14 june 2000
from peter jones, sheffield hallam university
dear colleagues
well this is developing into a really fascinating discussion. i've been
thinking about some of the earlier comments and have a couple of responses
below. i'll hold off for a while on the general issues of dialectics and so on
because paul's and jay's contributions are still developing on those themes.
but i wanted to return to points made by elisa (i'm still working on points
made by judy and other issues raised by jay).
1) On 7 june elisa made the following comment:
"But it seems that what Lakoff is trying to do is to deal with semantic
processes, not scientific thinking. So it is unjust to blame him for not doing
what he didn't say he would be doing in the first place. I'm not sure Lakoff
would deny that scientific thinking should be developed with a non-prototypical
reasoning. But when we observe the "mental activity" of adults, specially when
adults use language in daily, ordinary circunstances, we can observe
"prototypical effects". But those prototypical effects are not the way
"concepts" are structured, they are peripheral language effects, not core
classical concepts. Now, if you want to reserve the word "cognition" to
scientific thinking, and avoid it when talking about other forms of mental
activities, such as semantics ... this is only a matter of semantics !!! "
This is a very good point which i think drives to the heart of the matter. As
elisa phrases it, it does indeed seem to be a quibble over terminology and only
that. And if it is then there is, as she suggests, nothing to get excited
about, or even to discuss. But in fact i think (i hope) it is not a question
just of 'semantics' here, but about the philosophical (and scientific) problems
at stake between the 'embodied realism' of lakoff et al and the materialism of
ilyenkov, vygotsky, et al. ilyenkov himself looks in some detail at the history
of philosophical discussion on the question of cognition (and how the
relationship between concept and word meaning has been seen in different
philosophical traditions) (i'm referring mainly to his 'dialectics of the
abstract and the concrete in marxs capital). actually, lakoff himself (and his
close associate mark johnson) are well aware of the 'terminological' dimension
at issue here. it is discussed in lakoff's earlier 'women, fire and dangerous
things' as well as in 'philosophy in the flesh'. i quote from the latter: p 11
'All aspects of thought and language, conscious or unconscious, are thus
cognitive' and by cognitive is meant 'any kind of mental operation or structure
that can be studied in precise terms'. The authors then comment (p
12):'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.Morever, cognitive meaning is seen as truth-conditional meaning,
that is, meaning defined not internally in the mind or body, but by reference
to things in the external world. Most of what we will be calling the cognitive
unconscious is thus for many philosophers not considered cognitive at all'. so
for lakoff and johnson, cognition is anything happening in the head (conscious
or unconscious) which 'can be studied in a precise manner' (what that means i
leave to your imagination), while for materialism cognition, as L&J say, and as
i argue in the paper, is the process of developing objective knowledge. ok -
back to elisa's question now. what if L&J say ok you're talking about
scientific cognition only but we're talking about cognition more generally. to
which we could respond: well what do you mean by scientific cognition then? do
you accept that we can talk about developing knowledge (which often contradicts
our so-called basic level categorization and associated prototype effects)
which corresponds (albeit approximately, within certain limits) to the 'logic'
of phenomena and their interrelations as they exist objectively, independently
of our knowledge of them? to which the 'embodied' answer is: no we don't accept
this objectivist position. what does the embodied mind position understand by
scientific thinking then? this is discussed in lakoff's earlier work which i
quote on p276 of the paper, and it has to do with the conformity of ideas not
to the real world (which is the unacceptable objectivist and god's eye view
position) but their conformity to the standards of objectivity and correctness
which are supplied by the scientific community. stable scientific truths are
those accepted (over certain periods of time presumably) by scientists. i don't
need to attack this view here, as i know i'll be pushing at an open door!
(charles tolman has written on this though but i can't remember the reference).
the 'embodied' understanding of truth is just as nicely circular (and
therefore, in my view, hopeless). thus L&J define 'embodied truth' in the
following way (their page 106); 'A person takes a sentence as 'true' of a
situation if what he or she understands the sentence as expressing accords with
what he or she understands the situation to be'. hmm ...
anyway, where does this all this leave us on this issue? it means that the
embodied view of cognitive does not and cannot in principle distinguish between
thinking in the sense of something ('precise') going on in your head, whatever
it is, and the process (in thought) of solving a real problem, of discovering
something about the world, of struggling to find an idea, a concept which
corresponds to the objective logic of movement and possibilities of the real
world process (including the social process). since it is the so-called basic
level categories (derived via sensori-motor processes and perception) which
exemplify the best fit between mind and world, the development of scientific
abstractions can in no way get us closer to that world (otherwise this would be
the dreaded objectivism) and indeed, by definition, can only take us further
away from the 'best examples of knowledge'. a materialist view, i think,
obliges us to distinguish between the semantic processes plus all kinds of
other stuff which might happen in our heads (or when we communicate with one
another) and cognition in the sense of developing objective knowledge
(discovering true things about the world). so, in summary, i would say that
what appears to be a terminological disagreement is actually a fundamental
division between a philosophy which either denies or is thoroughly sceptical
about the possibility of objective knowledge, and a philosophy which sees the
possibility of objective knowledge as fundamental to human practice and to any
rational philosophy or science.
2) elisa's second point (post 8 june) is as follows:
I don't know if I grasp Lakoff's theory correctly, specially its
relation to epistemology. But it seems a good idea to understand that knowledge
- if you are an embodied being - can only be obtained through the lenses of
your embodiment. Like embodiment is something that causes a form of distortion
... or what you consider knowledge is knowledge only related to your embodiment
(which maybe is not the same thing as the first part of this sentence). So all
knowledge is considered knowledge because you are embodied in this way and not
in the other way. If lions could reason and talk, what would be knowledge for
a lion would be different from what is knowledge for a human being.
again, i think this is a crucial point and is taken up later by jay as the
factorization problem. it does indeed seem to be a good idea to accept the
general premise that knowledge comes from our bodily actions and interactions
in and with the world. otherwise we have mysticism. but by the same token, if
we accept that we are part of the same world, and a part of the same system of
dynamic interaction as the things in the world which we rely on for our
survival and prosperity then it had better be the case that the knowledge which
guides our actions in the world should relate not only to our embodiment, but
to the things in the world which we need. and we could go further: it had
better be the case that we can in principle (if not always in practice, and
often after very long experience) distinguish between what belongs to our
bodies (and their 'distorting effects' on our knowledge) and what belongs to
the other bodies which we need for our survival. if i look out of the window
and see two trees, then it could be that my embodiment (my tiredness or my
drunkenness) is causing a form of distortion: maybe there is only one tree and
i'm seeing double, or maybe there are two trees, or maybe there aren't any
trees and i'm hallucinating. the question is: is it in principle ever possible
to distinguish between these three options? can we never, in principle, say
that such and such is the case, whatever the state of my body? does the
existence of trees, or their precise quantity, merge inextricably and
indissolubly with the state of my body such that we can never separate out
these different 'contributions' to my experience? i suggest that we can do this
in principle, and do it in fact, in practice, every single second of our lives
and that if it were not possible then all human (and indeed sentient) life
would cease to exist! for the tree problem - i go outside and have a feel, or
ask somebody else what they see. if my relations with the world remain purely
contemplative i can never solve the 'factorization' problem. but human
relations with the world are primarily practical and not contemplative. another
example: i pick up a rock and it feels heavy. i pick up another rock and it
feels heavier than the first. my sensation of heaviness of course belongs to me
(the rocks are quite indifferent to the effects they cause in me). but does the
difference in sensation (one heavier than the other) correspond to any
objective properties or relations in the rocks independently of my sensation?
it could be that after picking up the first one, my muscles are tired so the
second one feels heavier, but really isn't. so maybe i go to bed, wake up
refreshed and repeat the experiment with the rocks the other way around, or ask
a friend to do it, or ask plenty of people to do it. if i 'factor out' in this
way all possible tiredness effects etc i'm left with something that belongs to
the rocks and not to me: one is heavier than the other. if i put both of them
on soft sand, one causes a deeper indentation etc. the property that i
experience corresponds to the causal interconnection between things independent
of my experience. these are simple cases, but the basic point is there: since
knowledge comes from practice, whether knowledge corresponds to its object or
not is a practical question. in practice, through our interactions and through
an understanding of these interactions, we do (and must) distinguish between
what is out there independently of us and the 'distorting effects' our bodies
impose (as i discuss in the paper). indeed, this is to misconstrue the process
i think. we know things not despite of but because of these 'distorting
effects', ie because in the course of acting together on and with things we
experience the causal properties of things on us. the embodied approach (and
dynamic systems interactional approach as discussed by jay) make much of our
experiences as being 'interactional' and imply that this property is a barrier
to objective knowledge. but all things in nature are interactional. the causal
powers, the lawgoverned dynamic etc of all things are revealed precisely in
their interactions with other things. i wonder how other colleagues see this
issue?
with apologies for the long messaeg
best wishes to all
Peter
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