of inference is the most salient property of conceptual metaphors.   Read more at location 730

Can We Think Without Metaphor?  

****  (Note:   I think even the literal is metaphorical in its metaphysical assumptions re: spacetime)  All basic sensorimotor concepts are literal. Cup (the object you drink from) is literal. Grasp (the action of holding) is literal. In (in its spatial sense) is literal. Concepts of subjective experience and judgment, when not structured metaphorically, are literal; for example, "These colors are similar" is literal, while "These colors are close" uses the metaphor Similarity Is Proximity.  Read more at location 739

Without metaphor, such concepts are relatively impoverished and have only a minimal, "skeletal" structure. A primary metaphor adds sensorimotor inferential structure.  Read more at location 741

If we consciously make the enormous effort to separate out metaphorical from nonmetaphorical thought, we probably can do some very minimal and unsophisticated nonmetaphorical reasoning. But almost no one ever does this, and such reasoning would never capture the full inferential capacity of complex metaphorical thought.   Read more at location 744

Summary  

metaphors provide subjective experience with extremely rich inferential structure, imagery, and qualitative "feel," when the networks for subjective experience and the sensorimotor networks neurally connected to them are coactivated.  Read more at location 751

Chapter 5. The Anatomy of Complex Metaphor

The Construction of Complex Metaphors

Primary metaphors are like atoms that can be put together to form molecules. A great many of these complex molecular metaphors are stable-conventionalized, entrenched, fixed for long periods of time. They form a huge part of our conceptual system and affect how we think and what we care about almost every waking moment.  Read more at location 756

A Purposeful Life Is a Journey  

there is a profoundly influential folk model according to which people are supposed to have a purpose in life, and there is something wrong with you if you don't. If you are purposeless, you are seen as "lost," "without direction" in your life, as "not knowing which way to turn."  Read more at location 762

The result is a complex metaphor that affects us all, the metaphor A Purposeful Life Is A Journey,  Read more at location 765

conceptual metaphors go beyond the conceptual; they have consequences for material culture.  Read more at location 784

We are supposed to he impressed with people who have come very far very fast and less impressed with people who are "behind schedule." People who have not "found a direction in life" are seen as being in need of help.  Read more at location 786

****  there are cultures around the world in which this metaphor does not exist; in those cultures people just live their lives, and the very idea of being without direction or missing the boat, of being held back or getting bogged down in life, would make no sense. The Grounding of the Whole Is the Grounding of Its Parts   Read more at location 790

Purposes Are Destinations and Action Are Motions each have their own experiential grounding. That grounding is preserved when the primary metaphors are combined into the larger complex metaphor.  Read more at location 794

Love Is a Journey  

Not only is each individual life a journey, but a couple's life together is also supposed to be a journey to common goals.  Read more at location 800

Metaphors Are Used to Reason With

The Love Is a journey mapping does not just permit the use of travel words to speak of love. That mapping allows forms of reasoning about travel to be used in reasoning about love.  Read more at location 812

Metaphorical Idioms and Mental Imagery  

Metaphorical idioms are philosophically important in a number of ways. First, they show something important about meaning, namely, that words can designate portions of conventional mental images. Second, they show that mental images do not necessarily vary wildly from person to person.  Read more at location 861

Third, they show that a significant part of cultural knowledge takes the form of conventional images and knowledge about those images.  Read more at location 863

Fourth, they open the possibility that a significant part of the lexical differences across languages may have to do with differences in conventional imagery.  Read more at location 864

Fifth, they show dramatically that the meaning of the whole is not a simple function of the meanings of the parts. Instead, the relationship between the meaning of the parts and the meaning of the whole is complex.  Read more at location 866

Why the Term Metaphor?  

Traditionally, only novel cases were called metaphors.  Read more at location 872

the theory of conceptual cross-domain mapping is exactly the theory needed to account for traditional cases of novel metaphorical expressions. It is thus best called a theory of metaphor. Metaphorical Pluralism: Multiple Metaphors for a Single Concept   Read more at location 873

There is some literal (i.e., nonmetaphorical) inherent structure to love in itself: a lover, a beloved, feelings of love, and a relationship, which has an onset and often an end point. But that is not very much inherent structure. The metaphor system gives us much more.  Read more at location 884

When we reason and talk about love, we import inferential structure and language from those other conceptual domains. The cognitive mechanism we use is cross-domain conceptual mapping.  Read more at location 887

****  In philosophy, metaphorical pluralism is the norm. Our most important abstract philosophical concepts, including time, causation, morality, and the mind, are all conceptualized by multiple metaphors, sometimes as many as two dozen. What each philosophical theory typically does is to choose one of those metaphors as "right," as the true literal meaning of the concept.  Read more at location 893

Philosophers have done this because they assume that a concept must have one and only one logic.  Read more at location 896

The Aptness of Metaphor  

one cannot ignore conceptual metaphors. They must be studied carefully. One must learn where metaphor is useful to thought, where it is crucial to thought, and where it is misleading. Conceptual metaphor can be all three. The very notion of the aptness of a metaphorical concept requires an embodied realism. Aptness depends on basic-level experience  Read more at location 915

Summary

****  Each complex metaphor is in turn built up out of primary metaphors, and each primary metaphor is embodied in three ways: (1) It is embodied through bodily experience in the world, which pairs sensorimotor experience with subjective experience. (2) The source-domain logic arises from the inferential structure of the sensorimotor system. And (3) it is instantiated neurally in the synaptic weights associated with neural connections.  Read more at location 918

Chapter 6.  Embodied realism: cognition science versus a priori philosophy

First, not every cognitive scientist accepts all these as "results." Many cognitive scientists were raised in the tradition of analytic philosophy, which asserts that concepts are literal and disembodied.  Read more at location 924

Second, many postmodern philosophers and other post-Kuhnian philosophers of science deny that cognitive science can have "results" that could provide a basis for criticizing a particular philosophical view.  Read more at location 926

From the radical postmodern perspective, no science, including cognitive science, can be free of crucial philosophical assumptions that determine the so-called results.  Read more at location 928

The First Generation: The Cognitive Science of the Disembodied Mind  

First-generation cognitive science evolved in the 1950s and 1960s, centering on ideas about symbolic computation  Read more at location 937

Early cognitive science thus assumed a strict dualism in which the mind was characterized in terms of its formal functions, independent of the body (C2, Haugeland 1985). What was added from artificial intelligence, formal logic, and generative linguistics was that thought could be represented using formal symbol systems.  Read more at location 944

Functionally, mind was disembodied. Moreover, thought was seen as literal; imaginative capacities did not enter the picture at all. This was a modern version of the Cartesian view that reason is transcendental, universal, disembodied, and literal.  Read more at location 955

The Second Generation: The Cognitive Science of the Embodied Mind  

a competing view of cognitive science developed in which all the above assumptions had to be abandoned in the face of two kinds of evidence: (1) a strong dependence of concepts and reason upon the body and (2) the centrality to conceptualization and reason of imaginative processes, especially metaphor, imagery, metonymy, prototypes, frames, mental spaces, and radial categories.   Read more at location 958

The key points of the second-generation embodied view of mind are the following:   Read more at location 960

• Conceptual structure arises from our sensorimotor experience and the neural structures that give rise to  Read more at location 961

• Mental structures are intrinsically meaningful by virtue of their connection to our bodies and our embodied experience.  Read more at location 962

• There is a "basic level" of concepts that arises in part from our motor schemas  Read more at location 963

• Our brains are structured so as to project activation patterns from sensorimotor areas to higher cortical areas. These constitute what we have called primary metaphors.  Read more at location 964

• The structure of concepts includes prototypes of various sorts: typical cases, ideal cases, social stereotypes, salient exemplars, cognitive reference points, end points of graded scales, nightmare cases, and so on.  Read more at location 965

• Reason is embodied  Read more at location 967

• Reason is imaginative  Read more at location 968

• Conceptual systems are pluralistic, not monolithic.  Read more at location 969

The Issue of Initial Philosophical Commitments  

• Functionalism: The mind is essentially disembodied; it can be studied fully independently of any knowledge of the body and brain, simply by looking at functional relations among concepts represented symbolically. • Symbol manipulation: Cognitive operations, including all forms of thought, are formal operations on symbols without regard to what those symbols mean. • Representational theory of meaning: Mental representations are symbolic;  Read more at location 976

• Classical categories: Categories are defined by necessary and sufficient conditions. • Literal meaning: All meaning is literal; no meaning is fundamentally metaphorical or imagistic.   Read more at location 979

First-generation cognitive science is based on analytic philosophy and, for that reason, denies many of the "results" that we are reporting on.  Read more at location 982

General Methodological Assumptions Versus Specific Philosophical Assumptions  

(Note: Realistic... meaning? Realism or plausibility?)  The Cognitive Reality Commitment: An adequate theory of concepts and reason must provide an account of mind that is cognitively and neurally realistic. The Convergent Evidence Commitment: An adequate theory of concepts and reason must be committed to the search for converging evidence from as many sources as possible.   Read more at location 990

The Generalization and Comprehensiveness Commitment: An adequate theory must provide empirical generalizations over the widest possible range of phenomena.   Read more at location 993

Assumptions That Do Not Determine Results  

basic tenets of Anglo-American cognitivist philosophy were taken as true prior to empirical research,  Read more at location 1005

Second-generation cognitive science argues that philosophy must begin with an empirically responsible cognitive science based on the above methodological assumptions, especially the assumption of convergent evidence. This stance is what sanctions our use of the word results in connection with second-generation cognitive science.  Read more at location 1006

Convergent Evidence for the Existence of Conceptual Metaphor  

****  conceptual metaphor allows us to reason about the target domain in a way that we otherwise would not, as when we use inference patterns for travel to draw conclusions about love.  Read more at location 1016

Polysemy Generalizations  

cases of systematically related meanings for a single word are referred to as instances of polysemy.  Read more at location 1020

Novel-Case Generalizations  

To date, nine major kinds of convergent evidence have contributed to the conclusion that conceptual metaphor is cognitively real. We just looked at three types of generalization evidence: Generalizations over (1) inference patterns, (2) polysemy, and (3) novel extensions.  Read more at location 1024

Psychological Experiments The experimental techniques (for a survey, see A2, Gibbs 1994, 161-167, 252-257) include the following seven types: priming, problem solving, inferential reasoning, image analysis, classification, verbal protocol analysis, and discourse comprehension. Because the range of convergent methodologies within such experiments is quite wide, we could technically consider each kind of experiment as presenting a different type of convergent evidence.  Read more at location 1030

Historical Semantic Change Sweetser (Al, 1990) demonstrated that conceptual metaphor provides "routes" for possible changes of word meaning over the course of history. For example, she provides extensive evidence for the existence of the Knowing Is Seeing metaphor  Read more at location 1054

For example, consider the Indo-European root *weid-, whose reconstructed meaning is "see." This develops in Greek into both eidon, "see," and oida, "know" (from which we get English "idea"). In English, it becomes both the vision word "witness" and the knowledge words "wit" and "wise."  Read more at location 1057

Spontaneous Gesture Studies McNeill (A3, 1992) has shown that spontaneous unconsciously performed gestures accompanying speech often trace out images from the source domains of conceptual metaphors.  Read more at location 1062

Language Acquisition Studies  

Christopher Johnson (Al, I997h, c), in studies of the acquisition of the Knowing Is Seeing metaphor by children, has found that the acquisition of such conceptual metaphors goes through two stages: conflation and differentiation.  Read more at location 1066

Sign Language Metaphor Studies The lexicon of American Sign Language (ASL) is replete with metaphorical signs that reflect common cross-cultural conceptual metaphors (A3, Taub 1997).  Read more at location 1072

Discourse Coherence Studies  

Srini Narayanan, in a study of examples of the uses of metaphor in news stories about international economics (B2, 1997a), has observed that conceptual metaphor is necessary to make coherent sense of such examples  Read more at location 1075

How Convergent Evidence Can Help Free Cognitive Science from A Priori Philosophizing  

****  (Note:   true for physical experience as well)  Many cognitive scientists have, in the course of their education, internalized tenets of analytic philosophy, consciously or not. Among these is the tenet that concepts are necessarily defined as being literal. If this tenet is assumed, the evidence for conceptual metaphor will not matter, because analytic philosophy rules it out a priori. When such a definition of what a concept is is accepted a priori, no evidence contradicting that philosophical definition could matter.   Read more at location 1092

A Response to the Postmodern Critique of Science Any student of twentieth-century history and philosophy of science will be aware that there can be no science without at least some assumptions.  Read more at location 1099

Science, as Kuhn rightly observed, does not always proceed by the linear accretion of objective knowledge. Science is a social, cultural, and historical practice, knowledge is always situated, and what counts as knowledge may depend on matters of power and influence.  Read more at location 1105

****  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 stable science at all and that there can be no lasting scientific results.  Read more at location 1107

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.  Read more at location 1110

We know from neuroscience that our brains contain topographic maps and that our visual systems contain orientation-sensitive cells. Much of what we have learned about the brain and the mind is now stable knowledge.   Read more at location 1113

Embodied Scientific Realism  

We are basing our argument on the existence of at least three stable scientific findings-the embodied mind, the cognitive unconscious, and metaphorical thought.  Read more at location 1118

Ironically, these scientific results challenge the classical philosophical view of scientific realism, a disembodied objective scientific realism that can be characterized by the following three claims: 1. There is a world independent of our understanding of it. 2. We can have stable knowledge of it. 3. Our very concepts and forms of reason are characterized not by our bodies and brains, but by the external world in itself.  Read more at location 1120

****  (Note: The "obviously" for 1 and 2 is acknowledgement of another western assumption that is unwittingly accepted 'as is’)  Obviously, we accept (1) and (2) and we believe that (2) applies to the three findings of cognitive science we are discussing on the basis of converging evidence. But those findings themselves contradict (3).  Read more at location 1123

Tzeltal speakers are extremely accurate (in the 90-95 percent range) at identifying plants and animals relative to scientific biological classification. At lower levels-the species and variety-their accuracy drops off precipitously to around 50 percent and below. In short, we are better equipped to recognize plants and animals at the level of the genus, that is, at the basic level, than at lower biological levels.  Read more at location 1130

Our embodied system of basic-level concepts has evolved to "fit" the ways in which our bodies, over the course of evolution, have been coupled to our environment, partly for the sake of survival, partly for the sake of human flourishing beyond mere survival, and partly by chance. It is not that every basic-level concept exists because of its survival value, but without such an embodied system coupled to our environment, we would not have survived.  Read more at location 1133

The degree of confirmation of a theory thus goes up exponentially with the number of distinct subject matters having distinct methodologies for testing inferences of the theory. Embodied scientific realism is thus compatible both with the success of science and with what we have learned in the Kuhnian tradition: that theories change over time, that new theories often don't cover previously known phenomena, that theories can be incommensurable, and that politics, culture, and personal issues enter into science. Successful sciences are those for which there is broad and deep converging evidence.  Read more at location 1146

As Kuhn saw, the history of science yields cases of scientific revolutions. For us, these are cases in which new metaphors replace old ones,  Read more at location 1154

Beyond Subject and Object

Embodied realism can work for science in part because it rejects a strict subject-object dichotomy.  Read more at location 1161

****  What disembodied realism (what is sometimes called "metaphysical" or "external" realism) misses is that, as embodied, imaginative creatures, we never were separated or divorced from reality in the first place.  Read more at location 1168

Chapter 7.  Realism and Truth

Aristotle concluded that we could know because our minds could directly grasp the essences of things in the world. This was ultimate metaphysical realism. There was no split between ontology (what there is) and epistemology (what you could know), because the mind was in direct touch with the world. With Descartes, philosophy opened a gap between the mind and the world. If the mind and the world were not one, then they had to he different kinds of things. The body was flesh and of the world; the mind was not.  Read more at location 1174

This "symbol-system realism" maximizes the chasm between mind and world, since the abstract entity of the symbol shares nothing with anything in the world, not even physical reality.  Read more at location 1182

embodied realism. It is closer to the direct realism of the Greeks than it is to the disembodied representational realism of Cartesian and analytic philosophy, which is fundamentally separated from the world.  Read more at location 1185

(Note: Or vise versa if Idealistic)  Evolution has provided us with adapted bodies and brains that allow us to accommodate to, and even transform, our surroundings.  Read more at location 1187

The embodiment of mind thus brings us far closer to the direct realism that the Greeks assumed than does the disembodied and mere symbol-system realism of present-day analytic philosophy.  Read more at location 1190

direct realism of the Greeks can thus be characterized as having three aspects: 1. The Realist Aspect: The assumption that the material world exists and an account of how we can function successfully in it. 2. The Directness Aspect: The lack of any mind-body gap. 3. The Absoluteness Aspect: The view of the world as a unique, absolutely objective structure of which we can have absolutely correct, objective knowledge.   Read more at location 1192

Embodied realism accepts (l) and (2), but denies that we have any access to (3).   Read more at location 1195

embodied realism denies, on empirical grounds, that there exists one and only one correct description of the world, it may appear to some to be a form of relativism. However, while it does treat knowledge as relative-relative to the nature of our bodies, brains, and interactions with our environment-it is not a form of extreme relativism, because it has an account of how real, stable knowledge, both in science and the everyday world, is possible.  Read more at location 1198

Embodied realism, however, does recognize a central insight of relativist thought, namely, that in many important cases, concepts do change over time, vary across cultures, have multiple inconsistent structures, and reflect social conditions.  Read more at location 1204

Philosophical Precursors of Embodied Realism  

It is anticipated by two of our greatest philosophers of the embodied mind, John Dewey and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.  Read more at location 1207

More recently, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (C2, 1991) have drawn on embodied cognitive science, phenomenology, and Buddhist awareness practices to explain their "enactive" notion of experience.  Read more at location 1213

Realism and Truth  

What analytic philosophy must resort to is a "correspondence theory of truth,"  Read more at location 1222

The Correspondence Theory of Truth in Its Simple, Intuitive Version

the correspondence theory can be stated as follows: A statement is true when it fits the way things are in the world. It is false when it fails to fit the way things are in the world.   Read more at location 1225

Formal model theory cannot fill the second gap for an empirical reason as well: The meanings of the words and grammatical constructions in real natural languages cannot be given in terms of set-theoretical models  Read more at location 1263

Embodiment and Truth

****  What we take to be true in a situation depends on our embodied understanding of the situation, which is in turn shaped by all these factors. Truth for us, any truth that we can have access to, depends on such embodied understanding.   Read more at location 1277

Levels of Embodiment  

Neural embodiment concerns structures that characterize concepts and cognitive operations at the neural level.  Read more at location 1284

When we speak of "neural circuitry," we are, of course, using an important metaphor to conceptualize neural structure in electronic terms. The circuitry metaphor is used by the neuroscience community  Read more at location 1287

The phenomenological level is conscious or accessible to consciousness.  Read more at location 1291

The cognitive unconscious is the massive portion of the iceberg that lies below the surface, below the visible tip that is consciousness.  Read more at location 1294

To say that the cognitive unconscious is real is very much like saying that neural "computation" is real.  Read more at location 1301

It is hypothesized to make sense of what happens in the vast complex of neurochemistry in the brain. Similarly, the detailed processes and structures of the cognitive unconscious (e.g., basic-level categories, prototypes, image schemas, nouns, verbs, and vowels) are hypothesized to make sense of conscious behavior.   Read more at location 1303

The Levels-of-Truth Dilemma  

In much of the Western philosophical tradition, truth is taken to be absolute and scientific truth claims take priority over nonscientific truth claims.  Read more at location 1320

At the neural level, green is a multiplace interactional property, while at the phenomenological level, green is a one-place predicate characterizing a property that inheres in an object. Here is the dilemma: A scientific truth claim based on knowledge about the neural level is contradicting a truth claim at the phenomenological level.   Read more at location 1322

The problem is that the truth-as-correspondence theory requires one consistent, level-independent truth. This raises the question as to which is to be given priority, the phenomenological experience or science.   Read more at location 1325

Truth Depends on Understanding  

There is no truth for us without understanding. Any truth must be in a humanly conceptualized and understandable form if it is to be a truth for us.  Read more at location 1338

Embodied Truth

(Note: Similar to Polanyi 'personal knowledge')  Social truths also make much better sense on this account than on the correspondence theory.  Read more at location 1346

What second-generation cognitive science has found is that there is no single unified metaphysics; nor is there any that is mind- and body-independent.   Read more at location 1357

Phenomenology, Functionalism, and Materialism: The Issue of Privileging the Metaphysics of Only One Level  

We, the authors, recognize the validity of all three levels, because we see all three as relevant to a complete description and explanation of thought, language, and other cognitive phenomena such as memory and attention.  Read more at location 1369

embodied truth requires us to give up the illusion that there exists a unique correct description of any situation.  Read more at location 1374

What we mean by "real" is what we need to posit conceptually in order to be realistic, that is, in order to function successfully to survive, to achieve ends, and to arrive at workable understandings of the situations we are in.   Read more at location 1377

The Embodied Mind Without Eliminativism  

Eliminativis,n is a philosophical position that says that the only things that are real are physically existing entities. Obviously, as proponents of embodied realism we are not eliminativists. But, at the same time, we are physicalists, in the sense that we believe that there is an ultimate material basis for what we take, from a scientific perspective, as being real.  Read more at location 1385

The Common Paradigm

Top Level: Cognitive Middle Level: Neurocomputational Bottom Level: Neurobiological   Read more at location 1392

neurobiologists and computational neuroscientists commonly use the Neural Computation metaphor without noticing that it is a metaphor. Indeed, it is extremely common for computational neurobiologists to form what linguists call a "conceptual blend" of the source and target domains of the metaphor (A7, Fauconnier and Turner 1994, 1996). In the blend, the target-domain biological structures (containing cell bodies, dendrites, synapses, and ion channels) are brought together with the source-domain neural circuitry (containing circuit ideas like connections and gates, as well as numbers indicating synaptic weights, activation, and inhibition).  Read more at location 1403

Noneliminative Physicalism

the NTL paradigm is an instance of a noneliminative physicalism for three reasons: First, all levels are taken as real. Second, explanation and motivation spread top to bottom as well as bottom to top. And third, explanation and motivation can only be adequate relative to larger ecological and evolutionary considerations. Embodied Realism Enters   Read more at location 1435

in order to conceptualize anything physical, one must use one's understanding. In embodied realism, where truth depends on understanding, there is no such metaphysics-epistemology split. Hence the term physicalist takes on a very different meaning, one concerning the nature of scientific explanation and motivation and what one takes as real for the purpose of scientific explanation. A physicalist is someone who believes that there is a material basis for all entities taken as real within any scientific theory. Embodied scientific realism thus makes for sensible science.  Read more at location 1440

It makes perfect sense in embodied realism to be a physicalist, yet to speak of such nonphysical things as real relative to forms of scientific theorizing. The only kinds of nonphysical entities and structures taken as "real" are those that are hypothesized on the basis of convergent evidence  Read more at location 1448

The Efficacious Cognitive Unconscious  

Because we are embodied beings functioning in the world, a basic-level concept like chair is intentional and representational.  Read more at location 1464

semantic frames (A6, Fillmore 1982b), which provide an overall conceptual structure defining the semantic relationships among whole "fields" of related concepts and the words that express them.  Read more at location 1467

frames used as a background are inference generating. And inference generation is both causal and part of what we take semantics to be about.  Read more at location 1479

when we understand a cat as being behind a tree, we are imposing a front and a back on the tree. This spatial-relations concept is causal in that it imposes on the scene something that it not externally there: the front and back of a tree!   Read more at location 1483

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.  Read more at location 1489

Chapter 8.  Metaphor and Truth

The traditional theory of metaphor has persisted for twenty-five hundred years in the philosophical and literary traditions, and the weight of all that tradition cannot easily be overcome by empirical evidence for the existence of conceptual metaphor.  Read more at location 1501

The Commonsense Theory of Language and Truth

There is only one way the world is. Our language consists of words expressing ideas that literally fit the world.  Read more at location 1509

For basic-level concepts, the commonsense theory is fundamentally right. Given the centrality of basic-level concepts in our embodied understanding and their prevalence in our mundane experience, the commonsense theory does make sense.  Read more at location 1511

What makes sense for basic-level concepts has been turned into a theory that is supposed to be true for all thought and language.  Read more at location 1514

We can now see why the traditional theory of metaphor goes hand in hand with the objectivist interpretation of the commonsense theory of language and truth.  Read more at location 1521

First, because ideas have to be literal if they are to fit the world, they cannot be metaphorical. Therefore, metaphor must be a matter of words, not thoughts. That is why the very idea of conceptual metaphor is at odds with this interpretation of the commonsense theory. Second, if ordinary everyday words are used in their "proper" senses, then they would be literal.  Read more at location 1522

In the objectivist theory, since all meaning is held to be literal, a metaphor does not have a capacity to express truth claims.  Read more at location 1531

Aristotle, the father of the traditional theory, was a literalist, as is John Searle, whose version of speech-act theory requires all propositions, that is, anything that can be true, to he literal.  Read more at location 1544

when a romantic like Nietzsche or a postmodernist like Derrida analyzes someone's metaphors, he sees the use of metaphor in formulating a position as invalidating any absolute truth claims that the author was making.  Read more at location 1547

These philosophers are either objectivists who want to preserve the commonsense folk theory or radical relativists who want to abandon it.  Read more at location 1549

Why the Traditional Theory Fails

The empirical incorrectness of Aristotle's theory is especially striking, because the theory was taken for granted for so long that it came to be thought of as a definition rather than a theory. For many people, the term metaphor was defined by those conditions.  Read more at location 1567

Some Philosophical Implications of Metaphorical Thought  

• 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.  Read more at location 1619

• 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  Read more at location 1621

• The fundamental role of metaphor is to project inference patterns from the source domain to the target domain.  Read more at location 1624

• Metaphorical thought is what makes abstract scientific theorizing possible. • Metaphorical concepts are inconsistent with the classical correspondence theory of truth.  Read more at location 1624

• Formal logic has no resources for characterizing any of the aspects of human concepts and human reason discussed so far in this book.  Read more at location 1625

• Reason and conceptual structure are shaped by our bodies, brains, and modes of functioning in the world.  Read more at location 1627

• Much of everyday metaphysics arises from metaphor.   Read more at location 1628

****  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.  Read more at location 1632

Part 2.  The Cognitive Science of Basic Philosophical Ideas. Events, Causation, Time, the Self, the Mind, and Morality 

Chapter 9. The Cognitive Science of Philosophical Ideas

we will begin by asking what has been discovered empirically about such concepts within the cognitive sciences.  Read more at location 1637

the cognitive linguist approaches causation by attempting to find all the causal expressions in English and in other languages throughout the world and to state generalizations governing both their meanings and their linguistic forms.  Read more at location 1642

****  Each of these basic philosophical ideas, we will argue, is not purely literal, but fundamentally and inescapably metaphorical. Moreover, none of them is monolithic, with a single overall consistent structure; rather, each is a metaphorical patchwork, sometimes conceptualized by one metaphor, at other times by another. The metaphors are typically not arbitrary, culturally specific, novel historical accidents, or the innovations of great poets or philosophers. Rather, they tend to be normal, conventional, relatively fixed and stable, nonarbitrary, and widespread throughout the cultures and languages of the world. In addition, they are not purely abstract but, rather, are based on bodily experience.  Read more at location 1656

the whole undertaking of philosophical inquiry requires a prior understanding of the conceptual system in which the undertaking is set. That is an empirical job for cognitive science and cognitive semantics.  Read more at location 1680

Chapter 10. Time

we have no fully fleshed-out concept of time-in-itself. All of our understandings of time are relative to other concepts such as motion, space, and events. Events and Time   Read more at location 1692

the "same" intervals of time are defined by the successive iteration of physical events of the same kind.  Read more at location 1697

The brain has been said to have its own "clock." What could that mean? Forty times a second an electrical pulse is sent across the brain. Some neuroscientists currently believe that this pulse regulates the neural firings in the brain and thus many of the body's rhythms. Whether or not this particular theory turns out to be correct, it gives some idea of what an internal "clock" might he.  Read more at location 1699

our real experience of time is always relative to our real experience of events. It also means that our experience of time is dependent on our embodied conceptualization of time in terms of events.  Read more at location 1710

The Metaphorization of Time

Spatial Time

In physics, time is a more primitive concept than motion and motion is defined as the change of location over time. But cognitively the situation is reversed. Motion appears to be primary and time is metaphorically conceptualized in terms of motion.  Read more at location 1721

The most basic metaphor for time has an observer at the present who is facing toward the future, with the past behind the observer. We will refer to this as the Time Orientation metaphor:   Read more at location 1724

This is a common way of orienting time in the world's languages.  Read more at location 1727

Where the Future Is Behind  

Such a language is Aymara, a Chilean language of the Andes (Al, Nunez et al. 1997). The metaphor The Past Is In Front is grounded by the experience of being able to see the results of what you have just done in front of you.  Read more at location 1735

The Moving Time Metaphor

What the Moving Time mapping does is use information in the spatial schema to give us an understanding of time as moving.  Read more at location 1747

The Moving Observer, or Time's Landscape  

Here the observer, instead of being fixed in one location, is moving. Each location in the observer's path is a time. The observer's location is the present.  Read more at location 1790

Duality  

In the Moving Time metaphor, the observer is the ground and the times are figures that move relative to it. In the Moving Observer metaphor, the observer is the figure and time is the ground-the times are locations that are fixed and the observer moves with respect to them. As we shall see, it is common for metaphors to come in pairs that are figure-ground reversals of each other. We will refer to such metaphor pairs as duals and to the phenomenon as duality. Object-location duality occurs for a simple reason: Many metaphorical mappings take motion in space as a source domain. With motion in space, there is the possibility of reversing figure and ground.  Read more at location 1831

Novel Cases

Time in Other Languages  

The Embodiment of Time Metaphors and Space Time Metonymies

we correlate time-defining events with motion, either by us or by others.  Read more at location 1859

What we will encounter in the future is what we are moving towards. What we are encountering now is what we are moving by. What we encountered in the past is what we moved past. These literal correlations in everyday motion-situations bring together the source and target domains of these metaphors and the elements that are mapped in these metaphors.   Read more at location 1866

Philosophy and Common Sense

we cannot measure time-in-itself, whatever that could mean. We can only define time to be that which is measured by regular iterated events.  Read more at location 1892

The Utility of Time Metaphors

We experience only the present. We have to conceptualize past and future. We have memory and we have images of what we expect. But memories and expectations are not in themselves laid out along a time line. Think of the benefits we reap from, say, the Moving Observer metaphor, in which times are locations in space and temporal intervals are distances.  Read more at location 1904

This metaphor is also central to the cultural tradition of establishing histories and calendars-time lines on which events are spread out.  Read more at location 1908

The Metaphysics of Time Metaphors

****  the metaphorical nature of our conceptual system, if unrecognized, can lead philosophers astray. Two things lead to such philosophical errors. First, a philosopher may fail to recognize conceptual metaphor and hence may see metaphorical sentences as literal and take them at face value. Once one takes a metaphor as being literal, the second error is to assume the correspondence theory of truth and therefore to regard the objective world as structured by the metaphor.   Read more at location 1922

locational time-time with regions to be in or locations to he at-doesn't exist independently of the spatial metaphors for time. Truth about metaphorically conceived time depends on the metaphorical conceptualization of both the sentence and the situation.   Read more at location 1929

Zeno's paradox of the arrow can also be seen as pointing out the mistake of taking a metaphor to be literal (though he didn't understand it as such).  Read more at location 1936

In our terms, the idea that time is a linear sequence of points is metaphorical, a consequence of times seen as locations in the Moving Observer metaphor. The mistake, once again, is to take what is metaphorical as literal.   Read more at location 1940

a cognitive response to Zeno's paradox of the arrow is simple. There is a part of the brain that detects motion. Our motion detectors identify the arrow as moving. That is, our brains give us multiple ways of perceiving and conceptualizing the world. Motion is not a metaphorical concept.  Read more at location 1941

The appearance of paradox comes from attributing real existence to metaphorical point locations. Zeno's brilliance was to concoct an example that forced a contradiction upon us: literal motion and motion metaphorically conceptualized as a sequence of fixed locations at fixed points in time.  Read more at location 1949

The Flow-of-Time Metaphysics

the philosophy of time is rife with philosophical errors of this sort, in which philosophers reach metaphysical conclusions from the fact that we judge everyday metaphorical sentences about time to he true.  Read more at location 1952

general relativity contains a metaphor by which we conceptualize gravity as curvature of space. The Time As Space metaphor permits the Gravity As Curvature Of Space metaphor. Jointly, they permit the mathematics of Riemannian geometry to be used to describe force in terms of properties of space.   Read more at location 1976

****  taking the theory of general relativity as literally true entails that the past, present, and future all exist "at once." That is, the theory seems to suggest determinism and the impossibility of free will or even random probabilistic events, as required by quantum mechanics. Of course, if one recognizes that general relativity uses our common metaphor for conceptualizing time metaphorically in terms of space, one need not reach such metaphysical conclusions. One can see general relativity as metaphorical.  Read more at location 1978

In general, to say that a science is metaphorical is not to belittle it. Because metaphors preserve inferences, and because those inferences can have nonmetaphorical consequences, one can often test whether or not a scientific metaphor is apt. Indeed, metaphor is what allows mathematical models to be linked to phenomena in the world and to he regarded as scientific theories.   Read more at location 1981

Time as a Resource and as Money  

This schema characterizes what is typically meant by a resource (actually, a nonrenewable resource). Given this schema, other concepts are defined relative to it, concepts like Scarcity, Efficiency, Waste, and Savings.  Read more at location 2000

THE TIME Is A RESOURCE METAPHOR The Resource -* Time The User Of The Resource - The Agent (The User Of Time) The Purpose That Requires -4 The Purpose That Requires Time The Resource The Value Of The Resource - The Value Of The Time The  Read more at location 2006

As a result of this mapping, words defined relative to the Resource schema, waste, save, worth, spare, and so on, acquire a meaning in the time domain.  Read more at location 2013

Time as Money

THE TIME IS MONEY METAPHOR Money - Time The User Of The Money - The User Of Time (The Agent) The Purpose That Requires -a The Purpose That Requires Time The Money The Value Of The Money -4 The Value Of The 'Time The  Read more at location 2017

time-domain senses for money words like budget, spend, invest, profit, and loss,  Read more at location 2020

The Reification of Metaphor in Institutions  

****  Part of Westernization is the importation of institutions that reify the Time Is A Resource and Time Is Money metaphors. Cultures in which time is not conceptualized and institutionalized as a resource remind us that time in itself is not inherently resourcelike. There are people in the world who live their lives without even the idea of budgeting time or worrying if they are wasting it.  Read more at location 2035

Stealing Time  

if the Robert Halfs of the world have their way, it could become true by passing a law that you can steal time. Truth is relative to understanding, often metaphorical understanding. Human institutions can impose such metaphorical understandings and create metaphorical truths. A Thought Experiment: Can We Conceptualize Time Without Metaphor?   Read more at location 2052

Try to think about time without thinking about whether it will run out or if you can budget it or are wasting it. We have found that we cannot think (much less talk) about time without those metaphors. That leads us to believe that we conceptualize time using those metaphors and that such a metaphorical conceptualization of time is constitutive, at least in significant part, of our concept of time.  Read more at location 2055

Does Time Exist Independent of Minds?

****  Does time exist independent of minds, and if so, what are its properties? We reject the question. It is a loaded question. The word time names a human concept of the sort we have described-partly characterized via the correlation of events and partly characterized via metaphor. Both the correlation of events and the metaphor together structure our experience, giving us temporal experience. That experience, like our other experiences, is real.  Read more at location 2060

Because of the nature of our conceptualization of time, its role in our experience, its utility, and its limits, any answer will have its silliness.  Read more at location 2063

But if we dismiss metaphor as always misleading and having nothing at all to do with reality, we get equally silly results: There can be no such thing as a long time or a long process, the theory of general relativity and any theory like it cannot be taken seriously, time cannot pass rapidly, we can never budget, squander, or lose time, and so on.   Read more at location 2066

What we are suggesting is that our concept of time is cognitively constructed by two processes, one metonymic (based on correlations with events) and one metaphoric (based on motion and resources). From a cognitive perspective, events and motion are more basic than time. The concept of time gets its inherent structure by virtue of time-defining events.  Read more at location 2072

Yet the biological and cognitive construction of time does not make it subjective or arbitrary or merely cultural. Consider our construction of time via the correlation with events or via spatial metaphors. We all do it in the same way, unconsciously and automatically, and in a way that is grounded in our bodies and brains and constant bodily experience. The spatial metaphors are not arbitrary; they are deeply motivated.  Read more at location 2076

Where Does This Leave Us?

Does it give us an objective metaphysics of time? No. Indeed, it suggests instead that the very idea in itself is a bit strange. When the concept itself is defined by metonymy and multiple metaphors, it is odd to ask what the objectively real correlate of that concept is. If you insist on asking that question, you will wind up doing one of the things that philosophers have typically done: choosing some aspect of the concept that you want to focus on and claiming that that one aspect really is time, either time as a flow, or time as a continuous unbounded line, or time as a linear sequence of points, or time as a single spatial-like dimension in a mathematical theory of physics.  Read more at location 2086

Chapter 11. Events and causes

events, causes, changes, states, actions, and purposes. We will refer to these as event-structure concepts. These concepts have traditionally been philosophically important because they are central to what constitutes general knowledge-knowledge  Read more at location 2094

It's hard to have a discussion of anything at all without using these concepts.   Read more at location 2096

In the usual interpretation of such questions, causation is assumed to be something in the world, an objective matter in which human conceptualization tells us nothing about whether a cause-a real cause-exists or not.  Read more at location 2100

****  The concepts of cause and event and all other event-structure concepts are not just reflections of a mind-independent reality. They are fundamentally human concepts. They arise from human biology. Their meanings have a rather impoverished literal aspect; instead, they are metaphorical in significant, ineliminable ways.   Read more at location 2111

****  the view of events and causes that will emerge is neither objectivist nor subjectivist. We will be denying that causes, as we conceptualize them, objectively fit an ohjectivist's mind-independent world. We will also be denying that there are no causes at all as well as denying that all notions of causation are purely subjective, historically contingent, and radically relative. Thus, we will not be making a subjectivist claim. Instead, the evidence will lead us along a third path: an experientialist approach  Read more at location 2113

Two Puzzles About Causation

The Causal Concept Puzzle

Causal paths: Change depends on the "path" of other changes.  Read more at location 2120

The domino effect: 

Thresholds: 

The plate tectonic theory of international relations

These are metaphorical causal models that have actually been proposed in the social sciences. Each has its own logic, taken from a physical domain. Each of the causal logics is somewhat different.  Read more at location 2132

Beginning with the Empirical Study of Thought and Language  

any questions we ask and any answers we give about causation and other event-structure concepts can only be framed within a human language and a human conceptual system.  Read more at location 2155

The Skeletal Literal Concepts of Events and Causes  

The structure that Narayanan found provides a literal skeleton for our conception of event structure. Recall what that structure is: Initial State: Whatever is required for the event is satisfied Start: The starting up process for the event End of Start: The end of the starting up process and the beginning of the main process Main Process: The central aspects of the event Possible Interruptions: Disruptions of the main process Possible Continuation or Iteration: The perpetuation or repetition of the main process Resultant State: The state resulting from the main process  Read more at location 2164

Skeletal Literal Causation  

Here is what we have found to be the literal skeletal concept of causation: a cause is a determining factor for a situation, where by a "situation" we mean a state, change, process, or action. Inferentially, this is extremely weak. All it implies is that if the cause were absent and we knew nothing more, we could not conclude that the situation existed. This doesn't mean that it didn't; another cause might have done the job. The only implication is entirely negative:  Read more at location 2177

Prototypical causation is the direct application of force resulting in motion or other physical change.   Read more at location 2184

The Structure of the Category of Kinds of Causation  

States Are Locations The mapping: Locations 

By "locations," we mean hounded regions in space. Each bounded region has an interior, an exterior, and a boundary. Being on the edge of madness means being at the boundary of a state facing toward the interior. The issue is whether you will go over the edge. Bounded regions can also be of various sizes and dimensions. Consider "a deep depression."  Read more at location 2214

expendable conceptual extra. Let us consider three kinds of evidence that states are conceptualized metaphorically as bounded regions in space. The polysemy evidence comes from the use of the expressions in, out, edge, deep, and so on. Each of these words has a spatial sense and a sense concerning states. This submapping links those senses in a systematic way for each word. Without such a submapping, one would have to list both senses for each word as if they were unrelated. This would miss the systematic nature of the relationship among the senses. The metaphorical mapping states a generalization over all these cases of polysemic correspondence,  Read more at location 2221

The second form of evidence for a metaphorical mapping is inferential evidence.  Read more at location 2227

The third kind of evidence for this submapping is poetic evidence, novel expressions that are understandable by virtue of this submapping.  Read more at location 2234

Changes Movements 

The polysemy evidence involves verbs and prepositions of motion like go, come, enter, fall, from, to, into, and between. Each of these has a sense in the domain of spatial movement and another sense in the domain of change of states. The submapping Changes Are Movements maps the movement senses into the corresponding change-of-state senses.   Read more at location 2258

Causation

Forces -~ Causes Forced 

Verbs like bring, throw, drive, pull, push, propel, and move provide evidence for existence of the mappings Causes Are Forces and Causation Is Forced Movement. The polysemy evidence resides in the fact that each verb has a central sense in the domain of forced movement as well as a conventionalized causal sense. In each case the causal sense is systematically related to the forced-movement sense by the Causation Is Forced Movement mapping.  Read more at location 2281

Philosophical Implications  

The point is that these verbs, in their abstract causal senses, do not all name the same concept. Each names a somewhat different concept-a different form of abstract causation. Each has its own logic, somewhat different from the others. And each is the product of a form of forced movement mapped onto the abstract domain of events.   Read more at location 2297

Actions  

Actions Are Self-propelled Movements  

If actions are conceptualized as self-propelled movements, then the following aspects of actions should be conceptualized as the corresponding aspects of movement: Aids To Action Are Aids To Movement Manner Of Action Is Manner Of Movement Careful Action Is Careful Movement Speed Of Action Is Speed Of Movement Freedom Of Action Is The Lack Of Impediment To Movement Suspension Of Action Is The Stopping Of Movement  Read more at location 2307

Difficulties

Difficulties Are Impediments To Movement  

Freedom of Action  

Freedom Of Action Is The Absence Of Impediments To Movement   Read more at location 2336

Purposes and Means  

• Purposes Are Destinations

• Achieving A Purpose Is Reaching A Destination  

• Lack Of Purpose Is Lack Of Direction

• Means Are Paths  

• Starting A Purposeful Action Is Starting Out On A Path  

• Making Progress Is Forward Movement  

• Amount Of Progress Is Distance Moved  

• Undoing Progress Is Backward Movement  

• Expected Progress Is A Travel Schedule; A Schedule Is A Traveler Who Reaches Prearranged Destinations At Prearranged Times 

• Lack Of Progress Is Lack Of Movement  

External Events  

External Events Are Large Moving Objects  

Long-Term Activities Long-Term Activities Are Journeys  

Summary  

The Anatomy of Event Structure  

****  The Changes Are Movements metaphor combines with States Are Locations to construe a change in an entity as the movement of that entity from one location to another. The Causes Are Forces metaphor combines with these to provide a conceptualization of causation as the forced movement of an entity from one location to another.   Read more at location 2386

the basic parameter is States Are Locations. Given Causes Are Forces and Changes Are Movements, the rest falls into place. Duality  Read more at location 2390

States Are Locations metaphor has a dual, the Attributes Are Possessions metaphor, in which attributes are seen as objects one possesses. Thus, you can have a headache,  Read more at location 2391

Acquiring

THE OBJECT EVENT-STRUCTURE METAPHOR • Attributes Are Possessions • Changes Are Movements Of Possessions (acquisitions or losses) • Causation Is Transfer Of Possessions (giving or taking) • Purposes Are Desired Objects • Achieving A Purpose Is Acquiring A Desired Object • Achieving A Purpose Is Getting Something To Eat • Trying To Achieve A Purpose Is Hunting • Trying To Achieve A Purpose Is Fishing • Trying To Achieve A Purpose Is Agriculture   Read more at location 2421

Causation is metaphorically conceptualized differently in the two Event-Structure metaphors: • Location: Causation Is The Forced Movement Of An Entity (The Affected Entity) To A New Location (The Effect)   Read more at location 2430

• Object: Causation Is The Transfer Of A Possessible Object (The Effect) To Or From An Entity (The Affected Entity).   Read more at location 2432

****  there is no conceptualization of causation that is neutral between these two! One cannot just abstract away the figure-ground difference and say that what remains is identical. It isn't. In the Location metaphor, the causal force is applied to the affected entity, while in the Object metaphor, the causal force is applied to the effect.   Read more at location 2439

The Word Cause and the Causative Construction

when we look at the grammar of cause in the light of metaphor research, we can see that cause has two syntactic valence structures that correspond to the metaphors (1) Causation As Forced Movement Of An Affected Entity To An Effect and (2) Causation As Transfer Of An Effect To An Affected Entity.   Read more at location 2447

the word cause is metaphorical in some ways and not others. It is not metaphorical in phonological form; the phoneme sequence is not taken from some other conceptual domain. But the grammatical valence structure is metaphorical.  Read more at location 2452

Event-Structure Hierarchies  

Difficulties Are Impediments To Movement  

Actions Are Self-Propelled Motions

Variations on the Location Event-Structure Metaphor

THE MOVING ACTIVITY METAPHOR

 Activities Are Things That Move Completion Of The Activity Is Reaching A Destination  Read more at location 2487

THE ACTION-LOCATION METAPHOR

An Action Is Being In A Location  

Existence Is Being Located Here  

Becoming Is Coming Here Ceasing To Exist Is Going Away  

The Full Conceptual Complexity of Change and Causation  

CHANGING Is TURNING

Remaining In A State Is Going In The Same Direction Changing Is Turning   Read more at location 2520

STATES ARE SHAPES

States Are Shapes Causes Are Forces Causation Is A Forced Change Of Shape   Read more at location 2524

THE CAUSAL PATH METAPHOR

Self-Propelled Motion -> Action Traveler -> Actor Locations -4 States A Lone Path -a A Natural Course Of Action Being On The Path --> Natural Causation Leading To -* Results In The  Read more at location 2551

Natural Causation and Essence Nature as Agent   Read more at location 2569

THE NATURE As HUMAN AGENT METAPHOR

Human Agents -> Natural Phenomena

Force Exerted By Agents -> Natural Causes Effects  Read more at location 2573

Arisings  

NATURAL CAUSATION IS UPWARD MOTION

Upward Motion -> Natural Causation

Thing Moving Upward -> A Natural Effect Original 

Emergings  

NATURAL CAUSATION IS MOTION OUT

Motion Out -> Natural Causation

Thing Moving Out -> A Natural Effect Original 

Essences  

the Folk Theory of Essences has a part that is causal. We will state it as follows: Every thing has an essence that inheres in it and that makes it the kind of thing it is. The essence of each thing is the cause of that thing's natural behavior.   Read more at location 2602

Reason in the World  

Deducing the existence of causation in the world from evidence proceeds from knowledge of the effect. Knowing the effect, you reason "backward," given what you know about the world, to knowledge of the cause.  Read more at location 2620

Teleology: Why We See the World as Rational  

***  (Note:   causality)  one of our most important primary metaphors, Causation Is Action To Achieve A Purpose, where Causes Are Reasons (why the action will in fact achieve the purpose). This is the metaphor that tells us that the world is rational, that what happens happens for a reason. This primary metaphor is the basis of our everyday notion of teleology, that there are purposes in the world.   Read more at location 2631

Causes conceptualized according to this metaphor are what Aristotle called final causes, that is, causes constituted by purposes, either the purposes of a person or purposes conceptualized as being in nature. Incidentally, the word final is used because, in the Purposes Are Destinations metaphor, purposes are conceptualized as end points  Read more at location 2642

Causation as Correlation and Probabilistic Causation  

CAUSATION IS CORRELATION

Correlation Of B With A -> Causation Of B By A

Independent Variable -> Cause

The Causation Is Correlation metaphor is at the heart of the concept of probabilistic causation.  Read more at location 2653

our most common metaphor for probability, namely: The Distribution Of An Occurrence In The Past For A Population -4 The Probability Of Such An Occurrence In The Future For An Arbitrary Individual In That Population   Read more at location 2658

The Probability Is Distribution metaphor is a metaphor, not a truth. Probability is about you, distribution isn't.  Read more at location 2665

Here is a statement of the Probabilistic Causation metaphor: Y  Read more at location 2676

The Range of Causal Concepts and Literal Causation  

Causal paths: Change depends on other changes. The domino effect: Changes perpetuate themselves. Thresholds: Change lags after the action of the cause, perpetuates itself, and becomes uncontrollable. The plate tectonic theory of international relations: The effect lags long after the continued action of a large cause.   Read more at location 2704

Our very concept of causation is multivalent: It consists of the entire radial structure, with human agency at the center and many extensions. What we mean by causation is all of those cases with all of their logics. What we take to be the central case is human agency. One might decide that one likes one type of causation better than another, but as far as the cognitive unconscious of ordinary people is concerned, they all count as causation. Metaphor is central to our concept of causation.  Read more at location 2715

Causal theories in the social sciences seek determining factors of various kinds. Each type of determining factor sought may have a different logic. The conceptual metaphors for causation used in the social sciences are chosen for their logics. Each metaphorical causal theory makes a claim about what types of determining factors there are in a subject matter and what the logic of each type of determining factor is.   Read more at location 2721

The Causal Theory Puzzle

each philosophical claim about the nature of causation is sanctioned by a corresponding type of causation in our radial causation concept.  Read more at location 2727

The Natural Phenomena Are Human Agents metaphor leads us to a notion of natural causes as forces exerted through human agency.  Read more at location 2728

Uniformities of nature are kinds of natural phenomena, and so uniformities of nature have also been set forth as causes.  Read more at location 2732

The metaphor that Causal Priority Is Temporal Priority sanctions the common philosophical view that causes are temporally prior to effects.  Read more at location 2734

The metaphor Causation Is Correlation sanctions the common empiricist view, from Hume (as commonly interpreted) to Nancy Cartwright, that causation is correlation.   Read more at location 2735

To discuss what final causes are, we will first have to go through the metaphor system for the mind in the next chapter. Internal causation must wait till the chapter after that, in which the system of metaphors for the internal structure of the self is described.   Read more at location 2737

Each particular theory of causation picks one or more of our ordinary types of causation and insists that real causation only consists of that type or types.  Read more at location 2740

They then take it as literal and attribute to it unique objective existence in the world,  Read more at location 2742

The Overall Philosophical Consequences  

********  Given that causation is a multivalent radial concept with inherently metaphorical senses, the theory of the one true causation becomes not merely false, but silly. Once we know that it is multivalent, not monolithic, and that it is largely metaphorical, it turns out not to be the kind of thing that could have a single logic or could he an objective feature of the world. Since the concept of causation has ineliminably metaphorical subcases, those forms of causation, as conceptualized metaphorically, cannot literally be objective features of the world. There can be no one true causation. That does not mean that causation does not exist,  Read more at location 2743

We do not claim to know whether the world, in itself, contains "determining factors." But the world as we normally conceptualize it certainly does. Those determining factors consist in all the very different kinds of situations we call causal.   Read more at location 2748

The Aptness of Metaphor in Science

As a classical scientific realist, Russell is technically right given his assumptions. Newton's laws, formulated mathematically, are equations-constraints. Acceleration is just a mathematical limit, not a physical entity; and so force, which is equal to mass times acceleration, is also not a physical entity. From the perspective of the laws of physics taken as literal truth, Russell argues correctly: Force does not exist. And if force is a fiction, causation cannot he otherwise. Russell is arguing on the basis of the correspondence theory of truth, taking the mathematical formulation of the laws of physics as literally true. He argues that, on this basis, force cannot exist. The argument is impeccable, though his premises are not.  Read more at location 2757

From our perspective, Einstein created a useful metaphorical theory. By using the metaphor of Time As A Spatial Dimension, Einstein could then use the mathematics of Riemannian geometry.  Read more at location 2769

Einstein's theory need not have been interpreted literally. One could have said: Einstein has created a beautiful metaphorical system for doing calculations of the motion of light in a gravitational field. The metaphor of space as a temporal dimension allows him to use well-understood mathematics to do his calculations. That is a magnificent metaphorical accomplishment. But that doesn't mean we have to understand that theory as characterizing the objectively true nature of the universe.   Read more at location 2778

superstring theory, which does for all forces what Einstein's theory did for gravity.  Read more at location 2787

In the traditional theory of elementary particles, particles are conceptualized in terms of the Object Event-Structure metaphor; particles were seen as possessing attributes like mass, charge, and spin. But the Object and Location Event-Structure metaphors are duals, differing by figure-ground reversal. Superstring theory makes the move of choosing the other dual, the Location Event-Structure metaphor. Elementary particles, via this metaphor, do not possess attributes; instead, they are locational, not things separate from the space they are "in," but aspects of space itself.  Read more at location 2789

In superstring theory, all forces-gravitational, electromagnetic, and strong and weak nuclear forces-are conceptualized as curvatures in ten-dimensional space. What this does is allow the same mathematics, Riemannian geometry, to be used to calculate all of what we ordinarily call "forces." But of course, if one takes this theory literally, no forces at all exist as forces. What we used to conceptualize as forces are now all curvatures in ten-dimensional space. If we take superstring theory literally, no forces exist at all.  Read more at location 2799

****  These are not mutually exclusive alternatives. From the perspective of the everyday human conceptual system, superstring theory is metaphorical, as is general relativity, as is Newtonian mechanics. To take any of these theories literally is to say that force, and therefore causation, is nonexistent. But to take these scientific theories metaphorically is to allow for the "existence" of causes from our everyday perspective. Embodied realism allows both perspectives to count as "true" for the same person.  Read more at location 2804

The Experiential Stance and Embodied Standpoints

Concepts of direct human agency-pushing, pulling, hitting, throwing, lifting, giving, taking, and so on-are among the basic-level anchors of our conceptual system in general and our system of causal concepts in particular. We have no more fundamental way of comprehending the world  Read more at location 2808

****  It is not that one is objectively true while the other is not. Both are human perspectives. One, the nonscientific one, is literal relative to human, body-based conceptual systems. The other, the scientific one, is metaphorical relative to human, body-based conceptual systems. From the metaphorical scientific perspective of general relativity and superstring theory, gravitational force does not exist as an entity-instead it is space-time curvature. From the literal, nonscientific perspective, forces exist.   Read more at location 2826

if we take one scientific theory or another as being literally true, and if we insist that there is only one truth and it is the best scientific truth we have, then, as Russell observed, force does not exist, and so neither does causation. If, however, we can allow scientific theories to be recognized for the metaphorical conceptual structures that they are for human beings, then we can allow multiple ways of conceptualizing the world, including both the scientific and nonscientific.  Read more at location 2828

Causation and Realism: Does Causation Exist?  

First, causation is a word in a human language and it designates a human category, a radial category of extraordinary complexity. In that complex radial category, there is no set of necessary and sufficient conditions that covers all the cases of causation. Therefore, causation as we conceptualize it is not a unified phenomenon. It does not simply designate an objectively existing category of phenomena, defined by necessary and sufficient conditions and operating with a single logic in the mind-independent world.  Read more at location 2834

****  This eliminates a simpleminded realism that assumes that our language is simply a reflection of the mind-independent world, and hence that such questions are simple and straightforward.  Read more at location 2838

What remains is an embodied realism that recognizes that human language and thought are structured by, and bound to, embodied experience.  Read more at location 2840

Beyond middle-level physical experience-in the microuniverse of elementary particles and the macrouniverse of black holes-our basic-level concepts utterly fail us. To conceptualize such experience requires the magnificent tool of conceptual metaphor. But once we move to the domain of conceptual metaphor in theorizing about the micro and macro levels, any ordinary everyday literal notion of causation fails us.  Read more at location 2847

The Mind is virtually impossible to think or talk about the mind in any serious way without conceptualizing it metaphorically. Whenever we conceptualize aspects of mind in terms of grasping ideas, reaching conclusions, being unclear, or swallowing a claim, we are using metaphor to make sense of what we do with our minds. Our system of metaphors for mind is so extensive that we could not possibly describe it all here.  Read more at location 2851

Chapter 12: The Mind

The Mind as Body System   

Eve Sweetser (Al, 1990) has shown that there is an extensive subsystem of metaphors for mind in which the mind is conceptualized as a body. The main outline of this subsystem can be seen in the following general mapping: The Mind Is A Body Thinking Is Physical Functioning Ideas Are Entities With An Independent Existence Thinking Of An Idea Is Functioning Physically With Respect To An Independently Existing Entity  Read more at location 2856

Thinking Is Moving  

The Mind Is A Body,

Thinking Is Moving,

Ideas Are Locations,

Reason Is A Force,

Rational Thought Is Motion, That Is Direct, Deliberate, Step-By-Step, And In Accord With The Force Of Reason

Being Unable To Think Is Being Unable To Move

A Line Of Thought Is A Path

Thinking About X Is Moving In The Area Around X

Communicating Is Guiding Understanding Is Following  

Reason is thus seen as a strong and typically overwhelming force moving the thinker from one idea-location to another.  Read more at location 2868

The word topic, incidentally, is etymologically derived from the Greek topos, meaning "a place." To think about a certain topic is metaphorically to move in the vicinity of a certain place. Thus, we can speak of returning to the topic, straying away from the topic, and approaching a topic.  Read more at location 2876

Thinking Is Perceiving

We get most of our knowledge through vision. This most common of everyday experiences leads us to conceptualize knowing as seeing.  Read more at location 2886

********  Here is the mapping that projects our logic of vision onto our logic of knowledge.

The Mind Is A Body

Thinking Is Perceiving

Ideas Are Things Perceived

Knowing Is Seeing

Communicating Is Showing

Attempting To Gain Knowledge Is Searching

Becoming Aware Is Noticing

An Aid To Knowing Is A Light Source

Being Able To Know Is Being Able To See

Being Ignorant Is Being Unable To See

Impediments To Knowledge Are Impediments To Vision

Deception Is Purposefully Impeding Vision

Knowing From A "Perspective" Is Seeing From A Point Of View

Explaining In Detail Is Drawing A Picture

Directing Attention Is Pointing

Paying Attention Is Looking At

Being Receptive Is Hearing

Taking Seriously Is Listening

Sensing Is Smelling

Emotional Reaction Is Feeling

Personal Preference Is Taste 

****  When we say "I see what you're saying," we are expressing successful communication. A cover-up is an attempt to hide something, to keep people from knowing about it. To deceive people is to pull the wool over their eyes, put up a smokescreen, or cloud the issue. Clear writing is writing that allows readers to know what is being communicated; unclear or murky writing makes it harder for readers to know what is being said. An attempt to gain knowledge of something is conceptualized as looking or searching for it, and gaining knowledge is conceptualized as discovering or finding. Someone who is ignorant is in the dark, while someone who is incapable of knowing is blind. To enable people to know something is to shed light on the matter. Something that enables you to know something is enlightening; it is something that enables you to see.  Read more at location 2892

However, the other senses also play a lesser role.  Read more at location 2908

Thinking Is Object Manipulation  

In this metaphor, ideas are objects that you can play with, toss around, or turn over in your mind. To understand an idea is to grasp it, to get it, to have it firmly in mind. Communication is exchanging ideas. Thus, you can give someone ideas and get ideas across to people. Teaching is putting ideas into the minds of students, cramming their heads full of ideas. To fail to understand is to fail to grasp, as when an idea goes over your head or right past you. Problems with understanding may arise when an idea is slippery, when someone throws too many things at you at once, or when someone throws you a curve. When a subject matter is too difficult for you to understand, it is seen as being beyond your grasp. Just as objects have a physical structure, so ideas have a conceptual structure. You can put ideas together to form complex ideas. Complex ideas can be crafted, fashioned, shaped, and reshaped.  Read more at location 2915

Acquiring Ideas Is Eating  

An interest in ideas is conceptualized as an appetite for food, as in having a thirst for knowledge, an appetite for learning, and an insatiable curiosity.  Read more at location 2932

The Homunculus and Fregean Intensions  

Metaphors for the Mind and the Linguistic Turn in Philosophy

THE THOUGHT As LANGUAGE METAPHOR

Thinking Is Linguistic Activity (Speaking Or Writing)

Simple Ideas Are Words

Complex Ideas Are Sentences

Fully Communicating A Sequence Of Thought Is Spelling

Memorization Is Writing  

We see the Thought As Language metaphor in many cases: It's Greek to me. Liberals and conservatives don't speak the same language. She can't translate her ideas into well-defined plans. His thoughts are eloquent. What is the vocabulary of basic philosophical ideas? The argument is abbreviated. He's reading between the lines. He's computer literate. I wouldn't read too much into what he says.   Read more at location 2973

Bear in mind these four aspects of this common metaphor: 1. Thought has the properties of language. 2. Thought is external and public. 3. The structure of thought is accurately representable as a linear sequence of written symbols. 4. Every thought corresponds to a linguistic expression; and hence, every thought is expressible in language.   Read more at location 2984

THE THOUGHT As MATHEMATICAL CALCULATION METAPHOR

Reasoning Is Adding

Ideas Considered In Reasoning Are Figures Counted In Adding

Inferences Are Sums

An Explanation Is An Accounting  

(Note: Cousin to Logical positivism)  The metaphor has important entailments: • Just as numbers can be accurately represented by sequences of written symbols, so thoughts can adequately represented by sequences of written symbols. • Just as mathematical calculation is mechanical, so thought is also. • Just as there are systematic universal principles of mathematical calculation that work step-by-step, so there are systematic universal principles of reason that work step-by-step.   Read more at location 2997

THE MIND As MACHINE METAPHOR

The Mind Is A Machine

Ideas Are Products Of The Machine

Thinking Is The Automated Step-By-Step Assembly Of Thoughts.

Normal Thought Is The Normal Operation Of The Machine

Inability To Think Is A Failure Of The Machine To Function 

No Consistent Conception of Mind  

the metaphors are not all consistent. It is not consistent to conceptualize ideas as both locations you can be at and objects you can manipulate or transfer. Nor is it consistent to conceptualize thinking as both motion and vision. Nor it is consistent to conceptualize ideas as objects you manufacture and food you consume. Moreover, the entailments that ideas are produced by thinking and exist independently of thinking are inconsistent. Such inconsistency across different metaphors is normal  Read more at location 3010

********  (Note:   metaphor all through)  We have no single, consistent, univocal set of nonmetaphoric concepts for mental operations and ideas. Independent of these metaphors, we have no conception of how the mind works. Even the notion works derives from the Mind As Machine metaphor. Even to get some grasp of what ideas in themselves might be, we have to conceptualize ideas as graspable objects.  Read more at location 3013

****  What a theory of mind or a theory of ideas must do is pick a consistent subset of the entailments of these metaphors. In so doing, any consistent theory will necessarily leave behind other entailments, inconsistent with these, that are also "intuitive." Each such theory is metaphorically intuitive and consistent, but not comprehensive.  Read more at location 3016

Metaphors for Mind and Anglo-American Analytic Philosophy  

the entailments of the metaphors mentioned above include the following:

THE MIND As BODY  

THOUGHT As MOTION  

THOUGHT As OBJECT MANIPULATION  

THOUGHT As LANGUAGE

THOUGHT As MATHEMATICAL CALCULATION

THE MIND As MACHINE  

there is one and only one correct analysis of a complex concept into its ultimate conceptual parts. In analytic philosophy, such an analysis is a definition of the concept: It provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the constitutive parts of the concept to constitute the whole concept. Thus, for every concept X, there is a correct theory of the one true X-an objectively correct account of the unique internal structure of the concept X. The theory of the one true causation, which we discussed above, is a special case. Much of classical analytic philosophy (not counting Wittgenstein's later work) is concerned with definitions of this sort that are to constitute theories of the one true X, for some concept X.  Read more at location 3032

****  (Note:   fundamental objectivism in analytic philosophy)  Frege saw ideas as psychological, subjective, and private-essentially incommunicable and hence not a part of the public, shared meanings that are communicated through language. He took senses, which go together to make up thoughts, not to have anything to do with human psychology, to be free of the subjective. Senses and thoughts, being nonpsychological, public, objective, and communicable, were capable of being the meanings of linguistic expressions. This distinction is what Dummett refers to as "the extrusion of thoughts from the mind." It lies behind virtually all of Anglo-American philosophy of language. Thoughts, freed from the mind, are objective; they are characterizable in terms of direct correspondences to things in the world.   Read more at location 3037

The notion that reason is characterizable as mathematical logic can also be seen as making use of the above entailments. Mathematical logic begins by assuming that one can adequately represent thoughts by sequences of written symbols of the sort one finds in written language.  Read more at location 3045

****  (Note:   again, objectivism premises challenged) Here we have, in our everyday metaphorical conception of thought, the basis of the notion that thought can be represented by a logical language, with reason as mathematical calculation and the meaning of the logical language given by correspondence with things in the world. This Language of Thought metaphor, with certain variations, constitutes the major worldview of Anglo-American philosophy.  Read more at location 3049

Those same assumptions lie behind the idea of artificial intelligence (AI). Classical Al assumed that thoughts can all be adequately expressed in a logical language (a computer "language" like LISP) and that reason is a matter of mechanical calculation and proceeds in a step-by-step fashion. Given these assumptions, it followed that computers could "think rationally."  Read more at location 3053

Marvin Minsky has added this metaphor to the Mind As Computer metaphor in his book Society of Mind (E, 1986), in which he argues that the computer program of the mind is broken down into subprograms with specialized functions. Daniel Dennett's computational theory of mind (C2, 1991) makes use of this metaphor. Even an anti-AI philosophy of mind such as John Searle's uses many of the above metaphorical entailments.  Read more at location 3060

****  Given that Anglo-American analytic philosophy has been constructed out of those everyday metaphors for ideas, analytic philosophy could not have sanctioned the existence of conceptual metaphors, and no future version ever will. It would mean giving up all of analytic philosophy's central ideas: the objectivity of meaning, the classical correspondence theory of truth, the notion of an ideal logical language, the adequacy of logical form, definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions,  Read more at location 3105

The Oddness of Anglo-American Philosophy

The brain uses neurons, not languagelike symbols. Neural computation works by real-time spreading activation, which is neither akin to prooflike deductions in a mathematical logic, nor like disembodied algorithms in classical artificial intelligence, nor like derivations in a transformational grammar. Cognitive scientists looking for a naturally based account of understanding must turn to the brain and body for empirical reasons. They cannot start a priori with a logician's set-theoretical models.  Read more at location 3109

To a cognitive scientist in the empirical tradition, the approach of Anglo-American philosophy to mind and language seems quite bizarre. This is especially true of what Michael Dummett calls the central idea behind both Anglo-American philosophy and phenomenology in the tradition of Brentano and Husserl, namely, "the extrusion of thoughts from the mind."  Read more at location 3114

It should be clear now why an experientialist philosophy-one that takes second-generation cognitive science seriously-is utterly different from a "naturalized" version of analytic philosophy. A naturalized analytic philosophy takes analytic philosophy for granted and just adds empirical results consistent with it. But the results of second-generation cognitive science are fundamentally at odds with analytic philosophy in any form,  Read more at location 3123

Metaphorical Thought in the Contemporary Philosophy of Mind  

In short, the functionalist program in Anglo-American philosophy of mind consists of two metaphors:

THE MIND As COMPUTER METAPHOR 

THE REPRESENTATION METAPHOR  

In functionalist philosophy of mind, such relations between symbols and things are seen metaphorically as meanings of concepts; by virtue of such relations, the abstract formal symbols are conceptualized metaphorically as "representing reality." As in Anglo-American philosophy in general, the Representation metaphor assumes that meaning has nothing whatever to do with minds, brains, bodies, or bodily experience,  Read more at location 3137

The Metaphors of Symbol Manipulation  

THE FORMAL LANGUAGE METAPHOR  

THE SYMBOL MANIPULATION METAPHOR  

It is important to see exactly why they are metaphors and not literal statements. A natural language has phonetics, phonology, and morphology. Formal "languages" don't. Intonation in natural language is on a separate plane from phonemic segments; that is, an intonation contour typically extends over many segments and can have meaning separate from the meaning of the segments. Formal "languages" have nothing like intonation. Formal "languages" are not meaningful. They are defined in terms of pure form, and expressions in a formal language are to be manipulated without regard to the meaning of the symbols. By contrast, natural languages are meaningful, and their meaning arises naturally from everyday human experience.  Read more at location 3150

Strong Artificial Intelligence  

When the Mind As Computer metaphor is believed as a deep scientific truth, the true believers interpret the ontology and the inferential patterns that the metaphor imposes on the mind as defining the essence of mind itself. For them, concepts are formal symbols, thought is computation (the manipulation of those symbols), and the mind is a computer program.   Read more at location 3162

Advocates of strong Al differ from philosophical functionalists in an important way: They typically do not require the Representation metaphor. That is, in strong Al, the idea of "representation" as a relation between abstract symbols and things in the world is not deemed necessary or is consciously excluded. Instead, meaningful understanding arises through the computations themselves. If the computer can get the computations right-if it can correctly manipulate the symbols given to it as input and generate the right output-then the computer has understood.  Read more at location 3169

Searle's Metaphorical Chinese Room Argument  

John Searle's Chinese Room Argument has been one of the most celebrated examples of philosophical argument within Anglo-American philosophy of mind. It is a philosophical argument against strong AI; indeed, it is the best-known and most-cited philosophical argument against strong Al. As an upholder of the Anglo-American philosophical tradition, Searle has, of course, denied that there is any such thing as metaphorical thought as we have discussed it here. What we will show (following the suggestion of Gyorgy Laszlo) is that this celebrated argument in the Anglo-American tradition is fundamentally and irreducibly metaphoric.  Read more at location 3173

Searle uses a special case of the Machine As Person metaphor in the Chinese Room Argument, when he conceptualizes the computer as a person-himself-physically moving symbols around. This instance of the Machine As Person metaphor, taken together with his special cases of the Formal Language and Symbol Manipulation metaphors, makes much of the Chinese Room metaphor seem natural, because it uses conceptual metaphors that we already have in our conceptual systems. When these metaphors are taken together, it seems natural to conceptualize a computer as a person physically manipulating Chinese characters that he doesn't understand according to rules. At this point, Searle makes crucial use of the fact that conceptual metaphors map patterns of inference from the source domain to the target domain. With the Chinese Room metaphor set up in this way, there is an entailed metaphorical mapping: Searle's lack of understanding of the meaning of the Chinese characters maps onto the computer's lack of understanding of the meaning of the formal symbols. This is a metaphorical inference par excellence!   Read more at location 3206

Searle-the person in the Chinese Room-does understand a great deal. He understands English. He understands the rule book. He understands that he is in a room, that he is manipulating objects, and that the objects are symbols. And he understands that he does not understand the symbols. None of this understanding is mapped by Searle's made-up metaphor. He includes the mappings "I any the `computer"' and "The rule book is the 'computer program,"' but he specifically excludes the mapping "My understanding of the rule hook is the computer's understanding of the program."  Read more at location 3212

The argument form goes as follows: 1. Searle is a kind of computer. 2. If computers can understand via manipulating symbols, then Searle can understand via manipulating meaningless symbols. 3. Since Searle cannot understand via manipulating meaningless symbols, computers cannot understand via manipulating meaningless symbols. The flaw in this as a literal argument lies hidden in the first statement. As Gyorgi Laszlo (personal communication) has pointed out, Searle's mind in the Chinese Room is not literally any subpart of a computer. There is nothing in a general-purpose digital computer that Searle's mind in the Chinese Room could be a special case of!  Read more at location 3224

What is interesting to us about Searle's Chinese Room Argument is that so many Anglo-American philosophers of mind, including Searle himself, took it as literal. But then, they could hardly have done otherwise, since Anglo-American philosophy, because of its own deep-seated metaphors, recognizes neither the cognitive unconscious nor conceptual metaphor. The Metaphorical Mind   Read more at location 3235

****  Is there a purely literal conception of mind? There is an impoverished, skeletal, literal conception: The mind is what thinks, perceives, believes, reasons, imagines, and wills. But as soon as we try to go beyond this skeletal understanding of mind, as soon as we try to spell out what constitutes thinking, perceiving, and so on, metaphor enters.  Read more at location 3242

What we call "mind" is really embodied. There is no true separation of mind and body.  Read more at location 3248

Chapter 13. The Self

What we call our "inner lives" concerns at least five kinds of experience that are consequences of living in a social world with the kinds of brains and bodies that we have. First, there are the ways in which we try to control our bodies and in which they "get out of control." Second, there are cases in which our conscious values conflict with the values implicit in our behavior. Third, there are disparities between what we know or believe about ourselves and what other people know or believe about us. Fourth, there are experiences of taking an external viewpoint, as when we imitate others or try to see the world as they do. And last, there are the forms of inner dialog and inner monitoring we engage in.   Read more at location 3253

Subject and Self in the Cognitive Unconscious  

(Note: First vs third person experience)  Andrew Lakoff and Miles Becker (Al, Lakoff and Becker 1992). Their analysis showed that the system is based on a fundamental distinction between what they called the Subject and one or more Selves.  Read more at location 3262

there is no single, unified notion of our inner lives. There is not one Subject-Self distinction, but many. They are all metaphorical and cannot be reduced to any consistent literal conception of Subject and Self.  Read more at location 3266

each such metaphor conceptualizes the Subject as being personlike, with an existence independent of the Self.  Read more at location 3270

The Structure of the Subject-Self Metaphor System

****  five special cases of the basic Subject-Self metaphor are grounded in four types of everyday experience: (1) manipulating objects, (2) being located in space, (3) entering into social relations, and (4) empathic projection-conceptually projecting yourself onto someone else, as when a child imitates a parent. The fifth special case comes from the Folk Theory of Essences: Each person is seen as having an Essence that is part of the Subject. The person may have more than one Self, but only one of those Selves is compatible with that Essence. This is called the "real" or "true" Self.  Read more at location 3278

each of these five special cases of the general Subject-Self metaphor has further special cases. It is at this third level of specificity that the real richness of our metaphoric conceptions of Subject and Self emerges.  Read more at location 3281

The General Subject-Self Metaphor  

The Subject is that aspect of a person that is the experiencing consciousness and the locus of reason, will, and judgment, which, by its nature, exists only in the present. This is what the Subject is in most of the cases;  Read more at location 3285

The Self is that part of a person that is not picked out by the Subject. This includes the body, social roles, past states, and actions in the world.  Read more at location 3288

THE BASIC SUBJECT-SELF METAPHOR SCHEMA  

The Physical-Object Self  

SELF CONTROL IS OBJECT CONTROL  

The Internal Causation Metaphor  

SELF CONTROL Is THE FORCED MOVEMENT OF AN OBJECT  

BODY CONTROL Is THE FORCED MOVEMENT OF AN OBJECT

CAUSING THE SELF To ACT Is THE FORCED MOVEMENT OF AN OBJECT

SELF CONTROL IS OBJECT POSSESSION  

TAKING CONTROL OF ANOTHER'S SELF IS TAKING ANOTHER'S POSSESSION  

The Locational Self  

SELF CONTROL Is BEING IN ONE'S NORMAL LOCATION

THE SELF As CONTAINER  

SELF CONTROL As BEING ON THE GROUND

The Scattered Self  

ATTENTIONAL SELF CONTROL IS HAVING THE SELF TOGETHER

Getting Outside Yourself

THE OBJECTIVE STANDPOINT METAPHOR  

The primary metaphors for Subject and Self that we have discussed so far have been based on two basic correlations in everyday experience: (1) the correlation between self-control and the control of physical objects and (2) the correlation between a sense of control and being in one's normal surroundings. We now turn to a third primary metaphor, based on a third kind of correlation: the correlation between how those around us evaluate both our actions and those of others and how we evaluate our own actions. The Social Self   Read more at location 3377

THE SOCIAL SELF METAPHOR  

Subject and Self as Adversaries:  

Subject as Parent and the Self as Child include:  

Subject and Self as Friends:

Subject as Master, Self as Servant:  

The Multiple Selves Metaphor  

Projecting onto Someone Else  

Imitating makes use of an ability to project, to conceptualize oneself as inhabiting the body of another. Empathy is the extension of this ability to the realm of emotions-not just to move as someone else moves, but to feel as someone else feels.   Read more at location 3421

The Essential Self  

We have in our conceptual systems a very general metaphor in which our Essence is part of our Subject-our subjective consciousness, our locus of thought, judgment, and will. Thus, who we essentially are is associated with how we think, what judgments we make, and how we choose to act. According to the folk theory, it is our Essence that, ideally, should determine our natural behavior. However, our concept of who we essentially are is often incompatible with what we actually do. This incompatibility between our Essence and what we really do is the subject matter of the Essential Self metaphor. In the metaphor, there are two Selves.  Read more at location 3436

THE ESSENTIAL SELF METAPHOR Person 1 -4 The Subject, With The Essence Person 2 - Self 1, The Real Self (Fits The Essence) Person 3 -4 Self 2, Not The Real Self, (Doesn't Fit The Essence) Constraint:  Read more at location 3453

Conclusions and Questions Raised  

These metaphors do seem to ring true. They appear to be about real inner experiences, and we use them to make statements that to us are true of our inner lives, statements like, "I'm struggling with myself over whom to marry," "I lost myself in dancing," or "I wasn't myself yesterday." The fact that we can make true statements about our inner lives using these metaphors suggests that these metaphors conform in significant ways to the structure of our inner lives as we experience them phenomenologically. These metaphors capture the logic of much of inner experience and characterize how we reason about it.   Read more at location 3500

One of the most important things that we learn is that there is in this system no one consistent structuring of our inner lives, since the metaphors can contradict one another.  Read more at location 3505

when we betray ourselves, we can experience a sense of guilt. Such phenomena raise a chicken-egg question: Does the metaphor fit a preexisting qualitative experience, or does the qualitative experience come from conceptualizing what we have done via that metaphor. The answer is not obvious.  Read more at location 3513

Chapter 14. Morality

****  One of the major findings of this empirical research is that our cognitive unconscious is populated with an extensive system of metaphoric mappings for conceptualizing, reasoning about, and communicating our moral ideas. Virtually all of our abstract moral concepts are structured metaphorically. The Experiential Grounding of the Moral Metaphor System   Read more at location 3519

These metaphors are grounded in the nature of our bodies and social interactions, and they are thus anything but arbitrary and unconstrained. They all appear to be grounded in our various experiences of well-being, especially physical well-being.  Read more at location 3522

For example, it is better to be healthy, rather than sick. It is better if the food you eat, the water you drink, and the air you breathe are pure, rather than contaminated. It is better to be strong, rather than weak. It is better to be in control, rather than to be out of control or dominated by others. People seek freedom, rather than slavery. It is preferable to have sufficient wealth to live comfortably rather than being impoverished. People would rather be socially connected, protected, cared about, and nurtured than he isolated, vulnerable, ignored, or neglected. It is better to be able to function in the light, rather than to be subjected to the fear of the dark. And it is better to be upright and balanced, than to be off balance or unable to stand.   Read more at location 3524

For example, since most people find it better to have enough wealth to live comfortably than to be impoverished, we are not surprised to find that well-being is conceptualized as wealth. An increase in well-being is a gain; a decrease, a loss. Since it is better to be healthy than to be sick, it is not surprising to find immorality conceptualized as a disease. Immoral behavior is often seen as a contagion that can spread out of control.  Read more at location 3534

The Moral Metaphor System

The basic idea behind moral accounting is simple: Increasing others' well-being is metaphorically increasing their wealth. Decreasing others' well-being is metaphorically decreasing their wealth.  Read more at location 3552

The Moral Accounting Schemes  

two distinct principles of moral action arise from the Moral Accounting metaphor: 1. Moral action is giving something of positive value; immoral action is giving something of negative value. 2. There is a moral imperative to pay one's moral debts; the failure to pay one's moral debts is immoral.   Read more at location 3564

By the metaphor of Moral Arithmetic, giving something negative is equivalent to taking something positive.  Read more at location 3570

****  The difference between retribution and revenge is one of legitimate authority. When the balancing of moral books is carried out by a legitimate authority, it is retribution. When it is carried out vigilante-style without legitimate authority, it is revenge.  Read more at location 3582

Turning the Other Cheek

By turning the other cheek, you make me even more morally indebted to you. If I have a conscience, I should feel even more guilty. Turning the other cheek involves the rejection of retribution and revenge and the acceptance of basic goodness-and when it works, it works via this mechanism of Moral Accounting. Karma: Moral Accounting with the Universe   Read more at location 3598

a contemporary American counterpart: What goes around comes around.  Read more at location 3601

Well-Being as Wealth and Moral Self-Interest  

(Note: Ayn rand ish)  there is a pair of metaphors that turns the pursuit of self-interest into moral action. The first is an economic metaphor: Adam Smith's metaphor of the Invisible Hand. Smith proposed that, in a free market, if we all pursue our own profit, then an Invisible Hand will operate to guarantee that the wealth of all will be maximized. The second is Well-Being Is Wealth. When combined with Well-Being Is Wealth, Smith's economic metaphor becomes a metaphor for morality: Morality Is The Pursuit Of Self-Interest.   Read more at location 3630

Moral Strength  

When one is healthy and in control of things, one is typically upright and balanced. Thus, moral uprightness is understood metaphorically in terms of physical uprightness:  Read more at location 3639

metaphorically, Evil Is A Force (Either Internal Or External) External evil is understood metaphorically either as another person who struggles with you for control or else as an external force (of nature) that acts on you. Internal evil is the force of your bodily desire, which is conceived metaphorically as either a person, an animal, or a force of nature (as in "floods of emotion" or "fires of passion"). Thus, to remain upright, one must be strong enough to stand up to evil. Hence, morality is conceptualized as strength, as having the moral fiber or backbone to resist evil. Therefore, Morality Is Strength   Read more at location 3646

By the logic of the metaphor, moral weakness is in itself a form of immorality. The reasoning goes like this: A morally weak person is likely to fall, to give in to evil, to perform immoral acts, and thus to become part of the forces of evil. Moral weakness is thus nascent immorality-immorality waiting to happen.   Read more at location 3652

Moral Authority Authority in the moral sphere is modeled on dominance in the physical sphere. The moral authority of the parent over the child is metaphorically modeled on the physical dominance of the parent over the young child.  Read more at location 3663

Version 1: Legitimate Authority  

Parents also have the responsibility of acting morally themselves, setting an example for their children. It is responsibility, wisdom, and moral action by parents that justifies parental authority and creates the moral imperative for children to obey their parents.  Read more at location 3670

Version 2: Absolute Authority

Parental authority is absolute. Children have a moral obligation to obey their parents and show them respect, simply because they are their parents, no matter what they are like or what they do.   Read more at location 3678

There are many kinds of moral authorities-the gods, prophets, and saints of various religions; people (e.g., spiritual leaders, dedicated public servants, people with a special wisdom); texts (e.g., the Bible, the Qur'an, the Tao Te Ching); institutions with a moral purpose (e.g., churches, environmental groups). What counts as a moral authority to a given person will depend on that person's moral and spiritual beliefs as well as his or her understanding of parental authority. Moral Order   Read more at location 3683

In nature, according to this folk theory, the strong and better-endowed tend to dominate the weak. In the metaphor of the Moral Order, this natural order of domination is mapped onto a moral order: The Moral Order Is The Natural Order   Read more at location 3690

****  (Note:   interesting political insight)  The Moral Order hierarchy is commonly extended in this culture to include other relations of moral superiority: Western culture over non-Western culture; America over other countries; citizens over immigrants; Christians over non-Christians; straights over gays; the rich over the poor. Incidentally, the Moral Order metaphor gives us a better understanding of what fascism is: Fascism legitimizes such a moral order and seeks to enforce it through the power of the state. Moral Bounds   Read more at location 3699

Moral action is seen as bounded movement, movement in permissible areas and along permissible paths. Immoral action is seen as motion outside of the permissible range, as straying from a prescribed path or transgressing prescribed boundaries.  Read more at location 3702

According to this metaphor, "deviant" behavior is immoral because it moves in unsanctioned areas and toward unsanctioned destinations.  Read more at location 3704

(Note: Heresy, atheism in the ancient sense)  According to the Moral Bounds metaphor, someone who moves off of sanctioned paths or out of sanctioned territory is doing more than merely acting immorally. She is rejecting the purposes, the goals, the very mode of life of the society she is in. In so doing, she is calling into question the purposes that govern most people's everyday lives.  Read more at location 3707

In the Western moral tradition, morality has often been conceived as the maximizing of individual freedom. Freedom of this sort cannot be absolute, however, since some of our free actions might interfere with a like freedom for other people. Consequently, the question of legitimate constraints on freedom lies at the heart of many ethical and political debates.  Read more at location 3712

Moral Essence

According to the metaphor of Moral Essence, people are born with, or develop in early life, essential moral properties and habits that stay with them for life. Such properties are called virtues if they are moral properties and habits and vices if they are immoral ones. The collection of virtues and vices attributed to a person is called that person's "character."  Read more at location 3727

The metaphor of Moral Essence has three important entailments: • If you know how a person has acted, you know what that person's character is. • If you know what a person's character is, you know how that person will act. • A person's basic character is formed by the time they reach adulthood (or perhaps somewhat earlier).   Read more at location 3731

Take, for example, the "Three strikes and you're out" law now gaining popularity in the United States. The premise is that repeated past violations of the law indicate a character defect, an inherent propensity to illegal behavior that will lead to future crimes.  Read more at location 3733

The ubiquity and power of the metaphor of Moral Essence has been most manifest in the O. J. Simpson trial. Simpson was a hero, and heroes are conceptualized as being inherently good people. The question that people kept repeating was "How can a good person do bad things?" The very idea that a hero, someone defined as inherently good, could commit two brutal murders simply does not fit the metaphor of Moral Essence.  Read more at location 3741

Moral Purity  

There are far-reaching entailments of this metaphor. Just as physical impurities can ruin a substance, so moral impurities can ruin a person or a society. Just as substances can be purged of impurities, so people and societies must be purged of corrupting elements, individuals, or practices. Within an individual, Moral Purity is often paired with Moral Essence.  Read more at location 3756

Morality as Health  

One crucial consequence of this metaphor is that immorality, as moral disease, is a plague that, if left unchecked, can spread throughout society, infecting everyone.  Read more at location 3763

Moral Empathy  

****  The morality of empathy is not merely that of the Golden Rule ("Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"), because others may not share your values. Moral empathy requires, instead, that you make their values your values. This constitutes a much stronger principle, namely, "Do unto others as they would have you do unto them."   Read more at location 3772

Moral Nurturance  

Learning how to care for others requires empathy, concern for the other, responsibility, caring for oneself, and so on. Empathy is necessary in order to understand what children need. Concern for their well-being moves you to act on their behalf. Children are seen as having a right to nurturance, and parents have a responsibility to provide it.  Read more at location 3779

Morality as Nurturance has a different logic and different entailments from a morality based on absolute principles and corresponding duties. The core of nurturance is empathy and compassion for the other. It focuses not on one's own rights but on the fundamental responsibility to care for other people.   Read more at location 3784

On the model of absolute empathy, moral nurturance requires that you act so as to make it possible for others to realize their goals according to their own value system. On the model of egocentric empathy, by contrast, you must understand how others see things and how they feel about them, but your careful concern is guided by your own value system.  Read more at location 3786

What Binds Our Metaphors for Morality Together?  

A more complete list would also, for instance, include Morality Is Light/Immorality Is Darkness, Moral Beauty, Moral Balance, and Moral Wholeness,  Read more at location 3799

The cross-cultural research has not been done yet to determine whether any of them are truly universal, but some of them, such as Moral Strength and Moral Accounting are good candidates.   Read more at location 3802

We now turn from this relatively well-established claim to one that is far less obvious and more highly speculative.  Read more at location 3805

Lakoff (Al, 1996a) proposed that these two political orientations are ultimately based on different models of the family. Mainstream conservatism, he claimed, is grounded on what he called a "strict father" model, whereas mainstream liberalism is based on a "nurturant parent" model. Since each family model includes it own morality, political liberalism and conservatism express different views of morality.  Read more at location 3809

Lakoff's political analysis raises the interesting possibility that morality, too, might also be based on models of the family.  Read more at location 3814

The Strict Father Family Morality  

Here is the basic Strict Father family model. The family is a traditional nuclear one, with the father having primary responsibility for supporting and protecting the family. The father has authority to determine the policy that will govern the family. Because of his moral authority, his commands are to be obeyed. He teaches his children right from wrong by setting strict rules for their behavior and by setting a moral example in his own life. He enforces these moral rules by reward and punishment. The father also gains his children's cooperation by showing love and by appreciating them when they obey the rules. But children must not be coddled, lest they become spoiled. A spoiled child lacks the appropriate moral values and lacks the moral strength and discipline necessary for living independently and meeting life's challenges.   Read more at location 3825

Love and nurturance are a vital part of family life, but they should never outweigh parental authority, which is itself an expression of love and nurturance-tough love. As children mature, the virtues of respect for moral authority, self-reliance, and self-discipline allow them to incorporate their father's moral values. In this way they incorporate their father's moral authority-they become self-governing and self-legislating.  Read more at location 3832

It will have variants, such as when the "strict father" is replaced by a "strict mother" who instantiates the moral authority,  Read more at location 3835

Nurturant Parent Family Morality

The primal experience behind this model is that of being cared for and cared about, having one's desires for loving interactions met, living as happily as possible, and deriving meaning from mutual interaction and care.   Read more at location 3846

Open, two-way, mutually respectful communication is crucial. If parents' authority is to be legitimate, they must tell children why their decisions serve the cause of protection and nurturance. They must allow their children to ask questions about why their parents do what they do, and all family members should participate in important decisions. Responsible parents, of course, have to make the ultimate decisions, and that must be clear.   Read more at location 3850

A fulfilling life is assumed to be, in significant part, a nurturant life-one committed to family and community responsibility. What children need to learn most is empathy for others, the capacity for nurturance, cooperation, and the maintenance of social ties, which cannot be done without the strength, respect, self-discipline, and self-reliance that comes through being cared for and caring.   Read more at location 3855

****  Nurturant Parent morality thus has a very different set of priorities in its metaphors for morality than those built into Strict Father morality. The dominant metaphor is Morality Is Nurturance. Nurturance is seen as the basis for all moral interactions within the family.  Read more at location 3860

Just as there exist Strict Father versions of Judaism and Christianity, likewise there are Nurturant Parent versions of both of these religious traditions. Most notably, in the kabbalistic tradition in Judaism the Shekhinah is understood as a nurturant female manifestation of God. In Catholicism the Virgin Mary is often seen as providing a female model  Read more at location 3869

Is All Morality Based on Models of the Family?  

THE FAMILY OF MAN METAPHOR

Family → Humankind

Each Child → Each Human Being

Other Children → Every Other Human Being

Family Moral Relations → Universal Moral Relations

Family Moral Authority → Universal Moral Authority

Family Morality → Universal Morality Family 

Who Is the Parent?  

God as Father (or Mother)  

****  The crucial differences among religious ethical views, therefore, depend primarily on different views of the family and different conceptions of the Father, as either strict, nurturant, or some combination of both. The idea of God As Mother is almost never used to present the strict parent model. God As Mother is typically regarded primarily as a nurturant parent.   Read more at location 3889

On the Strict Father model, God the Almighty created all that is according to his divine plan and moral order. He issues moral commandments in the form of moral laws binding on all rational creatures. Our duty is to learn God's laws and to develop the moral strength to obey them in a world filled with evil, both internal and external. In the Final Judgment, God will punish the wicked and reward the morally good  Read more at location 3892

God as Nurturant Parent

the prototypical case of God As Nurturant Parent emphasizes the metaphor of God As Love. This is usually not the "tough love" of the Strict Father God, but rather the nurturant, compassionate, suffering love of various New Testament interpretations. Here there is no talk of reward and punishment, but only of unconditional, all-encompassing love that flows to us undeserved. In the version of this that is central to Christianity, God is the nurturant parent to all humanity.  Read more at location 3894

This is not the morality of obedience to moral laws given by divine authority. Instead, it is a morality of caring for others out of compassion and empathy. People love others, on this view, ultimately because they are first loved and nurtured by God.  Read more at location 3898

Universal Reason as Strict Father  

the Enlightenment crisis of faith led to the emergence of the view that morality is not based on the commands of an all-powerful God, but rather on another type of father, Universal Reason (as the ultimate moral authority). God's Reason is replaced by Universal Reason.  Read more at location 3901

Universal Moral Feeling  

Some Enlightenment moral theories held that it is not impotent Reason that runs the show, but rather Feeling, or Passion, that moves us to action. When Feeling calls the shots, the other faculties' jobs are redefined relative to the power of Feeling to produce action.  Read more at location 3907

Society as Family  

Society is understood as a family, in which the metaphorical Strict Father sets social norms. Social norms are conceived as family norms.  Read more at location 3911

we even come to speak of the "General Will" of the people. In some cases the Strict Father may be embodied in particular people who have authority in a society, such as elected officials or clergy. These represent the most common metaphorical instantiations of the Father (or Mother) in universal morality.  Read more at location 3914

Moral Theories as Family Moralities  

Christian Ethics  

On the Strict Father interpretation, God is the stern and unforgiving lawgiver who rewards the righteous and punishes wrongdoers. The key to living morally is to hear God's commandments and to align one's will with God's will.  Read more at location 3925

When God is conceived as Nurturant Parent (sometimes as Mother), he is the all-loving, all-merciful protector and nurturer of his people. God is Love,  Read more at location 3927

Rationalist Ethics  

moral rationalism conceives of the Father as Universal Reason, possessed by all people and telling each person what is morally required of him or her. Rationalism tends to underwrite a Strict Father morality. Reason is a stern lawgiver and judge.  Read more at location 3931

We are rewarded, not by eternal life or external well-being, but rather by our own inner sense of self-esteem and self-respect, which comes from knowing that we have done our duty. Our punishments for moral wrongdoing are, likewise, internal-guilt, shame, and lack of self-respect.  Read more at location 3933

Reason is not typically understood as a nurturer. Reason commands, lays down the law, gives orders, judges, reprimands, and so on.  Read more at location 3935

Utilitarianism  

It is often seen as a rational principle, set within Enlightenment economic theory, that focuses on the maximizing of happiness according to a moral calculus. But, of course, the classical utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, did indeed regard this as the ultimate nurturant morality. It is a morality geared toward the realization of human well-being.  Read more at location 3938

Virtue Ethics  

An ethics of virtue is based on developing a strong, wise, and even-tempered moral character that will lead you to choose what is best and to act morally.  Read more at location 3944

For Aristotle, virtue is about developing habits and states of character that will lead one to naturally choose what is good and right. Morality is about growth, about the person's developing his or her capacities and exercising them to the fullest extent in order to realize what is best in them. Aristotle's ethics is thus about nurturance, the nurturance necessary to help a person become a well-balanced, temperate, fully actualized human being.  Read more at location 3947

Permissive Family Moralities

there appear to be two other major ethical perspectives that are neither Strict Father nor Nurturant Parent. Instead, they are modeled on what is known as the "permissive family." In a permissive family there are no strict rules and children are not held responsible for their actions. The permissive family is what Lakoff calls a "pathological" form of the nurturant parent family,  Read more at location 3954

Ethical Egoism

Ethical egoism is the view that an act is right if it maximizes my own well-being.  Read more at location 3957

There are at least two major interpretations of egoism. The first treats it as a nurturance morality that has shriveled up into itself by reducing nurturance to nothing more than self-nurturance.  Read more at location 3959

The second reading regards egoism as a form of moral self-interest. That is, if each person pursues his or her individual self-interest, then, by some Invisible Hand, the moral interest of all will be served. This second version appropriates some of the values of the Strict Father model,  Read more at location 3961

Existentialist Ethics  

existentialism might appear to provide the ultimate challenge to the idea of family-based morality. Above all else, it presents itself as a form of moral relativism that rejects the very notion of moral essence, absolute values, and rational commands. It denies that there is any preexisting human essence or any ultimate human end that could define moral action. All we have is our freedom and the necessity of making choices (since not to choose is to choose). Freedom and authenticity are its catchwords. You are being inauthentic when you let someone else's morality determine your actions.  Read more at location 3964

existentialism appears to be a form of Permissive Family morality. We, the children not under the authority of any parent, make our choices without help or guidance from our metaphorical parents (God, Reason, Feeling, Society). That does not mean that we act with no ethics at all. Rather we act with an ethics of our own choice, one that is not imposed on us. Existentialism might be seen as an instance of the rebellious child rejecting the parent altogether  Read more at location 3972

Moral Relativism  

of the previous moralities and ethical theories except existentialism share the grounding assumption that there exist universal moral standards. Moral relativism rejects this foundational assumption. It claims that there exist no universal essences upon which universal, absolute moral values rest. All moral standards are seen to be relative to the specific communities in which they arise.   Read more at location 3975

Is All Morality Metaphoric?

We understand our experience via these conceptual metaphors, we reason according to their metaphorical logic, and we make judgments on the basis of the metaphors. This is what we mean when we say that morality is metaphoric. Because our metaphorical moral concepts are grounded in aspects of basic experiential morality, they tend to he stable across cultures and over large stretches of time. The question of whether they are universal is an empirical one, and the research has not yet been carried out to make this determination.  Read more at location 3984

Does Cognitive Science Contribute to Moral Understanding?  

Evidence from three areas of psychological research-attachment theory, socialization theory, and family violence studies-shows that the Strict Father model does not, in fact, produce the kind of child that it is supposed to foster.  Read more at location 4009

such research, especially socialization research, shows the Strict Father family tends to produce children who are dependent on the authority of others, cannot chart their own moral course very well, have less of a conscience, are less respectful of others, and have no greater ability to resist temptations.   Read more at location 4011

The traditional view of moral concepts and reasoning says the following: Human reasoning is compartmentalized, depending on what aspects of experience it is directed to. There are scientific judgments, technical judgments, prudential judgments, aesthetic judgments, and ethical judgments. For each type of judgment, there is a corresponding distinct type of literal concept. Therefore, there exists a unique set of concepts that pertain only to ethical issues. These ethical concepts are literal and must he understood only "in themselves" or by virtue of their relations to other purely ethical concepts. Moral rules and principles are made up from purely ethical concepts like these, concepts such as good, right, duty, justice, and freedom.  Read more at location 4022

Why the Traditional View Can't Work  

the empirical question of whether our moral concepts and reasoning are metaphoric is all-important. If they are metaphoric, then they are not univocal, they are not understood in their own terms, and there is not some autonomous, monolithic "ethical" domain with its own unique set of ethical concepts.  Read more at location 4028

No Pure Moral Concepts  

we understand morality via mappings of structures from other aspects and domains of our experience: wealth, balance, order, boundaries, light/dark, beauty, strength, and so on. If our moral concepts are metaphorical, then their structure and logic come primarily from the source domains that ground the metaphors.  Read more at location 4031

****  We are not claiming that there are no nonmetaphorical ethical concepts. Some of our moral concepts appear to have a minimal nonmetaphorical "core." However, this core is typically so thin, so underspecified, that it can play little or no role in our reasoning without being fleshed out by various metaphors.  Read more at location 4034

For example, consider our concept of rights. Its minimal nonmetaphoric core appears as early as infancy and toddlerhood. 1. Very early on, infants and toddlers acquire the idea that something (such as a toy or pacifier) belongs to them-they possess it, and it is theirs to do with as they wish. Taking away a possession they see as fundamentally theirs leads them to protest loudly. 2. Infants and toddlers react vigorously against undue constraints on the movements of their bodies. Inhibiting normal bodily movement is protested against. 3. From infancy, we react against the infliction of pain. Basic possessions, normal bodily movement, and freedom from the infliction of pain seem to be, literally, where our notion of rights begin.   Read more at location 4037

Locke's rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of property" are versions of these abstract rights. Thomas Jefferson's substitution of "happiness" for "property" is based on the common metaphor Achieving A Purpose Is Acquiring A Desired Object.  Read more at location 4042

No Pure Moral Reason  

if we have no pure moral concepts that are defined only on their own terms, then the idea of a pure moral reason becomes superfluous. Given that most of our moral concepts are structured by metaphor, then the inference patterns of our moral reasoning come, for the most part, from the source domains of the metaphors.  Read more at location 4050

No Monolithic Morality  

For example, we have different, inconsistent, metaphorical structurings of our notion of well-being, and these are employed in moral reasoning. Which one we use, such as Well-Being Is Wealth versus Well-Being Is Health, will depend on the hierarchical structuring imposed by family-based moral systems as well as our purposes, interests, and the particular context we find ourselves in. There is no single, internally consistent concept of well-being that incorporates both of these metaphorical structurings.   Read more at location 4054

Morality Is Grounded  

*********  (Note:  summary of morality as metaphor)  our very idea of what morality is comes from those systems of metaphors that are grounded in and constrained by our experience of physical well-being and functioning. This means that our moral concepts are not arbitrary and unconstrained. It also means that we cannot just make up moral concepts de novo. On the contrary, they are inextricably tied to our embodied experience of well-being: health, strength, wealth, purity, control, nurturance, empathy, and so forth.  Read more at location 4059

No Deontological Ethics  

At least since Kant, it has been traditional to distinguish between moral theories that are deontological and those that are teleological, or consequentialist. Consequentialist views are those in which right action is defined by the good ends or consequences that it produces.  Read more at location 4068

an alleged split between principles and ends looks highly problematic in light of the metaphorical character of much of our moral reasoning.  Read more at location 4074

No Compartmentalized Morality

we should be wary of trying to compartmentalize ethics. The cross-domain mappings of the metaphors suggest the intricate web of connections that impose our moral ideas on other aspects of our lives, including considerations that are technical, scientific, political, aesthetic, religious, and social.  Read more at location 4092

*********  There is no pure moral reason and there are no pure moral concepts that are understood solely "in themselves" or in relation only to other pure ethical concepts. Our moral understanding is metaphorical, drawing structure and inference patterns from a wide range of experiential domains that involve values, goods, ends, and purposes. Our system of moral concepts is neither monolithic, nor entirely consistent, nor fixed and finished, and certainly not autonomous.   Read more at location 4101

Part  3: The Cognitive Science of Philosophy

The Cognitive Science of Philosophy Philosophical Theories and Folk Theories  

Chapter 15. The Cognitive Science of Philosophy

These metaphors for mind are neither incidental, nor disposable; they are constitutive. They define the ontology of mind that Locke is using. The ontology has a container, a mental locus with an interior and passages (the senses) from the exterior into the interior. Sense data are inert objects that (secondary qualities aside) have an objective external existence independent of any observer. The mind does not play any role in creating these sense data; it just receives them passively as given. The faculty of understanding is a person who actively puts these objects together to form complex ideas.   Read more at location 4140

The very possibility that the homunculus-type faculty of understanding (relying on the Reason As Person metaphor) can "view" idea-objects presupposes the Knowing Is Seeing metaphor. The metaphor of an internal viewing space where a personified faculty of mind inspects idea-objects is what Dennett has named the "Cartesian Theater." But this is not an exotic model to be found only in the abstruse meditations of Descartes and other philosophers. On the contrary, it is a metaphor (or cluster of metaphors) deeply embedded in our ordinary conceptions of mind,  Read more at location 4145

What Cognitive Science Offers Philosophy  

It is our claim that philosophical theories are attempts to refine, extend, clarify, and make consistent certain common metaphors and folk theories shared within a culture. Philosophical theories, therefore, incorporate some collection (perhaps in more precise form) of the folk theories, models, and metaphors that define the culture that they emerge in.  Read more at location 4162

Critical Assessment  

****  The cognitive sciences must rely on stable converging evidence from a number of different sciences, methods, and viewpoints. Only in this way can an empirical approach minimize the problem, so well documented by Thomas Kuhn, of a scientific theory defining what counts as evidence in such a way as to guarantee the truth of the theory in advance.   Read more at location 4178

Constructive Philosophical Theorizing  

we have certain limited but philosophically important purposes. They are (1) to demonstrate that vital aspects of each philosopher's metaphysics arise from certain of his central metaphors and folk theories; (2) to show how the logic of his reasoning comes out of the entailments of those metaphors and folk theories; (3) to illustrate how a relatively small set of metaphors and folk theories can make a complex philosophical theory hang together; and (4) to show how the very enterprises of metaphysics, epistemology, and moral theory arise from such metaphors and folk theories.  Read more at location 4210

Once we discern the cognitive structure of pre-Socratic metaphysics, we can see how that structure was elaborated by additional metaphors in Plato's middle-period doctrine of the Forms and in Aristotle's view of the nature of metaphysics, the science of Being qua Being. Our analysis shows that the metaphors that shaped the metaphysical and epistemological doctrines of the Greeks have guided philosophical and scientific thinking ever since. We will then go on to analyze the Enlightenment conception of mind, a view that directly shaped first-generation cognitive science.  Read more at location 4219

What do these case studies of metaphysics, mind, language and morality tell us? First, that all philosophical theories, no matter what they may claim about themselves, are necessarily metaphoric in nature. Second, that the metaphorical thought is ineliminable: It is metaphoric thought that defines the metaphysics and unifies the logic of each philosophical theory. Third, this is simply a consequence of the fact the philosophical theories make use of the same conceptual resources that make up ordinary thought.  Read more at location 4232

****  Metaphor, rather than being an impediment to rationality, is what makes rational philosophical theories possible.   Read more at location 4235

Chapter 16 The Pre-Socratics: The Cognitive Science of Early Greer Metaphysics What is at Stake in Metaphysics?  

THE FOLK THEORY OF THE INTELLIGIBILITY OF THE WORLD

The world makes systematic sense, and we can gain knowledge of it. 

THE FOLK THEORY OF GENERAL KINDS

Every particular thing is a kind of thing.

THE FOLK THEORY OF ESSENCES

Every entity has an "essence" or "nature," that is, a collection of properties that makes it the kind of thing it is and that is the causal source of its natural behavior.  

First, the very idea of an essence is based on physical properties that compose the basis of everyday categorization: substance and form.  Read more at location 4250

The second way in which the concept of essence is metaphorical concerns its role as a causal source. The intuition is this: If a tree is made of wood, it will burn.  Read more at location 4254

THE FOUNDATIONAL ASSUMPTION OF METAPHYSICS

Kinds exist and are defined by essences.  

This metaphysical impulse lies at the heart not only of Western philosophy but of all Western science, leading physicists to seek a general field theory, or as it has come to he known, "a theory of everything."  Read more at location 4263

Once we have started on this search for higher and higher categories and essences, there are three possible alternatives: 1. The world may not he systematically organized, or we may not he able to know it, above a certain level of generalization, which might even he relatively low in the hierarchy of categories. In other words, there may be a limit to the systematicity of the world or to its intelligibility. 2. The hierarchy of categories may go on indefinitely, with no level at which an all-inclusive category exists. In this case, the world might be systematic, but not completely intelligible. The process of gaining knowledge of the world would be an infinite, and hence uncompletable, task. 3. The iteration up the hierarchy of categories and essences might terminate with an all-inclusive category, whose essence would explain the nature of all things. Only in this case would the world he totally intelligible, at least in principle.   Read more at location 4267

THE FOLK THEORY OF THE ALL-INCLUSIVE CATEGORY

There is a category of all things that exist.  

This all-inclusive category is called Being, and its essence is called the Essence of Being.   Read more at location 4275

In early pre-Socratic philosophy, there are hints of this way of thinking about nature that, in Aristotle, finally and explicitly become the quest for an understanding of Being as the ultimate form of knowledge. This sets the stage both for Western science and for theological interpretations of God as Ultimate Being.   Read more at location 4280

The Beginnings

These early Greek philosophers thought they had discovered fundamental principles of nature (Greek phusis) that could explain how things come into being, why things have the properties they do, and why things behave as they do. In other words, they were driven by their belief in the Folk Theory of Intelligibility.  Read more at location 4293

The Milesian Nature Philosophers

THE FOLK THEORY OF THE ELEMENTS

Things in nature are made up of some combination of the basic elements: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. Each element is defined by a unique combination of heat and wetness values, as follows: Earth = Cold and Dry Water = Cold and Wet Air = Hot and Wet Fire = Hot and Dry   Read more at location 4307

We call this a "folk theory" because it was a basic explanatory model shared by most Greeks, beginning in the Archaic period. It was a model so intuitively clear that it was still a commonplace throughout most of Europe through the sixteenth century.  Read more at location 4310

it appears that the Milesian philosophers appropriated the Folk Theory of the Elements within a framework defined by a basic metaphor according to which nature-all that exists-is understood as being composed of material "stuff."   Read more at location 4315

The Milesian Metaphor: The Essence of Being Is Matter  

The metaphor provides an understanding of the totality of nature (phusis) in terms of the properties of one aspect of nature, the material aspect. This metaphor defines the view known as "materialism," which has persisted throughout all Western philosophy to the present day and, as we shall see, contrasts with views that claim that what is real is not matter, but form.   Read more at location 4317

Our claim, that the Milesian nature philosophers adopted the metaphor The Essence Of Being Is Matter, may seem anachronistic for the following reason: It is not clear that the Milesians even had any clearly defined notion of "Being" that went beyond physical nature.  Read more at location 4320

Thales' Metaphor: The Essence of Being Is Water

Thales' metaphor presupposes the Folk Theory of Essences: Every entity has an "essence" or "nature," that is, a collection of properties that makes it the kind of thing it is and that determines how it will behave. Thales' metaphor thus claims that whatever it is that makes water what it is, must also be the same principle that makes every thing (and every kind of thing) what it is. Thales' near contemporary, Anaximander, recognized an inconsistency in Thales' reasoning. He argued that any of the four elements will possess two of the four possible qualities (Cold, Hot, Wet, Dry). If everything that is real were only one of these four elements, then it could not he the source of any particular thing that possesses the opposite qualities.  Read more at location 4332

Anaximander's Metaphor: The Essence of Being Is Indeterminate Matter

Anaximander saw that the essence of all existing things would have to be some indeterminate principle (the Apeiron-the Unbounded, the Indeterminate). Since this is the essence of all that is, it must, by the Folk Theory of Essences, cause the behavior of all that is. Somehow, all determinate properties must emerge naturally from indeterminate matter.  Read more at location 4342

By the Folk Theory of General Kinds, nothing specific can be the Essence of all Being, since there must be something still more general than anything specific. That is why Anaximander came to the conclusion that the Essence of all Being is indeterminate matter.  Read more at location 4346

Anaximenes' Metaphor: The Essence of Being Is Air  

Socrates begins by stating the same general theory of the Forms we have seen to be operative in Euthypbro, and he thus presupposes exactly the same folk theories: And in respect of the just and the unjust, the good and the bad, and all the ideas or forms, the same statement holds, that in itself each is one, but that by virtue of their communion with actions and bodies and with one another they present themselves everywhere, each as a multiplicity of aspects. (476a) In other words, justice is defined by a single essence.  Read more at location 4484

****  Plato's argument rests on the metaphors Ideas Are Objects and Knowing Is Seeing. He then extends those metaphors to form a new complex metaphor, the Degrees of Being metaphor, in which there is a correspondence between degrees of knowledge and degrees of being: If knowing is seeing an object, and you see whatever is there to be seen, then your degree of knowledge depends on how substantial the object is. Solid knowledge is mental vision of a solid object. Insubstantial knowledge is the mental vision of an insubstantial object. Ignorance is the apparent vision of an object that does not exist.  Read more at location 4498

Here Plato uses the common metaphor that Existence Is Location Here, according to which things come into existence and go out of existence. Plato calls the metaphorical location where existent things are "located" the Realm of Being; the Realm of Becoming is the region of metaphorical space where things in the process of "coming into being" are metaphorically "located."  Read more at location 4506

Using the Knowing is Seeing metaphor once more, Plato asks what we know best. By the logic of the metaphor, what we can know best is what the mind can see best, namely, ideas.  Read more at location 4511

The Essences Are Ideas Metaphor  

****  The Essences Are Ideas metaphor brings the mind and the world together and thereby makes certain knowledge of the world possible: We know the essences of things in the world because we know our ideas directly.   Read more at location 4516

The entailments of this metaphor, given Plato's other metaphors, are striking: First, if essences are ideas, they cannot he material in nature and therefore must be forms. Hence the celebrated notion of the Platonic form. The essence of a chair is the form of chair. Next, as the Folk Theory of Essences says, essences are real entities. According to this metaphor, the mind can grasp and look at ideas, and if essences of objects in the world are ideas, then the mind can grasp and look at the essences of objects. It is by virtue of this metaphor that the essence of a chair is the idea of a chair. The Essences Are Ideals Metaphor   Read more at location 4518

Essence prototypes and ideal prototypes are very different things. But not for Plato. Plato brings these distinct ideas together via the metaphor Essences Are Ideals.  Read more at location 4527

Next, since Essences Are Ideas, it follows that the idea of a physical object is the ideal version of that object. Hence, the idea of chair not only characterizes the essence of a chair, but also sets the standard for what a chair should be.  Read more at location 4529

(Note: Relates to God, & how Platonic conception of God can be Good only)  There is another important consequence of this metaphor for Plato's metaphysics. Consider courageous and cowardly actions. Courage and cowardice are opposite ends on the same scale. Courage is positive: it is good; it is an ideal to be striven for. There is an essence to courage and that essence, via this metaphor, defines the ideal of courageous action. Cowardice, at the negative end of the scale, is not good and hence is not an ideal. Since essences are ideals, only positive qualities can be essences. Therefore, there can be no essence of cowardice. There is no Platonic ideal of cowardice, because ideals have to be good.  Read more at location 4531

****  The Essences Are Ideals metaphor provides Plato with a virtue theory of ethics. What the Essences Are Ideals metaphor does is link metaphysics with morality. A virtue is a positive essence (not a lack of one) and therefore is also an ideal.  Read more at location 4536

Plato's Idea of the Good

****  (Note:  Plato summary)  Plato has two original metaphors that characterize what is innovative in his philosophy: Essences Are Ideas and Essences Are Ideals. These two metaphors and the Degree of Being metaphor are Plato's signature metaphors. They give his metaphysics its distinctive character.  Read more at location 4544

the Essence of Essence is at the very top of the hierarchy. Moreover, since Essences Are Ideals, this essence must also be an ideal, indeed it is the most ideal-the greatest good. Since Essences Are Ideas, the Essence that is the most ideal, the greatest good, is the Idea of the Good. By the Folk Theory of Essences, an essence is the causal source of the behavior of all members of its category. The Idea of the Good is therefore the causal source of everything. It is first the causal source of all essences, including the Essence of Being.  Read more at location 4552

the Idea of the Good is at the absolute pinnacle of the causal chain. One can go no higher. Why? Because, as the Essence of Essence, it is the causal source of all causal sources.  Read more at location 4556

****  (Note:   Again, Plato's Good ties closely to notion of God)  since Essences Are Ideas, the Idea of the Good is the causal source of all other ideas. It is therefore the causal source of all knowledge. To know the Idea of the Good would be to know everything.   Read more at location 4557

Can the causal source of all knowledge itself he known? Plato's answer is yes and no. As an essence, the essence of essence is knowable: "As the cause of the knowledge and truth, you can understand it Ithe Idea of the Goody to be a thing known" (508e, brackets added).  Read more at location 4576

Plato uses the Knowing Is Seeing metaphor again. Just as light, the causal source of vision, cannot he seen like ordinary objects, so the Good, the causal source of knowledge, cannot be known in the way that we ordinarily know things. These same metaphors provide the logical coherence to Plato's Allegory of the Cave.  Read more at location 4580

********  Plato's Idea of the Good is not just a quaint archaic notion. It has been articulated in a theological context through a long historical tradition from Plotinus and other Neoplatonists, to Augustine, Anselm, and Thomas Aquinas. In medieval theology, Plato's Idea of the Good became the concept of God-the prime mover, the ultimate causal source of all things, the source and locus of all knowledge, and the Perfect Being, the origin of all that is good. That view of God is still with us today.   Read more at location 4588

Chapter 18. Aristotle

Aristotle is responsible for our conception of metaphysics. He defined metaphysics as a science, a systematic search for the nature of Being and essence-the word was episteme and it meant knowledge based on observation together with an understanding of why things are as they are.  Read more at location 4591

Aristotle shares the same folk theories used by Plato and the pre-Socratics, namely, the folk theories of Intelligibility, General Kinds, Essences, and the All-Inclusive Category.  Read more at location 4595

Consequently, Aristotle sees the world as having a hierarchical category structure, with all things contained in the ultimate category of Being. But, as we will see, he also notes that Being has properties distinct from all other categories. He thus reserves the term category for the ten highest subcategories of Being, although he treats Being logically as a category in that he sees it as an object of study having an essence.  Read more at location 4597

****  But Aristotle differs from Plato in a fundamental way. Where Plato had the metaphor Essences As Ideas, Aristotle has the converse metaphor, Ideas Are Essences. These opposite metaphors comprise the fundamental difference between the Platonic and Aristotelian views of philosophy. Where Essences Are Ideas makes Plato an idealist, Ideas Are Essences makes Aristotle a realist.  Read more at location 4609

The difference lies in whether the world takes its shape from ideas (as in Plato) or whether the ideas take their shape from the world (as in Aristotle).   Read more at location 4614

(Note: Aristotle quote, starting with 'he whose')  The structure of our rationality is in the world : He whose subject is existing things qua existing must be able to state the most certain principles of all things. This is the philosopher, and the most certain principle of all is that regarding which it is impossible to he mistaken, for such a principle must be both the best known (for all men may be mistaken about things which they do not know), and non-hypothetical. For a principle which every one must have who understands anything that is, is not a hypothesis; and that which every one must know who knows anything, he must already have when he comes to a special study. Evidently then such a principle is the most certain of all; which principle this is, let us proceed to say. It is, that the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect. (Metaphysics 1005b 10-20)  Read more at location 4617

For Aristotle, the father of logic, logic is the logic of the world. What we can logically think depends on the way things are in the world. Logic for Aristotle is not an abstract issue: It occurs as part of the world and has a locus in space, in time, and in ob)ects. As a result, there is transcendent reason, a reason of the world. Because Ideas Are Essences, human beings can partake of this transcendent reason. Logos, by virtue of the Ideas Are Essences metaphor, is both the logic (the rational structure) of the world as well as human logic (the rational structure of correct thought). The  Read more at location 4625

(Note: Aristotle certainty of realism, quote starts after 'rules out skepticism')  Because the world, for Aristotle, has a logic, essences must be part of the world. Hence, form must be in the world, instantiated in the substance of the things. And since Ideas Are Essences and Essence Is Form, it follows that the human mind can grasp the forms of things in the world, the forms that make those things the kind of things they are. It is this ability to grasp the forms of things in the world directly that, for Aristotle, guarantees us the possibility of knowledge and rules out skepticism. A sense faculty is that which has the power to receive into itself the sensible form of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of the signet ring without the iron or gold; what produces the impression is a signet of bronze or gold, but not qua bronze or gold: in a similar way the sense is affected by what is colored or flavored or sounding, not insofar as each is what it is, but insofar as it is of such and such a sort and according to its logos. (On the Sou/424a].7-24)   Read more at location 4631

Important things follow from these metaphors. We can get correct ideas from the world. Here's how: Things in the world all have a form, that is, a physical structure. The senses are metaphorically like wax tablets. Things in the world impinge on the senses, leaving their impressions as a signet ring does in wax. These impressions are metaphorically physical objects-the very structures of the physical objects perceived. The mind is conceptualized as a person capable of grasping and holding things. When the mind metaphorically grasps the form (the physical structure) of the object perceived, it understands (via the metaphor that Understanding Is Grasping).   Read more at location 4640

The Categories  

what are the most basic specific forms of Being? Aristotle's answer was his famous enumeration of categories: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, condition, action, and passivity. As an empiricist, he arrived at these empirically via an early form of linguistic investigation into the nature of semantics.  Read more at location 4652

there was an "equivocation" in sentences like "The musical note and the knife are sharp." He observed that the predicate sharp could not be applied to both musical notes and knives in the same sense. Therefore, he reasoned, musical notes and knives must be in different categories.  Read more at location 4654

by studying language that reflects the categories of mind, he is studying the world. The idea that we can study the world by studying language has come down to us in Anglo-American analytic philosophy. It was by such a method that Aristotle distinguished his ten basic categories.  Read more at location 4657

Causation

Aristotle gave us the doctrine of the four types of causes: material, formal, efficient, and final. The material cause is "that out of which a thing comes to be and which persists." Examples are the bronze of the statue or the silver of the bowl, that is, the material from which something is made. The formal cause is "the form or the archetype, i.e., the statement of the essence." He gives as an example the two-to-one ratio that defines an octave. The efficient cause is "the primary source of the change or coming to rest." The sculptor is the efficient cause of the statue. The final cause "is the sense of end or `that for the sake of which' a thing is done." For example, health is the cause of walking about; one walks about to he healthy.  Read more at location 4660

Aristotle took this metaphor as a literal truth, and it is the basis of his strong metaphysical doctrine of teleology. A telos, for Aristotle, is a purpose that arises naturally as part of the world. Thus, the world contains objectively given purposes (or "ends") that exert a causal pull on natural objects.  Read more at location 4673

That essence, that pattern of change, must reside in the object. Moreover, the telos, the final cause that brings about that change, must reside in that object as part of its essence. Aristotle's classic example is the acorn, which he sees as containing within it a telos-a natural end, which is to become an oak-and a regular pattern of change brought about by that telos. This remarkable realist view of teleology is a consequence of the Folk Theory of Essences plus Aristotle's central metaphor Ideas Are Essences.  Read more at location 4680

Definitions "A definition," says Aristotle, "is a phrase signifying a thing's essence" (Topics 102a). In short, it is a collection of necessary and sufficient conditions for an object to be a particular kind of thing, what we would call today a member of a conceptual category. This definition of definition is still commonplace in logic and philosophy.   Read more at location 4684

Definitions for Aristotle are anything but trivial matters. They are not mere stipulations of how to use words. Because of the metaphor Ideas Are Essences and the folk theory that essences are causal sources of natural behavior, definitions for Aristotle characterize essential aspects of things in the world that explain why those things behave naturally the way they do. In short, for Aristotle, correct definition is central to the scientific enterprise,  Read more at location 4688

Logic

one of the central metaphors of Aristotelian logic, Predication Is Containment. It is by virtue of this metaphor that statements are linked to the general logic of containers.   Read more at location 4694

Here are some of those logical constraints:

• Given a container and an entity, the entity is either inside or outside and not both at once.

• If Container A is inside Container B, and Entity C is inside Container A, then Entity C is inside Container B.

• If Container A is inside Container B and Entity C is outside Container B, then Entity C is outside Container A.   Read more at location 4696

****  Categories Are Containers and Predication Is Containment map these spatial truths (from the logic of spatial containment) onto the classic Aristotelian logical principles:

• The Law of The Excluded Middle: An object cannot both have a property and its negative (in the same respect at the same time).

• Modus Ponens (version 1): If all B's are C's and all A's are B's, then All As are C's.

(version 2): If all B's are C's and some A is a B, then that A is a C.

• Modus Tollens (version 1): If all B's are C's, and no A's are C's, then no A's are B's.

(version 2); If all B's are C's and some A is not a C, then that A is not a B. Version 1 in each case arises if A in the container logic is itself a container, and version 2 arises if it is not.  Read more at location 4698

The predications that define a category/container are those that define the essence that makes each category member what it is. By the Folk Theory of Essences, an essence is the causal source of the natural behavior of everything with that essence and in that category. A demonstrative syllogism can therefore produce causal knowledge of behavior, given knowledge of essences. This, for Aristotle, is the major mechanism by which we gain scientific knowledge. The syllogism is thus the central engine of scientific explanation.  Read more at location 4708

This is why classification is such an important scientific enterprise for Aristotle. Putting things in the right categories allows one to apply syllogistic logic to produce new causal knowledge. This view of logic as expressing causal relations is not present in modern formal logic.  Read more at location 4714

Modern logic does not contain two of Aristotle's central metaphors: Ideas Are Essences and Essences Are Causal Sources (from the Folk Theory of Essences). It is those metaphors that give syllogistic logic a significance for Aristotle that it does not have for us today.   Read more at location 4716

Literal Meaning and Metaphor  

There must be a conventional proper correspondence between linguistic expressions and ideas. This amounts to what we might call a literalist theory of meaning: Each term properly designates at least one (and perhaps more than one) idea, which in turn is a form characterizing an essence in the world.  Read more at location 4726

The very notion of a metaphorical concept could have made no sense at all to Aristotle, since concepts for him are defined in terms of kinds of things in the mind-independent world. Second, metaphors had to be deviant uses of words,  Read more at location 4739

Third, if a metaphorical linguistic expression (and that's all metaphor could be!) was to have any meaning at all, it had to be some other literal meaning. That's the only kind of meaning there is for Aristotle. And fourth, if a metaphorical expression had a meaning at all, there would have to be some consistent basis for determining what the appropriate literal sense was. Aristotle chose similarity as the most general consistent basis for a metaphorical use of language.  Read more at location 4741

As a result of Aristotle's literalist theory of meaning and his corresponding theory of metaphor, he was led to very bizarre analyses of concepts.  Read more at location 4749

Consider the submappings States Are Locations and Change Is Motion.  Read more at location 4751

Consider Aristotle's explanation of why a stone that is thrown into the air falls to the ground and why flames shoot up into the air. Since motion and change, for Aristotle, were just two special cases of the same general thing, Aristotle could appeal to the properties of natural change to explain the properties of natural motion.  Read more at location 4756

People are naturally healthy; occasionally they get sick, but they tend to become healthy again. In general, things have natural states. When they are removed from those natural states they tend to return to them.  Read more at location 4758

A stone's natural location is on the ground. When thrown in the air, it is removed from its natural state to which it seeks to return. In falling to the ground it is simply going to its natural location. Fire is a form of air. Air is naturally located above the earth. Fire moves upward because it is moving to its natural location.   Read more at location 4763

Aristotle asks whether there can be a vacuum. The answer is no, and for the following reason:  Read more at location 4765

Aristotle asks whether it is possible to have a state with nothing in that state. The answer is no. A state is always a state of a thing. Similarly, a location must always be the location of a thing. Since you cannot have a location with nothing in that location, it follows that a vacuum is impossible. Aristotle's Metaphoric Philosophy   Read more at location 4768

while Aristotle's theory of physics fell by the wayside after two thousand years, his theories of logic, of literal meaning, and of metaphor have lasted nearly twenty-five hundred years.  Read more at location 4776

Why Being Is Different  

For Aristotle, it makes no sense to apply the logic of attributes outside the category of Being, since only existing things do or do not have specific attributes. And so existence itself cannot be a predicate-an attribute that may or may not characterize the essence of some existing object.  Read more at location 4787

(Note: Being itself as unknowable for Aristotle, unlike Plato)  For Aristotle, you get to know things by observation, by observing the attributes of things and discovering those attributes that are the essences of a thing. To distinguish among the essences, you must carefully distinguish among the behavior of things, since the essences are taken as causing the behavior that distinguishes one kind of thing from another. Could the essence of Being be discovered in this way? The answer is no. Since all existing things by definition share the essence of Being, they do not differ in this respect. Empirical observation cannot lead to the knowledge of the essence of Being, since there is no differentiation to be observed. It follows that one cannot literally describe Being as one can describe ordinary categories, namely, by listing literal distinguishing attributes. Literal language simply fails for the description of Being.  Read more at location 4790

Hawking, like many other physicists, is taking the laws of nature as defining the essence of the universe, the essence of all that is, the essence of Being. The idea of the Big Bang predicates a beginning of Being. Just as logic for Aristotle makes sense only for things that exist, time for Hawking makes sense only for events since the Big Bang.  Read more at location 4808

The Remarkable Category of Being

Being, regarded as the fundamental ontological category, emerged historically, as we have seen, in pre-Socratic philosophy and was given an elaborate articulation and refinement in Plato and Aristotle.  Read more at location 4816

****  (Note:   metaphysical uncertainty)  Many of these folk theories and conceptual metaphors are so deeply rooted in our Western philosophical tradition that they may seem to us not to be folk theories or metaphors at all. Many people, for instance, take it as a self-evident metaphysical fact that things consist of matter organized by form, or that everything has an essence that makes it the kind of thing it is, or that reality is organized in a hierarchy of categories, with the category of everything that exists at the top. Many people think it obvious that the world must consist of basic substances that underlie the properties we experience. But there is nothing ontologically absolute about either the form/matter distinction or the idea of substance-attribute metaphysics.  Read more at location 4819

philosophers, such as Merleau-Ponty, Dewey, Whitehead, and, more recently, Rorty, have shown that the form/matter model is only one possible way of understanding things, and a mostly distorting way at that. Likewise, the idea that substance must be the ontologically basic entity is today almost totally discredited by a large number of philosophical traditions.   Read more at location 4823

****  The search for Being is for many people the search for God. The issues surrounding the quest for Being have always been at the center of Western theology and are still there today. God is widely regarded by theologians and laypeople alike as the ultimate causal source and sustainer of all that is, as the ultimate source of all that is good, as present in every existing thing, as having a plan that gives purpose to the world and meaning to human beings, and as being not merely all-powerful but also all-knowing. As we saw, most of these are the properties of Plato's Idea of the Good, that is, of the essence of essence. This is no accident. Most of the medieval conceptions of, and arguments for, the existence of God stem directly from Greek metaphysics, partly from Plato's Idea of the Good, but especially from Aristotelian views of causation and change.  Read more at location 4828

The Folk Theory of Essences is commonplace in virtually every science, because science is always looking for the properties of things that make them what they are and explain their behavior. The Folk Theory of the All-Inclusive Category is present in every mode of scientific explanation that seeks ever more comprehensive explanations to cover ever greater ranges of phenomena,  Read more at location 4837

Chapter 19. Descartes and the Enlightened Mind

Versions of the Platonic and Aristotelian views of knowledge persisted through the Middle Ages. The idealist Platonic views kept the metaphor of Essences As Ideas, while the realist Aristotelian views preserved the metaphor of Ideas As Essences. In both cases, what was preserved was an explanation of the possibility of knowledge via the most intimate of direct linkages between ideas and essences of physical objects-identity.  Read more at location 4844

****  (Note:   substance dualism)  this kind of identity becomes impossible for Descartes once mind is severed from body and mental substance is seen as utterly different from physical substance. What emerged from Descartes' philosophy was a new metaphoric view of mind as representing in some "inner" realm the objects existing in the "external" world.  Read more at location 4847

Among the most important of Descartes' ideas are the following:

• The mind can know its own ideas with absolute certainty.

• All thought is conscious.

• The structure of the mind is directly accessible to itself.

• No empirical research is necessary to establish certain knowledge of the mind.

• The mind is disembodied. It consists of mental substance, while the body consists of physical substance.

• The essence, and only essence, of human beings is the ability to reason.

• Imagination and emotion, which are bodily and therefore excluded from human reason, are not part of the essence of human nature.

• Certain of our ideas represent external reality, and their origin lies in the perception of external objects.

• Other ideas are innate; they are free of anything bodily and are not representations of anything external.

• Mathematics is about form, not content; because of its formal nature, mathematical knowledge can he certain.

• Thought is formal, just as mathematics is.   Read more at location 4854

Descartes' philosophy is necessarily metaphorical. The metaphors are not a mere embellishment, but are constitutive of his theory of mind. Descartes' Mental Vision   Read more at location 4864

Descartes conceived of the mind as what Daniel Dennett calls the "Cartesian Theater"-an inner mental stage in which metaphorical objects (our ideas) are illuminated by an inner light (the "Natural Light of Reason") and are observed by a metaphorical spectator (our faculty of understanding). Descartes gives the name intuition to such mental vision, which allows him to see the idea-objects clearly  Read more at location 4869

Descartes' Metaphorical Logic of Knowing  

KNOWING IS SEEING  

Descartes takes the Knowing As Seeing metaphor as a philosophical truth. This allows him to formulate the fundamental problem of knowledge as a problem concerning how it is possible to obtain clear and unobscured (intellectual) vision. The problem of philosophical method becomes a problem about how to see clearly the idea-objects that are present to the mind for inspection and also to discern the relations existing among these ideas. The mind's ability to see clearly is what Descartes calls "intuition."   Read more at location 4882

Descartes: “By intuition I understand, not the fluctuating testimony of the senses, nor the misleading judgment that proceeds from the blundering constructions of imagination, but the conception which an unclouded and attentive mind gives us so readily and distinctly that we are wholly freed from doubt about that which we understand. Or, what comes to the same thing, intuition is the undoubting conception of an unclouded mind, and springs from the light of reason alone.” (Rules 7 [emphasis added!)   Read more at location 4885

“1 term that clear which is present and apparent to an attentive mind, in the same way as we assert that we see objects clearly when being present to the regarding eye, they operate on it with sufficient strength. But the distinct is that which is so precise and different from all other objects that it contains within itself nothing but what is clear.” (C2, Descartes, Principles 237)   Read more at location 4889

He assumes that the mind is a container for ideas. The interior of the container is Dennett's Cartesian Theater, a locus in which the idea-objects exist and can be put in the spotlight and examined.   Read more at location 4894

Since perceiving is understood metaphorically as receiving sense-impressions from the external world, perception is conceptualized as a person who does the receiving.  Read more at location 4896

Reason, the person in the Cartesian Theater who is capable of knowing, is conceptualized by the Knowing Is Seeing metaphor as a person who can see. The Ideas Are Objects metaphor, added to the metaphor The Mind Is A Container for ideas, produces the entailment that ideas are objects in the mind that can be seen by Reason. All this metaphorical apparatus is applied to our everyday knowledge of seeing.  Read more at location 4898

Descartes: “If an idea is in the field of mental vision of Reason, who can know, and if the idea is sufficiently "illuminated" by the "light" of Reason and no other idea hides or obscures the idea, then Reason will know the idea as it really is, with all its detail, and will be able to distinguish it from other ideas.”  Read more at location 4904

Notice that there is no literal way to translate into the mental realm the notion of "illumination" by the "light of reason." Mental illumination and light are part of the ontology introduced by the metaphor. Note especially that Descartes' reasoning does not go through without what we know about illumination and light from the source domain of vision. If there is no light and illumination, then Reason cannot know its own ideas at all, let alone know them with certainty as they really are.   Read more at location 4906

from putting them together in just the right way and applying them to the folk theory of vision, we arrive at one of Descartes' most celebrated conclusions: The mind can know its own ideas with absolute certainty.   Read more at location 4909

a further startling conclusion follows from these same metaphors: All thought is conscious. This conclusion, which has been invalidated by virtually all of cognitive science, arises from the metaphors as follows: Thought consists of ideas. Since Ideas Are Objects and Knowing Is Seeing, thought can be seen by Reason. At this point two further commonplace folk theories of vision enter: You are conscious of what you see. Every object is capable of being seen.   Read more at location 4911

****  Another striking consequence follows from Descartes' system of metaphors: The structure of the mind is directly accessible to itself. Since all thought consists of ideas, and since Ideas Are Objects and Knowing Is Seeing, then all idea-objects are accessible to vision and hence able to be known by Reason. In other words, the structure and nature of thought processes can be known directly to the mind because they are made up of idea-objects, which can be directly seen (known). Thus Descartes concludes that Reason can reflect directly and successfully on its own nature and is therefore in no need of the aid of empirical research. From this, an additional startling conclusion follows: No empirical research is necessary to establish certain knowledge of the mind. These four conclusions remain pillars of present-day philosophy of mind in the Anglo-American tradition.  Read more at location 4916

Descartes' Logic of Deduction  

Deduction is what allows the mind both to "move" from one idea to another and to "see" their connections. This requires a complex metaphor system in which at least three common metaphors are woven together, metaphors that exist independently of Descartes' philosophy. First, there is Knowing Is Seeing, in which the faculty of reason is conceived metaphorically as a person who is able to see idea-objects. Second, there is Thinking Is Moving, in which the thinking mind is conceptualized as a person in motion. The careful logical thinker moves step-by-step from premises to reach a conclusion. Third, these two metaphors are joined by another metaphor containing elements of both Seeing and Moving, namely, the Seeing Is Touching metaphor.  Read more at location 4928

As Reason moves, mentally, down a train of deductions, we must be certain that our previous deductions-the ones on which our present deduction rests-are themselves infallible and certain.  Read more at location 4941

There would be no problem with memory if Descartes could simply make up a metaphor out of thin air like Memory Is Writing. Such a metaphor would allow idea-objects to remain as they were previously recognized. But this metaphor did not exist, so far as we can tell, in the conceptual system of Descartes. That leaves him with a problem. Descartes' metaphor of Knowing As Seeing, which is instantaneous, forces him to the rather bizarre model of deduction as a single act of vision that encompasses what is really a series of cognitive acts (of intellectual seeing) taking place over a period of time:   Read more at location 4942

Descartes: “if I have first found out by separate mental operations what the relation is between the magnitudes A and B, then what between B and C, between C and D, and finally between D and E, that does not entail my seeing what the relation is between A and E, nor can the truths previously learnt give me a precise knowledge of it unless I recall them all. To remedy this I would run over them from time to time, keeping the imagination moving continuously in such a way that while it is intuitively perceiving each fact it simultaneously passes on to the next; and this I would do until I had learned to pass from the first to the last so quickly, that no stage in the process was left to the care of the memory, but I seemed to have the whole in intuition before me at one time.” (Rules 19 [emphasis added])   Read more at location 4947

Descartes' Disembodied Mind  

His famous conclusion is that what he can never doubt is that when he thinks, he exists. After all, if he didn't exist, he could not be thinking or even doubting. But Descartes reaches conclusions beyond this: first, that being able to think constitutes our essence; second, that the mind is disembodied; and third, therefore, that the essence of human beings, that which makes us human, has nothing to do with our bodies. These three elements of Cartesian philosophy have had a profound effect on the character of much contemporary philosophical thinking.  Read more at location 4964

These beliefs, in the popular imagination, have led to the dissociation of reason from emotion and thus to the downplaying of emotional and aesthetic life in our culture. The philosophical respectability of these views still rests on versions of the original Cartesian arguments.  Read more at location 4969

THE FOLK THEORY OF ESSENCES   Read more at location 4977

Descartes' reasoning seems to go as follows: He knows he exists as long as he thinks. If he exists, he has an essence (by the Folk Theory of Essences). He assumes that his thinking is spontaneous, that is, not caused by anything else. If it is not caused by anything else, it must come from his nature. That is, it must be a consequence of his essence. Therefore, to be a thinking thing must be at least part of his essence.   Read more at location 4979

the idea of thought is utterly distinct from the idea of embodiment. Applying his method of intuition, he simply notes (no further argument is needed if his method is correct) that this is what he mentally "sees," and therefore that he cannot be mistaken. His monumental conclusion is, therefore, that the essence of thought is utterly distinct from the essence of embodiment.   Read more at location 4990

****  (Note:   this is all over)  he must assume an additional folk theory: the Folk Theory of Substance and Attributes, which goes hack at least to the time of Aristotle. THE FOLK THEORY OF SUBSTANCE AND ATTRIBUTES A substance is that which exists in itself and does not depend for its existence on any other thing. Each substance has one and only one primary attribute that defines what its essence is.   Read more at location 4993

(Note: Cartesian substance dualism)  Here then are two fateful conclusions that have been carried down to us through three hundred years of philosophy: The mind is disembodied. It consists of mental substance, while the body consists of physical substance. The essence, and only essence, of human beings is the ability to reason.  Read more at location 5001

an additional one follows immediately: Imagination is not essential to human nature.   Read more at location 5002

he says: I remark besides that this power of imagination which is in one, inasmuch as it differs from the power of understanding, is in no wise a necessary element in my nature, or in [my essence, that is to say, in] the essence of my mind; for although I did not possess it I should doubtless ever remain the same as I now am, from which it appears that we might conclude that it depends on something which differs from me. (Meditations 186)   Read more at location 5005

it also follows that: Emotion is not essential to human nature.   Read more at location 5008

Formalism, Representation, and Innateness  

• Mathematics is about form, not content; because of its formal nature, mathematical knowledge can be certain.

• Certain of our ideas represent external reality, and their origin lies in the perception of external objects.

• Other ideas are innate; they are free of anything bodily and are not representations of anything external.

• Thought is formal, just as mathematics is.   Read more at location 5010

Wouldn't there be a problem reasoning with an idea that might be so tainted by the senses? Descartes saw the solution to this problem in his understanding of mathematics. Descartes was the founder of analytic geometry, in which numbers are conceptualized as points on a line and geometrical figures can be expressed as algebraic equations. Descartes interpreted his own work on analytic geometry as being a model for the study of thought in general. In analytic geometry, the same formal symbolic notation can be used either for arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, or harmony in music. Descartes saw mathematics as being inherently a matter of the formal symbolism,  Read more at location 5020

Thought Is Mathematical Calculation  

the metaphor that Thinking Is Mathematical Calculation. This metaphor seems to have arisen with the Greeks, who saw mathematics as the quintessence of reason. This conceptual metaphor is still with us today.  Read more at location 5031

THINKING IS MATHEMATICAL CALCULATION   

Mathematical Calculation → Thinking

Numbers → Ideas

Equations → Propositions

Adding → Putting Ideas Together Sum 

Hobbes sums up this celebrated use of the Thinking Is Mathematical Calculation metaphor with his claim that "Reason, in this sense, is nothing but reckoning-that is, adding and subtracting-of the consequences of general names agreed upon for the marking and signifying of our thought" (Leviathan 46).   Read more at location 5042

Mathematics as a Model for Thought  

The only problem is how they relate to things in the external world. Descartes does not answer this in any interesting way. He merely assumes that God is no deceiver and that God gives us accurate ideas to reason with  Read more at location 5054

Our Cartesian Inheritance  

In brief, the Cartesian picture of mind that we have inherited is this: • What makes human beings human, the only thing that makes them human and that defines their distinctive nature, is their capacity for rational thought. • Thought is essentially disembodied, and all thought is conscious. • Thought consists of formal operations on ideas without regard to the relation between those ideas and external reality. • Ideas thus function like formal symbols in mathematics. • Some of our ideas are innate and therefore exist in the mind at birth, prior to any experience. • Other ideas are internal representations of an external reality. • We can, just by thinking about our own ideas and the operations of our own minds, with care and rigor, come to understand the mind accurately and with absolute certainty. • Nothing about the body, neither imagination nor emotion nor perception nor any detail of the biological nature of the body, need he known in order to understand the nature of the mind.  Read more at location 5062

as soon as you start to spell out what "formal operations" means in detail, you will need to use some conceptual metaphor, either mechanical or mathematical. As soon as you start characterizing "distinctive nature," you will be using the Folk Theory of Essences. When you try to flesh out "internal representation of external reality," you get some version of the Mind As Container metaphor and one of the standard metaphors for "representation."   Read more at location 5078

****  (Note:   aye)  The body of evidence that supports second-generation cognitive science requires us to reject every tenet of this Cartesian view of mind.  Read more at location 5082

Faculty Psychology  

Every Enlightenment epistemological theory is a specific elaboration and refinement of this shared cultural model of the mind.  Read more at location 5086

The Metaphorical Folk Theory of Faculty Psychology

"faculty psychology," is a model of the mind as divided into discrete "faculties."  Read more at location 5088

The Society of Mind metaphor is basic to faculty psychology. In the metaphor, the mind is conceptualized as a society whose members perform distinct, nonoverlapping tasks necessary for the successful functioning of that society.  Read more at location 5090

THE FOLK THEORY OF FACULTY PSYCHOLOGY

1. The world consists of an external realm of material objects and an internal, mental realm containing as "mental entities" ideas, sensations, feelings, and emotions. The external realm is the "objective" world; the internal realm is the "subjective" world.

2. The internal, mental realm contains a Society of Mind with a least seven members, the "faculties." Each faculty, that is, each capacity of the mind, is conceptualized as a person. The names of these people are Perception, Imagination, Feeling, Will, Understanding, Memory, and Reason.  

3. Each faculty-person has a particular personality. Depending on the nature of the personality, that person can be further conceptualized by common metaphors. For example, a methodical, reliable, dispassionate person is commonly conceptualized as a machine, while a wild, unruly, unpredictable person is commonly conceptualized as a wild animal 

4. Perception is methodical and mostly reliable. 

5. Imagination is typically a reliable craftsman, who can at unpredictable moments be playful, mischievous, or out of control. Imagination takes the sense impressions it gets from Perception and constructs from them images that represent things in the external world. 

6. Feeling is undisciplined, volatile, and sometimes out of control. It can be "aroused" by ideas originating either from outside or inside the mind. 

7. Understanding is always calm, sober, predictable, under control, and reliable. His job is to function as a judge. 

8. The assembly line so far goes like this: Perception receives sense impressions from the outside and passes them to Imagination, which combines them into images and passes them on to Understanding. Understanding judges how those images are to be assigned to concepts. Understanding thus produces propositions ("judgments") and passes them on to Reason.

9. Reason has good judgment, is cool, controlled, wise, and utterly reliable, and follows procedures explicitly. He acts as lawgiver, judge, and administrator. Reason decides what kinds of things are to be done and sets down the rules for doing them. He judges whether the others are carrying out those rules properly. 

10. Memory is usually methodical and is expected to be reliable, though he isn't always. Memory functions as a warehouse keeper. He takes items from Perception, Imagination, Understanding, and Reason and stores then for future use. 

11. Will is the only person in the society who can move the body to action. Will gets orders as to what to do from Reason and is subject to the pressures and entreaties of Feeling, which may conflict with what Reason commands. Will is free to act as he pleases, provided he is strong enough.  Read more at location 5114

This is an elaborate folk theory replete with conceptual metaphors. First, there is the Perceiving Is Receiving metaphor, through which Perception is conceptualized as a passive receiver of information. Ideas Are Objects allows ideas to be taken in by Perception, grasped and worked on by Imagination, and placed under concepts by Understanding. By virtue of Knowing Is Seeing, Understanding inspects the images and concepts to "see" how they best fit. Concepts (or alternatively Categories) are here conceptualized as containers for images. Thinking Is Object Construction on the assembly line of the mind; Imagination constructs images, and Understanding constructs propositions. Thinking Is judging, too. Understanding and Reason both act as judges of how images best fit under concepts and how concepts best fit together. In addition, Thinking Is Mathematical Calculation when Reason methodically calculates what the information given him adds up to. Feeling and Reason are both Forces, acting upon Will. Each of these individual conceptual metaphors has a long history in European culture, and they are still commonplace today. Together they constitute a significant percentage of the metaphors we have for conceptualizing various aspects of mind. Part of the genius of the folk theory is that it combines all these individual metaphors into a morality tale.  Read more at location 5118

This folk theory, made up of these metaphors and stereotypes, imposes a structure on the mind, producing a metaphorical conception of what the mind is and how it operates. For example, since each person in the Society of Mind is a separate autonomous agent, each faculty of mind is separate and autonomous. Since each person has a one specific task, each faculty of mind has one specific task. Since society is structured hierarchically with an executive giving orders, so too the mind has a hierarchical structure and an executive in control. Just as a society has unruly and uncontrollable individuals, so there are specific isolatable faculties of the mind that can be unruly and uncontrollable. Just as a well-ordered society should not be governed by people out of control, so a properly functioning mind should be governed in a calm, rational, methodical manner.  Read more at location 5126

****  Though we now have overwhelming evidence that the mind does not work like this, the model is still used. We know that reason and emotion go hand in hand, with reason possible only if emotion is present (B1, Damasio 1994). But most people still believe that emotion disrupts reason, and models of reasoning, planning, problem solving, and rational action do not include emotion.  Read more at location 5141

Eventually it may be possible to revise or replace this folk theory, but we will only be able to replace it with still other metaphors. Like time, events, and causation, the mind can only be comprehended metaphorically.   Read more at location 5149

Chapter 20. Kantian morality

Kant believed that he had shown how absolute, universally binding moral principles can be derived from the essence of what he called "pure practical reason." But if, as we have argued, there is no such thing as "pure reason," then Kant must have actually been doing something quite different from unpacking the essence of pure practical reason. What he was doing, we shall argue, was brilliantly working out the entailments of a close-knit cluster of conceptual metaphors that he inherited from Western philosophy and the Judeo-Christian moral tradition.  Read more at location 5151

Kant derives all morality as a version of Strict Father family morality.  Read more at location 5157

he would have vehemently denied the metaphorical character of morality, at least at the level of the fundamental moral principles he claimed to have identified. Nonetheless, as we will see, his moral theory does not reveal the a priori rational foundations of a universal morality. Rather, it is a working out of the logic of a small set of conceptual metaphors that define mainstream Western morality and that are based on the Strict Father model of the family.   Read more at location 5159

Kant's conceptual system reveals that his moral theory derives from the following sources: 1. The Folk Theory of Essences 2. Strict Father family morality 3. The Society of Mind metaphor 4. The Family of Man metaphor   Read more at location 5163

Kant developed his most striking and original moral doctrines, for example:

• Morality must be based on pure reason alone.

• The source of morality is our capacity to give moral laws to ourselves.

• All moral laws are universally binding.

• We have an absolute duty to treat rational creatures as ends-in-themselves and never as means only.

• Morality can consist only of categorical imperatives such as "Act only on that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law."   Read more at location 5165

Kant's Strict Father Morality  

Kant's moral theory is, its conceptual structure is actually Strict Father family morality (1) tied to rationality by faculty psychology, with Reason playing the role of the Strict Father, and (2) universalized to all human beings via the Family of Man metaphor.  Read more at location 5174

Reason as a Strict Father in the Society of Mind Metaphor  

****  Reason, which governs the Society of Mind and is responsible for its well-being, is a moral authority; it knows what is best for the society as a whole and has the duty to issue directives to the members of the society specifying what each needs to do to ensure the well-being of the community. Correspondingly, it is the duty of other community members to obey the dictates of Reason. Will, who is responsible for what the body does, has a moral obligation to obey the commands of Reason. Passion, who does not typically act morally and who is Reason's antagonist, struggles with Reason over the control of Will. To resist Passion, Will must be strong. This requires that Will be disciplined, and it is the duty of Reason to do everything it can to provide that discipline.   Read more at location 5179

THE REASON As STRICT FATHER METAPHOR   Read more at location 5185

It is only by being rational, by obeying the dictates of Reason, that you become free-autonomous-and independent of any alien influence, including that of your own body. This is the epitome of rationalism in morality.  Read more at location 5198

The Role of the Folk Theory of Essences  

Kant accepted the Folk Theory of Essences as an obvious truth. The essence of human beings was, of course, the capacity for Reason. Since an essence is the same for all the members of the category defined by that essence, it follows that all human beings have the same capacity for Reason; that is, we all have the same Reason, and so Reason is universal. Since all human minds were conceptualized in the Enlightenment via the Society of Mind metaphor, Reason, in that metaphor, is therefore Universal Reason. And since Reason, in that metaphor, is the author of moral precepts, those moral precepts must be universal-Universal Moral Laws!   Read more at location 5202

The Family of Man Metaphor  

THE FAMILY OF MAN METAPHOR

Family → Humankind

Each Child → Each Human Being Other 

For Kant, the Family of Man is a Strict Father family. The universal moral laws are the precepts a strict father would give.  Read more at location 5219

Universal Morality as Strict Father Morality  

THE STRICT FATHER FAMILY OF MAN METAPHOR  

Father → Reason

Father → Moral Authority

Therefore, Moral Authority → Reason According to the Folk Theory of Essences, Reason is Universal Reason.

Therefore, Moral Authority → Universal Reason  

Kantian Morality  

In essence, what Kant does is to replace God's Reason with an equally transcendent Universal Reason possessed by all people. God's commandments, as moral laws, are thus transformed into the absolute moral laws issued by Universal Reason. Christianity's split of the self into soul and body is carried directly over into the Kantian picture as a split between our rational and bodily natures. The strength of will necessary to follow God's commandments translates as the strength of will necessary to overcome the passions of the body, to follow Reason, and thus to do one's ethical duty. Moral virtue is moral strength.   Read more at location 5249

Moral Authority  

Kant's moral theory, which has three major doctrines concerning moral authority. First, the ultimate Moral Authority is Reason. Second, for Reason to be a moral authority it must be "pure," that is, free of any bodily taint. Third, Reason can be a moral authority only if it is universal.  Read more at location 5261