Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason : How Our Bodies Give Rise to Understanding

Mark Johnson is one of the great thinkers of our time on how the body shapes the mind. This book brings together a selection of essays from the past two decades that build a powerful argument that any scientifically and philosophically satisfactory view of mind and thought must ultimately explain how bodily perception and action give rise to cognition, meaning, language, action, and values. A brief account of Johnson’s own intellectual journey, through which we track some of the most important discoveries in the field over the past forty years, sets the stage. Subsequent chapters set out Johnson’s important role in embodied cognition theory, including his cofounding (with George Lakoff) of conceptual metaphor theory and, later, their theory of bodily structures and processes that underlie all meaning, conceptualization, and reasoning. A detailed account of how meaning arises from our physical engagement with our environments provides the basis for a nondualistic, nonreductive view of mind that he sees as most congruous with the latest cognitive science. A concluding section explores the implications of our embodiment for our understanding of knowledge, reason, and truth. The resulting book will be essential for all philosophers dealing with mind, thought, and language. Mark Johnson is one of the great thinker of our time on how the body shapes the mind. This book brings together a selection of essays from the past two decades to argue for the central importance of our bodies in everything we experience, mean, think, say, value, and do. This embodied conception of mind shows how meaning and thought are profoundly shaped and constituted by the nature of our bodily perception, action, and feeling. In short, Johnson convincingly argues that it is impossible to understand any of the issues that are so dear to philosophy without a deep and detailed understanding of how our embodiment gives rise to experience, meaning, and thought. Johnson begins with ideas that were anticipated, in part, in the writings of American pragmatist John Dewey, and supplies crucial details from important scientific and philosophical developments that take us beyond what Dewey could provide in his time. By constructing a positive account of human meaning-making that draws on the cognitive science of the embodied mind, Johnson's account runs directly counter to some of the fundamental assumptions in analytic philosophy and early cognitive science of the last seventy-five years. Concluding with a rich exploration of the implications of our embodiment for our understanding of knowledge, reason, and truth, Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason is indispensable to all philosophers dealing with mind, thought, and language. -- from back cover Introduction: bringing the body to mind -- Cognitive science and Dewey's theory of mind, thought, and language -- Cowboy bill rides herd on the range of consciousness -- We are live creatures: embodiment, American pragmatism, and the cognitive organism / Mark Johnson and Tim Rohrer -- The meaning of the body -- The philosophical significance of image schemas -- Action, embodied meaning, and thought -- Knowing through the body -- Embodied realism and truth incarnate -- Why the body matters