Review: [Untitled] Reviewed Work(s): The Body in the Mind--The Bodily Basis of Meaning Imagination and Reason. by Mark Johnson Keith Gunderson Noûs, Vol. 26, No. 1. (Mar., 1992), pp. 110-113. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0029-4624%28199203%2926%3A1%3C110%3ATBITMB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-E Noûs is currently published by Blackwell Publishing.
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Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind - The Bodily Basis of Meaning Imagination and Reason (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press), xxxviii + 233 pp., $27.50.
KEITH GUNDERSON University of Minnesota This is both a grouse about the status of current theories of meaning and reason, and a sketch of a novel approach designed to accommodate what they allegedly ignore or supposedly can't handle. We are told in the Introduction that Johnson's account of imagination will suggest a central role for what are called (with echoes of both Kant and Ulric Neisser) "image schematic structures" in our makings of meaning and inferences. These are said to be apparently nonpropositional and analog in nature, as well as embodied and linked to patterns of perceptual interactions and motor programs that parse and interpret our experience. Both Preface and Introduction usefully combine to provide the motivation and set the stage for Johnson's positive theory in the following way. There is, it is claimed, an influential "offending cluster of assumptions" pertaining to meaning and reason which ignore the role of imagination in our cognitive enterprises. The cluster is called "Objectivism." Most generally stated the world is pictured as consisting of objects with properties which stand in various relationships to each other independent of human minds. It suggests one correct "God's-Eye-View" of the whole shebang, and a rational structure to reality, which correct reason reflects. This general outlook pops up in specific and sophisticated ways in a rich variety of extant approaches to meaning and rationality. These in turn dominate contemporary cognitive science, which lends a sense of urgency to Johnson's diagnosis and prescriptions. The idea that meaning is an abstract relation between symbolic representations and objective reality, or that concepts and rationality are essentially "disembodied" and detached from "subjective processes in the reasoner's mind" are just a couple of examples of Objectivism's varied manifestations. To help appreciate how big the bullseye really is in the target of Johnson's complaint, it should be added that Frege, model-theoretic semantics, situation semantics, and Davidsonian semantics are all billed as having some ring of Objectivism to them. During the last decade, according to Johnson, trenchant objections of both logical and empirical sorts have been raised to Objectivism. Putnam is credited with forcefully demonstrating that the very nature of meaning mitigates against attempts to provide a semantics for abstract symbols "via their direct and unmediated correspondence to the world, or any model of it ..." And empirical evidence against the Objectivist outlook is said to derive from studies in a number of disciplines where human understanding is implicated in accounts of meaning and reason, e'.g. in research involving topics such as categorization, the framing of concepts, metaphor, polysemy, et al. It is against this backdrop that Johnson proceeds to develop his view that understanding plays a role in all meaning and "typically involves image-schematic structures of imagination that are extended and figuratively elaborated as abstract structures of meaning and patterns of thought." (p.xxxvi) His epigram for the project is "putting the body back in the mind." Chapter 1, The Need for a Richer Account of Meaning and Reason has as a subheading "An Embodied, Nonpropositional Dimension of Meaning." Johnson describes
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his inquiry into meaning as "nontraditional" and means thereby to focus on aspects of it associated with what he calls an image schema, which is said to function "somewhat like the abstract structure of an image, and thereby connects up a vast range of different experiences that manifest this same recumng structure." A simple example of the latter is the COMPULSIVE FORCE schema. In Chapter 1. he represents its basic structure visually with the following figure:
Figure 1. Compulsion Such schema actually exist as a "continuous, analog pattern" in various of our perceptual and cognitive experiences (e.g. seeing a jet plane forced down on the runway or the comprehension of forces acting on continental plates, etc.). The schema itself is not to be identified with any mental picture or concrete image, however, but is viewed as an abstract pattern that might occur in them or in other perceptions or events. Such image schematic-structures are claimed to be nonpropositional except in a very special sense "as a continuous, analog pattern of experience or understanding, with sufficient internal structure to permit inferences." These structures emerge from our embodiment. They in turn provide a basis for metaphorical projections crucial to our reasonings. For example, the belief that physical appearance (or sexual appearance) is a physical force may be construed as ultimately derived from out (preconceptual) bodily experiences of force. Chapter 2. The Emergence of Meaning through Schematic Structure, Chapter 3. Gestalt Structure as a Constraint on Meaning, Chapter 4. Metaphorical Projections of Image Schemata, and Chapter 5. How Schemata Constrain Meaning, Understanding, and Rationality, all contribute to filling in the details and exploring the ramifications of how we move from preconceptual embodied experiences-the patterns of which manifest themselves in essentially nonpropositional image-schemata-to irreducibly metaphorical projections which inform our beliefs and reasonings including all our linguistic behavior. (I cannot reconstruct the nuances of this crucial conceptual journey here; suffice it to say it is non-arbitrary and replete with supportive examples and illustrations.) Chapter 6. is entitled Toward a Theory of Imagination and Chapter 7 is On the Nature of Meaning. Chapter 8, the finale, is called "All This, and Realism, Too!" where the realism deemed compatible with Johnson's non-Objectivism has overtones of Putnam's "internal" realism. Chapter 6. contains some snippets on Plato, Aristotle, and Hobbes, and a comparatively lengthy interpretation of Kant's account of imagination. It is Kant's theory which has most influenced Johnson, and the shortcomings of which he views his own approach as canying us beyond. In Chapter 7. it is Searle's account of meaning as derived intentionality and his approach to context-dependency (and the role of "the Background") which Johnson focuses on. He tells us what he likes about it--e.g. that all meaning involves intentionality-and, again, how he sees his own theory as taking us beyond it. Briefly: Johnson argues that "the so-callCd Background is that part of meaning not focused on in a given intentional act" whereas Searle denies that the Background is part of meaning because it is not intentional and does not have conditions of satisfaction. The above is a mere outline of an outline of Johnson's fascinating study. It is a book of many dimensions, and though somewhat eclectic, hangs together as a general and generally novel approach to the sizeable subjects it tackles. The freshness and surprise in the work lies mainly in the pivotal role it accords imagination in our varied attempts to
make sense out of experience and reasonings about reality. I initially thought that the critique of so-called Objectivism could be detached from the positive theory that is the main thrust of the work, in the same way that, for example Berkley's positive metaphysical theory could be detached from his critique of Locke's doctrine of general abstract ideas. In other words, the question of whether there is "one correct God's-EyeView" about what the world is really like seems at first blush to be an issue (or cluster of issues) rather remote from a theory about how embodied image schemata constrain our meanings and inferences along the lines suggested by Johnson. But after the more specific commitments concerning approaches to meaning and reason subsumed under the Objectivist label are spelled out in the book's unfolding, it is possible to see that, indeed, most of these are at loggersheads with the theory he formulates. (I am not, however, convinced that his quarrel with Searle amounts to much more than a benign proposal to relabel some underlying causes of meaning as themselves part of meaning.) Johnson may at times seem to take on more competition than he needs to, but it provides the work with some of its excitements. Nevertheless its major contributions derive from his account in Chapters 2-6 of image schemata and their role in our cognitive life. Image schemata are said to have a kinesthetic character, and, though frequently visual, are not restricted to any one perceptual modality. They are all gestalt structures which gather together various features of our experience and impinge on our inferences. Johnson employs diagrams to aid us in discerning their structural features and internal relationships. (Seven different force structures are discussed in Chapter 3.) Given my own penchant for imagistic thinking-I love my Macintosh mouse and icons-I found these reader friendly, though, again, Johnson cautions us that embodied schemata are not themselves just rich images or mental pictures. They operate at a level in between these and abstract propositional structures. "A schema consists of a small number of parts and relations, by virtue of which it can structure indefinitely many perceptions, images, and events." (p. 29) This taxonomy is a flashback to Kant. Johnson's exegesis of Kant's account of imagination in Chapter 6. and the purported differences Kant etched between concept and schema and image and physical object struck me as excellent. It is the clearest and most interesting interpretation of Kant's tantalizing but infuriatingly intractable account of imagination that I have read. Johnson's characterization of how his own theory takes us beyond Kant, however, I found somewhat less than lucid. It turns on a denial of Kant's presumed gap between understanding, imagination, and sensation. I thought that Kant believed that for analytical purposes it was useful to treat these as separate, but that as realized in us they are inextricably intertwined, and that his dictum concerning the emptiness of our concepts without sensations (or intuition) and the blindness of the latter without the former was meant to epitomize their embodied unification made possible by schemata in the tow of the imagination. Nevertheless by the time we get to Chapter 6. Johnson has already given Kant's distinctions uses that he (Kant) could not have envisioned, and enlivened our interest in them through associations (some metaphorical?!) with contemporary work in cognitive psychology and linguistics. (Neisser, Pylyshyn, Shepard'and Meltzer, Schank and Abelson, Rumelhart, and co-author with Johnson of this book's precursor, Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff, are a few of the names associated with that work.)
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The Body in the Mind is an original study which should be of interest to philosophers, linguists, psychologists, and computer scientists. I would hope its central chapters assume the role of prolegomena to a more fully worked out account of embodied image schemata and their alleged metaphorical projections into our lives of meanings and reasonings.
Douglas Seanor and N. Fotion, editors, Hare and Critics: Essay on "Moral Thinking." With Comments by R. M. Hare (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1988) x+307pp. ALANGEWIRTH University of Chicago After a brief introduction by the editors and a very informative essay by W. D. Hudson on "The Development of Hare's Moral Philosophy," this volume presents twelve critical essays on various aspects of Hare's ethical theory by R. B. Brandt, William K. Frankena, Allan Gibbard, James Griffin, John C. Harsanyi, Thomas Nagel, David A. J. Richards, T. M. Scanlon, Peter Singer, J. 0. Urmson, Zeno Vendler, and Bernard Williams. These essays are followed by a 95-page set of "Comments" by Hare. The volume concludes with a bibliography of Hare's writings and a list of other writings referred to in the volume. Although the critical essays focus on Moral Thinking (1981), which is the third and most recent of Hare's three major books on ethics, the essays inevitably discuss topics that also figured in The Language of Morals (1952) and Freedom and Reason (1963). These topics, to whose prominence in contemporary moral philosophy Hare has made pioneering contributions, include prescriptivism, universalizability, the distinction between act-and rule-utilitarianism, and especially the distinction between the "intuitive" and the "critical" levels of moral thinking, around which Moral Thinking is organized. In many ways this volume is a model of its kind. The critical essays are cogent, perceptive, and thought-provoking. Hare's extensive and incisive comments on each essay address explicitly and in detail the critical points they have raised. The comments are very conveniently organized: they refer, by page and line, to the critical text to which Hare is replying. And also very helpfully, at each such critical text an asterisk has been placed in the margin of the page, so that the reader is at once alerted to the fact that Hare has given a response to that particular passage. It is therefore made very easy to check forward from each part of each critical essay to Hare's critical response, as well as in the reverse direction. The overall result is a fruitful and powerful philosophical dialectic. An alternative organizing scheme would have (been to group the critical essays by topic (instead of alphabetically by author), and similarly to arrange Hare's replies by topic. This would have had the advantage of presenting together in one section all of Hare's comments on, for example, prescriptivism or "fanaticism," as against the scattering they now exhibit. On the other hand, Hare scrupulously refers, by page and line, to other places in his comments where he has already addressed some disputed
