몸의 철학

Lakoff and Johnson make strong claims for second-generation cognitive science as a potential revolution in philosophy. By and large, they are right in their general claims. (And they are not "reifying science," only telling us what's current in one branch of one science.) Indeed, the mind is in the body, and we use metaphors. The actual way we think is very different from what most philosophers assumed, and that is an important realization. However, they could do a better job with the execution. The other reviews have covered a lot of this ground, so I will stick to a few important issues. 1. Damasio. In spite of a couple of references to rather dated Damasio work, they do not take into account the genuinely revolutionary importance of A. and H. Damasio's findings about the inseparability of emotion and cognition in the human brain. This absolutely epochal finding has been largely ignored, due in part to Damasio's less than philosophically sophisticated writeup of it in DESCARTE'S ERROR. One would hope that L and J would supply the sophistication rather than joining in the ignoring. 2. Darwinian psychology. L and J's writeup on Darwin confines itself to an attack on pop-Darwinism of the TIME and NEWSWEEK species. Yet, their whole book would be enormously improved by consideration of serious evolutionary psychology (Cosmides, Tooby, David Buss, et al). The brain isn't just in the body; it, and the body it is in, have been shaped by a few million years of natural selection. That has created particular, and interesting, problems, such as: 3. Built-in biases. People find it exceedingly difficult to think according to the tenets of formal rationality, because our minds love to take shortcuts and make plausible assumptions. This makes sense in the context of everyday life (see Gert Gigerenzer on this) but sure plays hell with the sort of "rational thought" that economists claim we do all the time. Yet, no serious discussion of this in L and J. 4. Kant. Kant is badly misrepresented in the book. He (unlike most of his followers--I admit) was quite aware of the embodiment of mind and the physical limits on thought, and worked hard to figure out how we could reason in spite of all. He pointed out that we do somehow manage to carry out abstract reason when it comes to math, formal logic, and much else. So, why shouldn't we try to apply it to morals? And he was hardly a "strict father" in his morality; he was the architect of the arguments for freedom of speech and many of the other civil liberties we now take for granted (in the US). 5. Metaphors. Are we the slaves of our metaphors, or their masters? If we metaphorize "love" (read: amorous relationships) as a journey, does that mean we seriously think love is a journey? Relationships also "blow up," "break," "fold," "die," "strengthen," etc. We deploy metaphors strategically; we are sometimes their slaves but usually their masters, as Elizabethan writer and blues lyricists well know. Thus, when we try, we can think rather more accurately and abstractly than L and J allow.