Why cognitive linguistics requires embodied realism

Abstract

Why cognitive linguistics requires embodied realism MARK JOHNSON and GEORGE LAKOFF In our book Metaphors We Live By (1980), we presented evidence that taking the existence of conceptual metaphor seriously would require a massive rethinking of many foundational assumptions in the Western philosophical tradition concerning meaning, conceptualization, reason, knowledge, truth, and language. In the twenty years between that book and Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), a mushrooming body of additional empirical evidence from linguistics, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and anthropology became available, which not only reinforced our original claims about the pervasive, constitutive nature of conceptual metaphor, but also revealed implications for traditional philosophy that were even more devastating than we at first imagined. What we saw, especially in light of sweeping, rapid developments in cognitive neuroscience, was that meaning is grounded in our sensorimotor experience and that this embodied meaning was extended, via imaginative mechanisms such as conceptual metaphor, metonymy, radial categories, and various forms of conceptual blending, to shape abstract conceptu- alization and reasoning. What the empirical evidence suggests to us is that an embodied account of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and value is absolutely necessary for an adequate understanding of human cognition and language. You cannot simply peel off a theory of conceptual metaphor from its grounding in embodied meaning and thought. You cannot give an adequate account of conceptual metaphor and other imaginative structures of understanding without recognizing some form of embodied realism. The reasons are discussed at length in Philosophy in the Flesh (1999: chapters 3, 4, and appendix). As Grady (1997) and Johnson (1997) have ( jointly) observed, there is a system of hundreds of primary conceptual metaphors that we all learn by the age of four or earlier on the basis of ‘‘conflations’’ in our experience—cases where source and target domains are coactive in our experience. For example, verticality and quantity are coactive whenever we pour juice into a glass or pile up objects. Cognitive Linguistics 13–3 (2002), 245–263 # Walter de Gruyter - 10.1515/cogl.2002.016 Downloaded from PubFactory at 08/07/2016 11:26:38PM via University of California - Berkeley

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