Human meaning concerns the character and significance of a person's interactions with their environments. The meaning of a specific aspect of dimension of some ongoing experience is that aspect's connections to other parts of past, present, of future (if possible) experiences. Meaning is relational. It is about how one thing relates to or connects with other things. This pragmatist view of meaning says that the meaning of a thing is its consequences for experience - how it "cashes out" by way of experience, either actual or possible experience. Sometimes our meanings are conceptually and propositionally coded, but that is merely the more conscious, selective dimension of a vast, continuous process of immanent meanings that involve structures, patterns, qualities, feelings, and emotions. An embodied view is naturalistic, insofar as it situates meaning within a flow of experience that cannot exist without a biological organism engaging its environment. Meanings emerge "from the bottom up" through increasingly complex levels of organic activity; they are not the construction of a disembodied mind.
The semantics of embodied meaning that is supported by recent research in the cognitive sciences provides a naturalistic perspective, one that makes no explanatory use of any alleged disembodied or "purely rational" capacities. A naturalistic theory of meaning takes as its working hypothesis the idea that all of our so-called higher cognitive faculties (e.g., of conceptualization and reasoning) recruit cognitive resources that operate in our sensorimotor experience and our monitoring of our emotions. The guiding assumption for such a naturalistic semantics is what John Dewey called a "principal of continuity."
Dewey's Principle of Continuity:
"The primary postulate of a naturalistic theory of logic is continuity of the lower (less complex) and the higher (more complex) activities and forms. The idea of continuity is not self-explanatory. But its meaning excludes complete rupture on one side and mere repetition of identities on the other; it precludes reduction of the "higher" to the "lower" just as it precludes complete breaks and gaps... What is excluded by the postulate of continuity is the appearance upon the scene of a totally new outside force as a cause of changes that occur." (Dewey 1938/1991, 30-31)
An embodied view of meaning looks for the origins and structures of meaning in the organic activities of embodied creatures in interaction with their changing environments. It sees meaning and all our higher functioning as growing out of and shaped by our abilities to perceive things, manipulate objects, move our bodies in space, and evaluate our situation. Its principle of continuity is that the "higher" develops from the "lower," without introducing from the outside any new metaphysical kinds.
I will be using the terms embodied meaning and immanent meaning to emphasize those deep-seated bodily sources of human meaning that go beyond the merely conceptual and propositional. Structures and dimensions of this immanent meaning are what make it possible for us to do propositional thinking. But, if we reduce meaning to words and sentences (or to concepts and propositions), we miss or leave out where meaning really comes from. We end up intellectualizing human experience, understanding, and thinking, and we turn processes into static entities or properties. I will therefore be suggesting that any philosophy that ignores embodied meaning is going to generate a host of extremely problematic views about mind, thought, and language. I want to suggest, in anticipation of my arguments to come, some of the more important consequences of taking seriously a nondualistic account of mind and personal identity and recognizing the bodily basis of human meaning.
The semantics of embodied meaning that is supported by recent research in the cognitive sciences provides a naturalistic perspective, one that makes no explanatory use of any alleged disembodied or "purely rational" capacities. A naturalistic theory of meaning takes as its working hypothesis the idea that all of our so-called higher cognitive faculties (e.g., of conceptualization and reasoning) recruit cognitive resources that operate in our sensorimotor experience and our monitoring of our emotions. The guiding assumption for such a naturalistic semantics is what John Dewey called a "principal of continuity."
Dewey's Principle of Continuity:
"The primary postulate of a naturalistic theory of logic is continuity of the lower (less complex) and the higher (more complex) activities and forms. The idea of continuity is not self-explanatory. But its meaning excludes complete rupture on one side and mere repetition of identities on the other; it precludes reduction of the "higher" to the "lower" just as it precludes complete breaks and gaps... What is excluded by the postulate of continuity is the appearance upon the scene of a totally new outside force as a cause of changes that occur." (Dewey 1938/1991, 30-31)
An embodied view of meaning looks for the origins and structures of meaning in the organic activities of embodied creatures in interaction with their changing environments. It sees meaning and all our higher functioning as growing out of and shaped by our abilities to perceive things, manipulate objects, move our bodies in space, and evaluate our situation. Its principle of continuity is that the "higher" develops from the "lower," without introducing from the outside any new metaphysical kinds.
I will be using the terms embodied meaning and immanent meaning to emphasize those deep-seated bodily sources of human meaning that go beyond the merely conceptual and propositional. Structures and dimensions of this immanent meaning are what make it possible for us to do propositional thinking. But, if we reduce meaning to words and sentences (or to concepts and propositions), we miss or leave out where meaning really comes from. We end up intellectualizing human experience, understanding, and thinking, and we turn processes into static entities or properties. I will therefore be suggesting that any philosophy that ignores embodied meaning is going to generate a host of extremely problematic views about mind, thought, and language. I want to suggest, in anticipation of my arguments to come, some of the more important consequences of taking seriously a nondualistic account of mind and personal identity and recognizing the bodily basis of human meaning.
... The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, Mark Johnson
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