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IS PHILOSOPHY OBSOLETE?

METAPHORS, MINDS, AND THE A conversation with George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

FATE OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY

Interview conducted by Austin Dacey

George Lakoff, professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, and Mark Johnson, professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon, first advanced their theory that human cognition is largely metaphorical in Metaphors We Live By (1983). In 1999, they published Philosophy in the Flesh, in which they claim their theory is being borne out by cognitive neuroscience.

-EDS.

Fil REE INQUIRY: In your new book, Philosophy in the Flesh, you claim that recent findings in cognitive

science are "inconsistent with central parts of Western philosophy," and that an "empirically responsible philosophy would require our culture to abandon some of its deepest philo-sophical assumptions." I'd like to begin by talk-ing about these cognitive-science findings. One claim is that much of our thought belongs to the unconscious, or what you call the "cognitive unconscious." What is the cognitive uncon-scious, and how did we find out about it?

GEORGE LAxoFF: We found out about it in a number of ways. For one, priming experiments—where words or pictures of which you're not conscious are flashed in front of subjects so quickly that they don't know they've seen them, but nonetheless have a systematic effect on how their minds process things.

MARK JOHNSON: The cognitive unconscious isn't "uncon-scious" in the Freudian sense of repressed experience. We're talking about these massive sets of operations and processes that go into making us have an experience of the world. We cannot be aware of the online processing that generates them.

FI: Then in what sense can we call them cognitive? JOHNSON: Many philosophers wouldn't think of the cognitive

unconscious as a cognitive structure, because they want cogni-

tive to denote a clearly conceptual, propositional, and entirely conscious kind of processing and reflection. But we believe it is highly cognitive, because it plays a central role in the ordering of our conceptual systems. It's part of the structure of how we think about things and how we reason. So we would insist that the cog-nitive unconscious lays good claim to the term cognitive.

FI: You also claim, on the basis of recent findings in cogni-tive science, that abstract thought such as theoretical reason-ing is largely metaphorical. Could you explain this conclusion and describe in general the evidence that is pointing us towards it?

Liion : In Philosophy in the Flesh, we go through a list of the evidence from various fields in linguistics, cognitive psy-chology, developmental psychology, and so on. Here are some examples. If you look at the common metaphors for time, for example, you'll notice that you have expressions like "the time will come," "the time has long since gone," "the time for action has arrived," and so on. You have spatial words like come and

go and arrive—and then you see them being used in a very systematic way to talk about time. We then find that words from the domain of space are mapped onto the domain of time in a system-atic way. It isn't just a matter of words; inference patterns from the domain of space are being mapped over to the domain of time. And they're mapped in the same way as the mapping that accounts for the words' meanings. Now go and look at novel expressions—poetic metaphors and song lyrics and so on—you find that these new expressions people create invoke the same kind of metaphors for time, and work by extensions of

exactly the same mapping. That gives you a third domain of evi-dence for the existence of this same mapping process.

Now examine the history of languages, and study how words change their meaning over time. Over and over you'll see words for space coming to mean words for time. It's the same mapping yet again, now governing the principles of his-torical change. If you then look at gesture evidence, as David McNeil at the University of Chicago has, you'll find almost-uni-versal metaphorical gestures that are carried out in space to express concepts of time. These are spontaneous: they're not fixed gestures, they're things you make up as you talk about time. And if you examine the constraints that limit possible acceptable gestures when you're talking about time, they reflect exactly the same metaphorical mapping that constrains

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gestures you'd use to express spatial relationships. And there are many such independent sources of evidence, all of which give support for the same metaphorical mappings. These metaphors preserve inferential structure from domain to domain. So it's clear that they're intimately involved in rea-soning, and that they constitute the major mechanism by which we take the inferential mechanisms of sensori-motor concepts and apply them to abstract concepts.

Convergent evidence like this it is very robust. And we have this enormously robust evidence concerning not just metaphors for time, but for hundreds of familiar cognitive metaphors. The evidence becomes overwhelming.

JOHNSON: We found a number of people who had done analyses of some of our most important concepts—concepts like mind, knowledge, thought, basic politi-cal concepts, moral concepts, the conceptions of the self. All of these abstract concepts seem to be defined by multiple meta-phors. What we're claiming is that you get a new view of philos-ophy if you understand that a philosophy is sort of a putting together and orchestrating of vast systems of metaphors, and these metaphors have entail-ments. They lead you to reason in certain ways. So if you have a computational model of mind, there are a bunch of metaphors that are working together. This isn't just an obvious truth about how the mind works. It's predi-cated on some basic metaphors we have about the nature of mind and mental processes—how language works, what a concept is.

And so in order to understand a philosophy, what its logical entailments are and how they affect the way we reason within it—what its basic assumptions are—you've got to understand the grounding metaphors that define those basic concepts and the patterns of reasoning. We are really making a sweeping claim about philosophy: that if you're going to understand a particular philosophical viewpoint or system, one of the best ways to go about that is to do an analysis of its grounding metaphors. Further, understanding the limitations of some of those metaphors can in some cases provide a basis for criti-cizing certain philosophical views.

FI: How do the prevalence of metaphor and the idea of the cognitive unconscious challenge traditional philosophical theory?

LAKOFF: In Anglo-American philosophy, you have the corre-spondence theory of truth, and a theory of meaning based on that. It assumes a literal correspondence between words and the world, or between symbols and structures in the world. Most metaphorical thought is just not like that; if you look at metaphors, clearly they can't fit into this literal relationship between words and the world. Metaphors aren't out there in

the world, independent of mind. Yet there's always been an assumption that human concepts are reflections of rational structures in the world. That's been part of Anglo-American philosophy from the beginning, and it just cannot work for this vast metaphorical system that we now recognize. This applies to most of the reasoning we do about time and metaphors for time, about events and causes. It applies also to our basic understandings of morality, the mind, the self, being—the most very basic concepts philosophy has always been about. Anglo-American philosophy had always assumed that these basic concepts could be characterized in literal terms, and that turned out to be massively false.

FI: Some philosophers would say that's a non sequitur. They might concede that we can only perceive and think about reality in ways that depend on our par-ticular cognitive and conceptual systems, but they'd deny that this means we can know no real-ity independent of our concepts, in virtue of which our thoughts and perceptions are true or false. How do you respond?

LAKOFF: Our theory allows you to talk about the truth and falsity of philosophical ideas that are metaphorical, or everyday ideas that are metaphorical. And that goes beyond the role of the external world in structuring those ideas. Consider metaphor-ical truths like saying—to take a simple case—"He wasted an hour of my time this morning." That statement is based on the

metaphor of time as a resource. So are statements like "He budgets his time well," and so on. Well, time is not really a moneylike resource in itself. There's nothing in the world about time that makes it a resource or moneylike; it's our understanding that creates that correspondence. And yet, when we set up a culture in which we pay people by the hour and force them to live in terms of a "time is like money" metaphor, then that metaphor structures our understanding. Then we can talk about sentences like "He wasted an hour of my time" being true or false. Yet that does not mean that it's by virtue of the nature of time in itself that a sentence like that can be true or false. It can be true or false only in virtue of the metaphor.

JOHNSON: We are not idealists. We're not claiming that real-ity is a construct, built up from ideas or concepts. We're not claiming that there's a kind of infinitely malleable "something" that gets structured by these concepts. Rather, we're more in line with a view like Maurice Merleau-Ponty's, or John Dewey's, or Alfred North Whitehead's. We're in line with work in the contemporary cognitive sciences that looks at organism-environment interactions and tries to explain how this mean-ingful world that we can make sense of, and act within, and make inferences about, comes together. What we're trying to

"Philosophy as an institution has, in the

Western tradition, adopted certain

assumptions that we think are just scientifically false. And that has made philosophy far less useful

than it should be."

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IS PHILOSOPHY OBSOLETE?

avoid is a picture in which there's just the world as it is out there, and then there's our processing mechanism over here. We're saying that the basic unit of experience is this process—this ongoing set of interactions—and out of that arise all of our concepts and our patterns of reasoning.

We were never claiming that all truth is metaphoric. We see many traditionally literal concepts remaining valid. But the key point is that ours is an embodied theory of truth. It says that all human understanding is tied to, and grows out of, our embodiment. And that embodiment will sometimes involve these metaphorical extensions.

FI: At this point, we can imagine critics saying, "Okay, so philosophical theories are deeply metaphorical. All thought is. But if we can distinguish good from bad metaphors in these ways that you have been discussing, then, once we do that, we can go back to debating the merits of our philosophical theo-ries." Some critics would say that what you then wind up with is essentially no different from the enterprise of traditional philosophy.

LAKOFF: Yes and no. What you've just said is not true of most philosophy. What we've observed is that science uses metaphors. In good science, you have metaphors and a math-ematics that goes with the metaphors, and, preferably, cases where the metaphors have entailments that are observable—and observable in massive numbers—so you can check them out. That's very different from having those metaphors be the basis of a philosophy. Philosophical theories are very different from scientific theories in this respect. Anglo-American phi-losophy is a good example of this. There is no scientific evi-dence for the correspondence theory of truth. There's no sci-entific evidence for the idea that meaning is based on truth. There is no observable evidence based on this. These are pure-ly metaphorical theories.

JOHNSON: "Philosophical" discussion and criticism are going to go on, but we're saying they need to be empirically responsible. They need to make use of converging evidence acquired using multiple methods, from different sciences, and utilizing all sorts of modes of inquiry. In moral theory, for example, you can understand how the concepts are struc-tured, where they come from, and why we have the kind of moral concepts we do by using some of these tools and tech-niques that we've talked about. But there's also a critical com-ponent. Any moral theory that is predicated on the classical theory of categorization, as some are, is going to be inade-quate to that extent. So if you have a moral theory that says that there are moral principles or rules that are applied by having cases brought under the literal concepts that make up the rules in a sort of one-to-one way—well, that's not an ade-quate understanding of morality.

FI: What happens when philosophical discourse about rationality or morality—which embodies not only descrip-tions, but also expressions of our values or norms—butts up against some empirical evidence that's inconsistent with it? How do we decide which has to give?

LAKOFF: If you have a philosophical account that is incon-sistent with the way the mind works, then the philosophical account should give.

JOHNSON: We're not taking away the responsibility of indi-viduals to reflect on these things, to think deeply, and to strug

gle with them, and, ultimately, you have to act. Persons who are morally sensitive need to be aware of what their moral assumptions are, what other people's moral assumptions are, what the entailments are. There's no substitute here for that kind of moral sensitivity and perceptiveness and openness.

FI: And you think that this kind of give and take is mirrored at the broader level, in the give and take between philosophy and the sciences of the mind.

LAKOFF: It's very important when you're studying the sci-ence of the mind that you understand your metaphors there, too. We have to question, as cognitive scientists, the concepts we use in our science. And we have to understand which metaphors we're using, and why we're using them. In saying that, we're placing a criterion on science that had never previ-ously even been thought of as a criterion to place on science.

FI: Maybe in closing, you could both comment on how you think this ongoing dialogue between cognitive science and phi-losophy will unfold in the future.

JOHNSON: One has to realize that the dominant philosophi-cal schools in America and England are still principally work-ing in an analytic mode. If you go to philosophy conferences, these assumptions we've been criticizing are still very much at work—determining who does what, what grants are funded, and how people think of education, that sort of thing. But we're encouraged by what we see as a much more genuine, open, honest dialogue emerging between philosophy and the cogni-tive sciences. I'm thinking of people like Paul and Patricia Churchland, Antonio Damasio, Gerald Edelman, and others. I think we see people who are opening up and are literate and can do some of the detailed empirical work in the sciences that's necessary—and who are beginning to understand the philosophical implications. So I'm encouraged.

LAKOFF: I agree with that. And I think it's important to dis-tinguish philosophy as an enterprise from philosophy as an institution. We have no opposition whatever as to philosophy as an enterprise, quite the opposite. We see philosophy as one of the most important enterprises anyone can engage in. Philosophy as an institution is a different matter. Philosophy as an institution has, in the Western tradition, adopted certain assumptions that we think are just scientifically false. And that has made philosophy far less useful than it should be.

Philosophy as an enterprise needs to fit what we know about the nature of the mind in order to be scientifically respectable and cognitively responsible. If philosophy can use the kinds of tools that are coming out of cognitive science and metaphor theory, that will make philosophy better, and better for the world. It will make philosophy understand itself better. The idea of "knowing thyself" is central to all of philosophy. Contemporary Anglo-American philosophy does-n't know itself. It's quite striking to us to look at how much it deviates from that idea. As scientists, we take a deeply philo-sophical perspective. We use the tools that emerge from the sciences to question our own work. Then we say, "What can you do with these tools to have a philosophy that's better informed, and that makes the world better?" Philosophy is there to make the world better. And it should be using the best tools available.

FI: Well, if time is a resource, then I feel that mine has been well spent. Thank you. f©

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spring 2001