The phrase “Conceptual
categories” is a technical term for something we all do whether consciously or
not. When we see a tree we know it to be a tree because of our concept of
trees. The tree you see over there fits the category in your mind called tree.
Sounds simple enough---but it isn’t. What I have described is called the
correspondence theory of truth in epistemology. To have knowledge according to
this theory two things have to happen. My concept has to be correct and my
concept must be correctly linked to the experienced object “out there.” There
is much controversy with this theory. For starters there is the troubling worry
about how I can be certain I have the right concept (is it the same as yours?
What about the guy living on the other side of the planet?), and can I be
certain the object out there really is the thing I think it is, be it tree or
whatever. You might think this is just
an academic problem that philosophers spend way too much time pondering. Yet
suppose we aren’t talking about trees, suppose instead we are talking about a
landmine that you think you may have just stepped on. Questions of knowledge
and certainty would suddenly loom large wouldn’t they?
George Lakoff (co-author
of the celebrated title Metaphors We Live
By) has written an account of the latest multidisciplinary findings on the
cognitive act of categorizing. His thesis is that the old way of construing knowledge,
which I have called the correspondence theory of truth, has been largely
discredited. Why? Because research in cognitive sciences, psychology and
linguistics has shown that objectivism as understood in correspondence theories
of truth, that is the idea that there is one concrete and correct way of
experiencing a given object, is simply not true. Instead of this old objectivist view of
knowing Lakoff’s own theory, which he calls experiential realism, takes each
person’s experience as being uniquely her own. This is a much more relativistic
approach to epistemology. Relativism is an ancient bugaboo of philosophy and
Lakoff knows it.
What is at issue isn’t the
truth of how we come to know the things we know, but the nature of reason
itself. You can intensify the significance of these findings by saying our whole
understanding of what it means to be a knowing, acting human being is being
altered by what cognitive scientists are discovering. That is some heady stuff.
Is the mind like a machine? If it is
like a machine how does it connect to the things out there to know them? If
there are objects out there won’t they necessarily transcend the mind? Lakoff
declares all of these ideas discredited, but it is that word, transcendence,
that I think is really behind the motivating spirit of this work, or more
accurately the attack upon any notion of transcendence as a guiding principle
in epistemology. The idea that we are
minds in bodies (or more traditionally phrased, souls in bodies) and that the
world has been created with purposes and meanings out there to be discovered by
these minds in bodies is an old idea that science has long wanted to discredit.
Minds, souls and essences are very hard to locate under a microscope. Cognitive
scientists maintain there are no spirits, souls, or minds capable of existing
independent of the body and no essences to things. We are thoroughly biological
beings in a physical world and we use our various different conceptual schemes
to categorize the world in unique ways. The way you categorize your experience
is different, not better or worse, than the way I categorize my experience. This
is the new, revolutionary science of the mind.
The problem is this
understanding of our situation is not new and hardly revolutionary. As I read
through the book I kept asking myself, is the picture of the philosophic
tradition being presented here correct? Have philosophers since ancient times
simply taken it as common sense that we are minds/souls working to have our
ideas correspond correctly with the essential natures of the things in the
world? Just about every word (concept) in that last sentence has been debated
by philosophers for over 2000 years. As soon as Plato drafted the first version
of his theory of Forms (transcendent, eternal essences that are the real
objects of knowledge) there were philosophers lined up and ready to challenge
him on the idea of disembodied ideas. This is precisely Aristotle’s main
complaint of his teacher. Despite what Lakoff maintains, philosophers have
never wholly endorsed the correspondence theory of truth. It has been widely
known and for a long time that the theory has its problems. Indeed it has been
widely known that the notion of a soul in a body is problematic. Medieval
theologians, thinkers one might assume would be most readily accepting of a
correspondence theory of knowledge based on a soul seeking to know God’s creation,
were aware of the issues with the rather puzzling notions of souls and
essences.
What is interesting in Women, Fire and Dangerous Things is the
attempt to deal with the charge of relativism. If you see the world in your
unique way and I see it in my unique way, can it be said that we share a world? What
is it that is being shared? Clearly there is something “out there,” independent
of you or I. One could say it transcends us, even if it doesn’t transcend our
various ways of categorising it. This is the stuff that philosophers find
endlessly intriguing. Lakoff has not ended the debate on the question of how
the human mind comes to know the world, but he has contributed to it.
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