Edward Slingerland. What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture .What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture by Edward SlingerlandReview by: By G. E. R. LloydIsis, Vol. 100, No. 1 (March 2009), pp. 211-212Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/599703 .

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als, they can practice well without quite know-ing consciously what they are doing. This bookdisplays far more intellectual self-knowledgethan most theoretical reflections by historians ontheir profession and many philosophical tractsthat display neither tacit nor explicit knowledgeof historiography. But to produce an innovativeand fruitful and true theoretical understanding ofhistoriography, of the kind offered in Chapter 6,a better familiarity with the conceptual tools,technical skills, and methods of contemporaryphilosophy is necessary.

AVIEZER TUCKER

Edward Slingerland. What Science Offers theHumanities: Integrating Body and Culture.xv � 370 pp., figs., apps., index. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.$24.95 (paper).

Edward Slingerland is a Sinologist by training,currently the holder of a Canada Research Chairin Chinese Thought and Embodied Cognition atthe University of British Columbia. This book,addressed to “fellow humanists,” is a passionateplea that they should pay greater attention to thesciences in general and to cognitive science inparticular. Slingerland seeks to develop a meth-odology that can avoid the pitfalls of, on theone hand, the objectivist model (most human-ists, he believes, are still under the sway of adualist view of the mind/body) and, on the other,the sterile language games of postmodernism(which dismisses science as just another sociallyconstructed discourse with no privileged accessto truth). As that characterization already sug-gests, Slingerland likes to draw the contrasts inrather simplistic terms, as if current debate wereframed by extreme polar opposites.

Successive chapters deal with the problem ofobjectivity and with postmodernism and decon-struction (given two chapters, on the groundsthat the positions are still unfamiliar to many).Slingerland then moves on to the positive alter-native, “embodying culture,” and defendingwhat he calls vertical integration, including ar-guments that insist on the value of empiricalevidence, on the virtues of the pragmatic theoryof truth, and on the possibilities for understand-ing both ethics and aesthetics as essentially “em-bedded.”

The first three critical chapters are an oddcombination. On the one hand, Slingerlandlaunches into broad-brush, if not actually super-ficial, attacks that often ignore the differences inthe positions of those he targets. That is espe-cially true in his critique of postmodernism,

where he lumps together Clifford Geertz, PierreBourdieu, Bruno Latour, Richard Rorty, DonnaHaraway, and Sandra Harding along with manyothers. He appreciates that some would objectthat these and others he considers adopt verydifferent stances on many of the fundamentalquestions at issue, but he justifies his tactic byasserting that, whatever they may say, they allimplicitly deny the possibility of truth claimsthat are not socially determined. That is highlyquestionable—and it shows singular impatiencewith some of his opponents that he even accusesthem of bad faith.

But, on the other hand, the reader is intro-duced to a great deal of recent empirical work inthe cognitive sciences that Slingerland claims toshow—among other things—how deconstruc-tion and postmodernism are wrong. AntonioDamasio and Joseph LeDoux are cited for theirevidence on the effects of brain lesions, as areElizabeth Spelke, Renee Baillargeon, RochelGelman, and many others on cognitive develop-ment; the work of John Tooby and Leda Cos-mides in evolutionary cognitive science is reliedon heavily, as is Steven Pinker for overviews ofthe consequences of this research for our under-standing of the human mind. Yet Slingerlandtends to brush aside many of the problems thatfolk biology, folk psychology, and folk taxon-omy raise and to underestimate how controver-sial the findings are, especially on the questionof how far these are cross-culturally applicable.Having recently had occasion myself to reviewcognitive science studies on the emotions, theself, causation, and folk taxonomy (CognitiveVariations [Oxford, 2007]), I have reservationsabout how far they can be said to present agreedsolutions on the issues.

The theme of Chapter 4 is that cultural vari-ation is grounded in the body. At first sight thatseems absurd. All humans have basically thesame anatomy and physiology; yet the differ-ences in our cultures are staggering. Slinger-land argues, however, that a certain common-sense understanding of reality is universal.That understanding derives from certain so-matic experiences and is mediated throughbasic metaphorical schemata. “Balance” is aprime example, but that and other commonbodily experiences do not seem to me to get usvery far in explaining cultural differences.Slingerland tends to slip from talking (reason-ably enough) of the omnipresence of meta-phors to the further claim that these are ulti-mately derived from bodily experiences. Thatis true only in the weakest of senses.

Chapter 5 continues exploring the idea that sci-ence is, at bottom, an extension of common sense

BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 100 : 1 (2009) 211

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(drawing on Susan Haack, among others) and ar-gues that the pragmatic theory of truth enables usto escape from the alternatives of objectivity andrelativism, chiefly on the grounds of its practicalsuccess. Yet greater attention to actual examplesfrom the history of science concerning what haspassed as “common sense” might have served toshake some of Slingerland’s confidence in itstrustworthiness.

But, surprisingly enough, Chapter 6 takes adifferent tack. Physicalism may not have beenproved, but it is the best explanation available.Yet here the conflict between its teachings andwhat we “intuitively” feel about soul, free will,agency, and the like leaves us with a dilemma.

Once we accept physicalism, we have to revisemany of our deep-rooted assumptions about theself. So much for those aspects of “commonsense.”

What Science Offers the Humanities has thegreat merit of bringing a lot of recent work incognitive science to bear on traditional problemsin philosophy, and Slingerland is certainly rightto insist that humanists should pay more atten-tion to that work. Yet he seems to me to besome way short of having provided the new,integrated, solutions to the problems that heclaims.

G. E. R. LLOYD

212 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 100 : 1 (2009)

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