Cognitive science has, in the last thirty years, made some revolutionary discoveries. These empirically verified discoveries have resulted from close coordination between neural and linguistic scientists. These efforts have culminated in metaphor theory, which I suspect will become the first paradigm of Cognitive Science. This new metaphor theory is elaborated in “Philosophy in the Flesh†written by linguist George Lakoff and Mark Johnson Philosophy Department head at the University of Oregon.
All God’s creatures categorize. As a bare minimum a creature’s survival is dependent upon categorizing friend/foe and eat/not eat. From such minimal beginnings our libraries have become full of intellectual stuff.
Cognitive science has discovered how that journey is theoretically possible. A theory explains one possible means to go from here to there. Newton’s theory held prominence for 250 years before Einstein issued a modification called The Special Theory of Relativity. This modification, plus others, made possible this computer upon which I dribble my wisdom.
Concept is the tag we attach to neural structures that facilitate the characterization of these categories into a form that allows us to reason about them. Human categories are structured in several different ways; these different ways are called prototypes.
“Each prototype is a neural structure that permits us to do some sort of inferential or imaginative task relative to a category.†“Typical case-prototypes are used in drawing inference patterns about category members in the absence of any special contextual information. Ideal-case prototypes allow us to evaluate category members relative to some conceptual standard [ideal husband versus typical husband]. Social stereotypes are used to make snap judgements, usually about people.â€
Empirical guided research demonstrates that conceptual structures are intrinsically meaningful because these structures originate within the perception ability of the creature. The creature has within its sensorimotor system the ability to conceive and to infer in a manner similar to what we have always before recognized as being only an after the fact mental activity.
Before metaphor theory there was a universal consent that conscious or unconscious intellectual activity accessed the sensations and perceptions of experience and from this data developed concepts, inferences, categories, i.e. that reason was disembodied and literal. Naturally all domains of knowledge assumed that that mind could be studied in terms of cognitive functions while ignoring any connection between brain and the rest of the body.
This is the revolution upon which this whole theory rests, so I will try to be clear. When a creature perceives or moves in space, that creature has within the perception and movement system certain abilities that were considered to be totally and exclusively part of mind. Cognitive science has discovered that many of these capacities lay within the sensorimotor system itself. If we ask, how does reason enter within the evolutionary thread and eventually become the crowning feature of human kind? The answer is that the elementary glimmering of faculty of reason is part of the perception and movement structure of the most primitive creature.
There are computer models designed to simulate human sensorimotor systems which when used to simulate reasoning capacity have proven to be able to do so.
A linguist and a neural scientist have gathered sufficient evidence to support the conclusion that the same neural networks that controls human movement in space also controls the formulation of language. From this conclusion they logically hypothesize that all mental concepts, concrete and abstract, are controlled by such neural networks that control motor movements and sensory acquisition.
This is a revolution in human knowledge as large as Darwin’s Theory, in my judgement. Think about it—we have a theory that allows us to ground all cognitive activity in fundamental innate neural networks that control all our action in the world.