Contributions of embodied realism to ontological questions
This article fortuitously popped up in my email this morning, as we discussed this topic in our online discussion yesterday. An excerpt from the introduction will explain its relevance.
“Emancipation is very much about reducing what Bhaskar calls the demi-real–beliefs and conceptions that do not correspond well with reality. […] It is not enough to point out the demi-real or systemic biases in reason. Ameliorating demi-reality involves identifying its sources, i.e. the causal and structural mechanisms that produce it. […] In this chapter I draw on trends in cognitive science-based embodied philosophy that reveal some of the structural sources of the demi-real. I draw primarily from Lakoff and Johnson’s embodied realism. […] The demi-real involves not just erroneous ideas but an erroneous certainty in ideas. “
I like much of what this article is saying, such as: “integral theory encompass hard science, social science, ethics, and spirituality in their spacious meta-theoretical purview” “validity is graded such that some claims are stronger than others” “fully acknowledge that there are epistemic limitations and fallibilities to all human knowledge and propositions, “the map is not the territory,” “everyone is at least partially right” “the world begins by making splits, then drawing boundaries, then solidifying these boundaries. Then we fool ourselves into believing what we have made ourselves see” “Embodied Realism has a strong resonance with pragmatism” “the main task of… Read more »
Keep in mind that the article is putting its own spin on Lakoff. In Lakoff’s response to Pinker he notes that not everything is metaphorical. E.g.: “Chapter twelve of Metaphors We Live By discussed the non-metaphorical grounding of conceptual systems. Chapter two of More Than Cool Reason begins with a section on “What is not metaphorical.” Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things goes through 373 pages of non-metaphorical conceptual analysis before bringing up examples of metaphorical thought. And Mark Johnson and myself, in Philosophy in the Flesh (see chapter three) survey the basic mechanisms of thought, beginning with the non-metaphorical ones… Read more »
I think it is better to say that we think in intuitions than in metaphors. A metaphor is a certain use of intuition – a metaphor relies on intuiting the similarities between a familiar object and an unfamiliar one, then using the similarities to project some of your pre-developed understanding of the familiar object onto the unfamiliar object, and indicating the qualities you’re projecting from one to the other in the metaphor. To say “she swims like a fish” does not mean she actually swims like a fish, it means she swims remarkably well, and that’s about all it says. Metaphors are great shortcuts in understanding and communication, but intuition forms… Read more »
What you’re calling intuition is pretty much what Lakoff and company call those basic categories and image schema that do pretty much what you’re describing as “pre-developed understanding […] which basically perceives similarities and differences between objects.” As we say in coal-speak: same difference.
So when you say “I think it is better to say” I say that’s fine for you. I think it is better to say it in the terms of empirical cognitive science.