Philosophy in the Flesh (Book Review)

I recently read the book “Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought” by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.  While I don’t agree with everything in the book, I think it provides a good conceptual overview of how concepts and language might get their meaning.

To give some background, one line of thought views “concepts” as ethereal and as existing in some sense independently of any individual thinker.  This is very close to Plato’s “forms”, and posits some “essence” which makes a concept what it is.

Enter modern science and the view that everything is ultimately describable by the patterns of physics.  Under this view, the idea of essences is incorrect, and must be replaced by some mechanistic description of what is happening when someone thinks about a concept.

As controversial as this later view may be in popular culture, I would argue that it is accepted by most scientists, and in my view, likely to be correct.  But we then have the question – if concepts are not made of “essences” but of physical mechanisms, what kind of physical mechanisms are involved?

This book attempts to give a possible answer to this question.  Lakoff and Johnson argue that most of our concepts are “embodied”, meaning that they are directly or indirectly based on our bodies and the movement of our bodies through space.  Of course, some of our concepts / language are clearly and directly based on the body – being cold or hot, or moving forward or backward, for example.  But they argue that much or most of our language is based metaphorically on body concepts.  For example, we conceive of time as moving forward or backward, and we speak of time as *looking* forward or backward – “we’ll see what happens”, etc.

They lay out these basic ideas, and then spend much of the book describing how specific abstract concepts might be based on body metaphors – self, free will, morality, time, etc.

Although the book constantly refers to “the findings of second-generation cognitive science”, it is relatively light on actual experimental evidence supporting their claims.  Much of the value of the book lies, in my opinion, not on the science, but on plausible outlines of how concepts might come to have meaning in physical systems.  In this respect, I think the ideas in the book might truly be as groundbreaking as the authors suggest.