Re: Lakoff & Johnson, embodied cognition, social selves

Phil Graham (pw.graham who-is-at student.qut.edu.au)
Sun, 31 Oct 1999 11:36:35 +1100

Paul,

I also tend to agree with Peter, perhaps for different reasons than you,
perhaps not. I think you may have misinterpreted what I was saying, which
was mostly this: I was disappointed that "Philosophy in the flesh" (L&J,
1999) uses ideas that already contained possibilities for reconciling 'The
embodied mind" (Varela Thompson & Rosch, 1995) with socially oriented
theorising about the relationship between thought and language (in fact
they were already socio-biological models of cognition). L&J have worked
very hard to elide these possibilities, which is in itself extremely
ideological [I know, I know: "what isn't?"]. To me, though, it seems like
an outright hijack of possibilities that had taken 20 years or longer for
people associated with Maturana and Varela (eg N. Luhmann) to develop. I
found this to be a very disappointing aspect of the book.

Furthermore, L&J seem to assume, not merely that the social is
coincidental, but that the body is a mediating appendage for the _brain_
where thought is concerned, which is also antithetical to earlier efforts
into theorising the embodied mind - ie as a whole-of-body, socially,
environmentally, and historically mediated _process_. Aristotle located the
centre of thought in the stomach, whereas CL and AI situate all thought in
"the brain" - as do most people these days - as if the brain did or could
think all by itself. In L&J, the body appears as a mediating artefact which
the brain "watches" and relates to all other things. Still too dualist for
me - the curse of CL, AI, etc, I suppose. Are we to assume that Aristotle
was completely loopy for suggesting that the centre of thought was the
stomach? Or, might we assume that different dominant media: oral vs
written, for instance, give different perceptions of what thinking "is" and
where it is "situated" in the body. I dunno.

I haven't read "Metaphors we live by" very closely, but I agree that there
are some tools that AI & CL have developed that might be useful (I think
Pinker's 1994 work is especially interesting in this respect). There is
certainly room for a dialogue, but the socios seem far more willing to do
this than do the CLs (which is, again, why I found L&J's work
disappointing). But there are other socially oriented models that have
already gone a long way towards working these things out, like Halliday's
(1993) "language in a changing world", for instance.

On the matter of objective truth: I hope you didn't think I was putting
forward a "strong school" argument for truth relativism. I wasn't and I
wouldn't. Even the claim that "all truth is relative", culturally or
otherwise, and that therefore "no objective truth can be known", is an
enormous and totalising _truth claim_ that ignores some of the excellent
insights into socially, environmentally, co-ontogenously mediated model of
cognition offered by the likes of Varela et al (see especially the chapters
on colour and language). The "there is no objective truth" claim is merely
a variant on Zeno's paradox ("All Cretan's are liars"). If the statement's
true, then it's false. What such paradoxes thrive on is the paradoxical
nature of language (and thus thought) itself, not the state of the "world
as it is", external to what we do. Which leads me to an important and
useful distinction that Varela makes (originally with Maturana eg 1980,
1987): the notion of "consensual domains".

Your choice of the periodic table is an excellent example of one type of
description specific to the consensual domain of physics. Descriptions of
"things that aren't human", or better, "things that aren't living", are
much easier to make reliable (ie verifiable) truth claims about (at a
certain level) than are, for instance, descriptions about "things that
people think", or the way they think, feel, or etc. What is a valid
description of what uranium "is" (or is "made" of) is much easier to
establish than, say, the _meaning_ of uranium for a particular group (the
anti-nuclear lobby, for instance). But these descriptions are only valid
for two entirely different consensual domains. Of course, these domains are
also interdependent and are not in the least mutually exclusive (eg the
anti nuclear lobby also includes physicists). To put it far too broadly,
the former is a description of physical characteristics valid for the field
of physics (a consensual domain with its own way of describing the world),
the other is a description of ... a description, or a judgement, or an
attitude, or some other intangible, socially and historically specific set
of position-takings that have their social basis in language and emotion.

Anyway ... I'm not sure I can begin to explain myself in under 10,000
words, which may indicate that my thoughts probably aren't clear enough.
Perhaps they are entirely wrong-headed. I'm prepared to accept that. But,
in short, I don't like the way L&J have used the embodied mind
(metaphorically?), and then gone on to describe the embodied _brain_, which
is a totally different "thing" altogether (and tautological). Perhaps
that's just a matter of taste. But I'd like L&J, using their philosophy, to
explain the following conversation that I had with my 6 y.o. son this
morning (he has an unusual turn of phrase and comes out with such language
as: "Hey! Who dressed me naked?" - which he said, in a dreadfully incensed
tone, upon waking up in his underwear on a morning after he fell asleep on
a really hot night, got carried off to bed and undressed).

Context: House is unusually quiet. I decide to ask what's happening and
call out to Matt down the hall -

Me: "What are you doing?"
Matt: "Nothing!"
Me: "Whaddya mean nothing?"
Matt: "_Nothing_ nothing. That's the sort of nothing I mean"

What is the experience that relates to a statement like this and allows it
to make sense? I would say: only the social experience of language. From
L&J's perspective, "nothing" - as something someone is doing - would be a
metaphor for .... what? Nothing? As for "_Nothing_ nothing", a specific
"type" of nothing, ... gads! Where do we start to explain that?!

I think that "sign systems" are an unnecessary insertion into theorising
about social cognition (which is necessarily embodied by people). A sign
system, by its very position in language, appears as an autonomous system
external to people. I'm not comfortable with this, and I tend to think that
it, too, is another paradox of language. It might be a useful concept for
talking about writing, film, painting, film, and so on (viz. as sign
systems people make to "stand for" certain experiences, things, processes),
but Occam's razor ought to apply. I think that where embodied thought and
language are concerned, the notion of the "sign" becomes a confusing and
unnecessary insertion, especially considering that the "sign" appears in
language as a description of something that exists outside "for" language
and mind to interpret, and in other cases, as a system independent of
language altogether. Perhaps it's just another paradox; perhaps another
artefact of an advanced state of alienation where all ideas, emotions,
actions, and thoughts now appear as "things" external to social processes,
rather than as - inalienably - socially and materially constituted and
embedded processes that form an historical and social whole.

I also highly recommend Pete Jones's papers.

regards,
Phil

Phil Graham
p.graham who-is-at qut.edu.au
http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/8314/index.html