Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought
George Lakoff
Top 10 Best Quotes
“We categorize as we do because we have the brains and bodies we have and because we interact in the world as we do.”
“The problem with classical disembodied scientific realism is that it takes two intertwined and inseparable dimensions of all experience - the awareness of the experiencing organism and the stable entities and structures it encounters - and erects them as separate and distinct entities called subjects and objects. What disembodied realism ... misses is that, as embodied, imaginative creatures, we never were separated or divorced from reality in the first place. What has always made science possible is our embodiment, not our transcendence of it, and our imagination, not our avoidance of it.”
“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.”
“Cognitive science has something of enormous importance to contribute to human freedom: the ability to learn what our unconscious conceptual systems are like and how our cognitive unconscious functions. If we do not realize that most of our thought is unconscious and that we think metaphorically, we will indeed be slaves to the cognitive unconscious. Paradoxically, the assumption that we have a radically autonomous rationality as traditionally conceived actually limits our rational autonomy. It condemns us to cognitive slavery - to an unaware and uncritical dependence on our unconscious metaphors. To maximize what conceptual freedom we can have, we must be able to see through and move beyond philosophies that deny the existence of an embodied cognitive unconscious that governs most of our mental lives.”
“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. One reason there is so much argumentation across philosophical theories is that different philosophers have chosen different metaphors as the "right" one, ignoring or taking as misleading all other commonplace metaphorical structurings of the concept. Philosophers have done this because they assume that a concept must have one and only one logic. But the cognitive reality is that our concepts have multiple metaphorical structurings.”
“Any truth must be in a humanly conceptualized and understandable form if it is to be a truth for us. If it's not a truth for us, how can we make sense of its being a truth at all?”
“...there is no real person whose embodiment plays no role in meaning, whose meaning is purely objective and defined by the external world, and whose language can fit the external world with no significant role played by mind, brain, or body. Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies. Because a vast range of our concepts are metaphorical, meaning is not entirely literal and the classical correspondence theory of truth is false.”
“There is no such thing as a computational person, whose mind is like computer software, able to work on any suitable computer or neural hardware whose mind somehow derives meaning from taking meaningless symbols as input, manipulating them by rule, and giving meaningless symbols as output. 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.”
“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. Moreover, human language is not a totally genetic innovation. Rather, central aspects of language arise evolutionarily from sensory, motor, and other neural systems that are present in "lower" animals.”
“The properties of mind are not purely mental: They are shaped in crucial ways by the body and brain and how the body can function in everyday life. The embodied mind is thus very much of this world. Our flesh is inseparable from what Merleau-Ponty called the "flesh of the world" and what David Abram refers to as "the-more-than-human-world." Our body is intimately tied to what we walk on, sit on, touch, taste, smell, see, breathe, and move within. Our corporeality is part of the corporeality of the world.”
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Book Keywords:
metaphysics, concept, embodiment, nature-of-theory, cognitive-unconscious, thought, conceptualization, metaphors, nature-of-reason, imagination, embodied-realism, illusion, relational-identity, irony, philosophy, self-knowledge, autonomy, embodied-mind, logic, situated-cognition, mind-world-relation, relativism, mind, categorization, meaning, correspondence, cognitive-science, limitation, freedom, objectivity, truth, holism, reason, metaphor, limits, body, science
