KARL JASPERS FORUM
TA110 (Mind and Metaphysics)
Commentary 27 (to Harwood Fisher,
C24)
( ON EMBODIMENT )
by Richard W Moodey
25 February 23009, posted 7 March
2009
[ New comments marked with ** -
HFJM ]
<1>
[HF]
As I understand the proposal by Johnson
and by Lakoff, there are no reifications of the concepts
of 'mind' and 'body.' The proposal is
that linguistic functioning as we can observe it is a product of cognitive processes,
and that these cognitive processes are constructions, which appear as mapped
schematizations of bodily experiences and their reaction patterns.
[RWM]
I do not think we can
"observe" linguistic functioning as a product of cognitive
processes. This is probably because I
understand 'observation' to refer to an activity involve the external senses,
not "pure" sensation, Of course, because i believe that the observing subject integrates sensory Inputs
into a coherent experience. The point is
that my interpretation of "observation" is a construction, and so is Lakoff's, Johnson's, and Fisher's.
[HF]
Reply: you can't have it both
ways. If 'observe' is relegated to 'external'
-- whatever that means -- then you don't have an 'observing subject', as you
define it. Observation neither precludes
"integration into an 'Experience'" nor a process of construction.
**[RWM]
By "external senses" I
mean sight, hearing, touching, etc. I
don't see any contradiction between saying that "observating"
involves the external senses and saying that there is an observing
subject. "I see things."
<2>
[HF]
To make this clear, take an
example of the person who jumps into a lake.
The visual, kinesthetic, and other sense and
motor experiences are bodily and they are tied to the motor reactions, whether
of breathing, swimming motions, or other such.
Neural communication pathways and networks advance signals and
significations, which result in cognitive patterns that schematize the
experiences and action patterns in a format, which has nodes for different
aspects of the prior (memory-engendered) and future (habit-inspired) stimulus
to 'meaningful' reaction to, if not interpretation of, environmental demands
and characteristics that the person faces--in the example, when various
situations triggering analogues of jumping into a lake arise. So, a metaphor-inspired phrase like 'Go jump
in the lake' has such origins.
<3>
[HF]
The ongoing Moodey,
Muller, and Freeman dialogue is too beset with reifications of mind and body as
entities. Johnson and Lakoff are, for better or worse, not trapped in those considerations. They have presented a series of causal
progressions that make use of the basic idea (Darwinian and Gibsonian)
that adaptation is by way of action patterns and these action patterns are
reflected at various points in the organism's action within its bounds
(includes sensory motor and affective action and reaction) and action upon the
external environment.
[RWM]
I thought that I was arguing
against reifications of mind and body. I
do regard a person as a thing, and I could see how Fisher might regard that as a reification. If so,
we disagree.
[HF]
Reply: 'person' is not what I
identified as a reification. Still, although there is a broader discussion
here about the positing of units and the interaction of perception and
cognitive decisions about objects and their characterization, the topic is too
big. It includes all sorts of cultural
and sociological points of view. My
points have to do with 'mind' and 'body.' My concern is that too dogmatic a
position on either prevents Progress of theorizing -- and even just thinking --
about the different ways to analyze events, phenomena and patterns of dynamics
and transaction.
**[RWM]
We agree about the dangers of
dogmatism. My position is that whatever
I say explicitly about "mind" or "body" has many other
beliefs as the tacit background. Among
those are tacit beliefs about the person as actor.
<4>
[HF]
The model they present has two
fundamental flaws: Problem One, the
direction of the causal flow is bottom-up from neural--(and possibly sub-neural)
structures and functions on upward to sensory-motor patterning and its
schematizations. These are reflected in
cognitive images and other representations that are organized as schemata, as
if reflections of adaptive habits.
<5>
So, problem I is
that this view makes no distinction for conscious evaluation of schemata -- unless
you want to go down the road of endless regression by which an 'evaluative
schema' is derived from target sub-schemata.
In short, this physical base orientation as the start point introduces a set of causal
progressions, which do not accommodate an 'information-based' approach (Patee's point). The
'information-based' approach to analyzing causal phenomena would call for a
bi-directional account, in which cognitive phenomena would drive 'downward' in
a top-down manner.
[RWM]
A bi-directional account makes a
lot of sense to me. I would say, By the
way, that it is not the "mind" that evaluates schemata, but the Person.
[HF]
Reply: it looks like we agree more than disagree. 'The mind' becomes a 'thing' if agency is not
accounted for; so I look for a dynamic account that differentiates action from
evaluation. The 'person' -- at times and
at different levels or modes of functioning -- acts or functions with access to
agency. Distinctions between more and
less conscious thought and the manifestations of these distinctions in a
phenomenological analysis are necessary for an adequate account of the
vicissitudes of thought re logical form, and also re the relation of self to intention. The point for cognitive linguistics has to do
with overextending linguistic form to account for these things.
**[RWM]
For me,
and in this I might be in a minority, the first step in accounting for
"agency" is being explicit about the "agents" and what they
can and cannot do. And I think that you
are doing that in what you say above. I
am not sure how to interpret "access to agency," however. Does it mean something other than "able
to act"?
<6>
[HF]
Problem Two, about which I've
written extensively, is undue compression of organismic
epistemics.
Our knowledge-enabling structures are reduced to schemata in an
excessive patrimony to the concept of adaptation as blind habit building.
[RWM] ?
[HF]
I must say that i had telescoped there!
Sorry about that. But now see my reply immediately above.
<7>
Eschewed are follow-up analyses
and probes of perceptual and cognitive patterns that are in different formats
than schematics. Here, one only need to
refer to Aristotle's analyses of different sorts of logical and rhetorical
forms to see that as Braine and O'Brien had pointed out there are probably
basic logic patterns that are wired-in either universally or for most
people. Coupled with the para-logical formats that yield both poetic comparisons and
hypotheticals, there is enough reason to examine the structure
and dynamics of thought without stuffing it all into a schematization format.
[RWM]
Could not
Braine and O'Brien be accused of reifying wire-in logic Patterns?
[HF]
What concerns me is not a
proposal about a neurologically-inspired process of logical routines and
constraints. The latter is subject to a phenomenological
inquiry as well as to all sorts of operationalizing
in social psychological experiments. The
posit of a 'wired-in' status, even if it's tied to the idea of neurological
correlates is sufficiently hypothetical to be merely suggestive -- although I
must admit, that I too get concerned when some theorists and researchers
consider a neurological model with too limited an explanation of determinants
of meaning, its processing and its evaluation in thought.
--------------------------------------
References
M. D. S. Braine & D. P.
O'Brien (Eds.) 1998, Mental logic. Mahwah NJ. USA: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates Inc.
Patee, H. H.
(2007). The
necessity of biosemiotics: Matter symbol-complementarity.
In: Barbieri,
M. (2007). Introduction to biosemiotics: The new biological synthesis.115-132.
Dordrecht: Springer.
--------------------------------------
Richard W Moodey
e-mail <
MOODEY001 (at) gannon.edu >