The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"--metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them. In (...) this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language. (shrink)

"There are books—few and far between—which carefully, delightfully, and genuinely turn your head inside out. This is one of them. It ranges over some central issues in Western philosophy and begins the long overdue job of giving us a radically new account of meaning, rationality, and objectivity."—Yaakov Garb, _San Francisco Chronicle_.

Using path-breaking discoveries of cognitive science, Mark Johnson argues that humans are fundamentally imaginative moral animals, challenging the view that morality is simply a system of universal laws dictated by reason. According to the Western moral tradition, we make ethical decisions by applying universal laws to concrete situations. But Johnson shows how research in cognitive science undermines this view and reveals that imagination has an essential role in ethical deliberation. Expanding his innovative studies of human reason in Metaphors We Live (...) By and The Body in the Mind, Johnson provides the tools for more practical, realistic, and constructive moral reflection. (shrink)

In _The Meaning of the Body_, Mark Johnson continues his pioneering work on the exciting connections between cognitive science, language, and meaning first begun in the classic _Metaphors We Live By_. Johnson uses recent research into infant psychology to show how the body generates meaning even before self-consciousness has fully developed. From there he turns to cognitive neuroscience to further explore the bodily origins of meaning, thought, and language and examines the many dimensions of meaning—including images, qualities, emotions, and metaphors—that (...) are all rooted in the body’s physical encounters with the world. Drawing on the psychology of art and pragmatist philosophy, Johnson argues that all of these aspects of meaning-making are fundamentally aesthetic. He concludes that the arts are the culmination of human attempts to find meaning and that studying the aesthetic dimensions of our experience is crucial to unlocking meaning's bodily sources. Throughout, Johnson puts forth a bold new conception of the mind rooted in the understanding that philosophy will matter to nonphilosophers only if it is built on a visceral connection to the world. “Mark Johnson demonstrates that the aesthetic and emotional aspects of meaning are fundamental—central to conceptual meaning and reason, and that the arts show meaning-making in its fullest realization. If you were raised with the idea that art and emotion were external to ideas and reason, you must read this book. It grounds philosophy in our most visceral experience.”—George Lakoff, author of _Moral Politics_. (shrink)

The need for ethical naturalism -- Moral problem-solving as an empirical inquiry -- Where are our values bred? : sources of moral norms -- Intuitive processes of moral cognition -- Moral deliberation as cognition, imagination, and feeling -- The nature of "reasonable" moral deliberation -- There is no moral faculty -- Moral fundamentalism is immoral -- The making of a moral self.

Mark Johnson is one of the great thinkers of our time on how the body shapes the mind. This book brings together a selection of essays from the past two decades that build a powerful argument that any scientifically and philosophically satisfactory view of mind and thought must ultimately explain how bodily perception and action give rise to cognition, meaning, language, action, and values. A brief account of Johnson’s own intellectual journey, through which we track some of the most important (...) discoveries in the field over the past forty years, sets the stage. Subsequent chapters set out Johnson’s important role in embodied cognition theory, including his cofounding of conceptual metaphor theory and, later, their theory of bodily structures and processes that underlie all meaning, conceptualization, and reasoning. A detailed account of how meaning arises from our physical engagement with our environments provides the basis for a nondualistic, nonreductive view of mind that he sees as most congruous with the latest cognitive science. A concluding section explores the implications of our embodiment for our understanding of knowledge, reason, and truth. The resulting book will be essential for all philosophers dealing with mind, thought, and language. (shrink)

All too often, we think of our minds and bodies separately. The reality couldn’t be more different: the fundamental fact about our mind is that it is embodied. We have a deep visceral, emotional, and qualitative relationship to the world—and any scientifically and philosophically satisfactory view of the mind must take into account the ways that cognition, meaning, language, action, and values are grounded in and shaped by that embodiment. This book gathers the best of philosopher Mark Johnson’s essays addressing (...) questions of our embodiment as they deal with aesthetics—which, he argues, we need to rethink so that it takes into account the central role of body-based meaning. Viewed that way, the arts can give us profound insights into the processes of meaning making that underlie our conceptual systems and cultural practices. Johnson shows how our embodiment shapes our philosophy, science, morality, and art; what emerges is a view of humans as aesthetic, meaning-making creatures who draw on their deepest physical processes to make sense of the world around them. (shrink)

Rich with historical and cultural value, these works are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Because of the ease of their implementation, attribute-value based theories of grammar are becoming increasingly popular in theoretical linguistics as an alternative to transformational accounts and in computational linguistics. This book provides a formal analysis of attribute-value structures, their use in a theory of grammar and the representation of grammatical relations in such theories of grammar. It provides a classical treatment of disjunction and negation, and explores the linguistic implications of different representations of grammatical relations. Mark Johnson is assistant professor (...) in cognitive and linguistic sciences at Brown University. He was a Fairchild postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the 1987-88 academic year. (shrink)

In the past thirty years, face perception has become an area of major interest within psychology. The Oxford Handbook of Face Perception is the most comprehensive and commanding review of the field ever published.For anyone looking for the definitive review of this burgeoning field, this is the essential book.

Dewey's ethical naturalism has provided an exemplary model for many contemporary naturalistic treatments of morality. However, in some recent work there is an unfortunate tendency to presuppose a moral faculty as the alleged source of what are claimed to be nearly universal moral judgments. Marc Hauser's Moral minds (2006) thus argues that our shared moral intuitions arise from a universal moral organ, which he analogizes to a Chomskyan language faculty. Following Dewey's challenge to the postulation of the idea of universal (...) instincts, I argue that Hauser's moral faculty account is (1) contrary to results from recent cognitive science, (2) unnecessary for explaining our moral understanding and reasoning, and (3) counterproductive to the correct project of a non-transcendent, empirically-grounded theory of moral understanding and problem-solving. I provide a sketch of an alternative account of what such an ethical naturalism would involve. (shrink)

Abstract Recent empirical studies of categorization, concept development, semantic structure, and reasoning reveal the inadequacies of all theories that regard knowledge as static, propositional, and sentential. These studies show that conceptual structure and reason are grounded in patterns of bodily experience. Structures of our spatial/temporal orientations, perceptual interactions, and motor programs provide an imaginative basis for our knowledge of, and reasoning about, more abstract domains. Such a view transcends both foundationalism and extreme relativism or scepticism.

The emergence of linguistic pragmatism has given rise to a lively debate over whether philosophy should focus on language or experience. But the experience vs. language dichotomy is just another type of dualism of the sort that pragmatists ought to be wary of. We need to appreciate that, insofar as pragmatism aspires to elucidate and transform our meaningful experience, it must recognize that meaning goes deeper than language. What linguistic pragmatists hope to do with language cannot be done without meaning (...) resources that are not themselves linguistic. Meaning, understanding, thinking, and valuing all have to be enacted as embodied processes. Moreover, no use or analysis of language is possible without an experience of meaning, and so we can never avoid experience in our philosophical undertakings, even granting that there is no perspective-free take on what some thing or event means. (shrink)

This article views face perception as the ideal case study example for understanding the deeper principles underlying human neurodevelopment. It illustrates how face perception has been one of oldest battlegrounds for resolving key issues in human development. It argues that taking a developmental approach to face perception can resolve some of the major current debates in the adult face perception and cognitive neuroscience literature. Thus, face perception and development continue to be mutually informative domains of study. The work on newborns (...) designed to test the “innate knowledge” of faces, studying the development of face perception skills during infancy and childhood, has proved to be fertile ground for domain-general theories of perceptual and cognitive development. The study reviews recent literature on the factors that contribute to the specialization of certain cortical areas for face processing. It suggests an intriguing alternative middle-ground view in this polarized debate. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Pragmatism's Neglect of Cognitive Science Convergence Between the Cognitive Sciences and Pragmatism Consciousness as a Functional Process The Productive Interplay of Pragmatism and Cognitive Science.

J. M. Kennedy and J. Vervaeke argue that my view of the bodily and imaginative basis of meaning commits me to a mistaken reductionism and to the erroneous view that metaphors actually impose structure on the target domain. I explain the sense in which image schemas are central to the bodily grounding of meaning, although in a way that is not reductionistic. I then show how conceptual metaphors can involve pre-existing image-schematic structure and yet can also be partially constitutive of (...) the conceptual structure of the target domain. In this way human conceptual systems can be both rooted in patterns of our bodily interactions and at the same time can be subject to various kinds of imaginative development and extension. (shrink)

This paper shows how to define probability distributions over linguistically realistic syntactic structures in a way that permits us to define language learning and language comprehension as statistical problems. We demonstrate our approach using lexical‐functional grammar (LFG), but our approach generalizes to virtually any linguistic theory. Our probabilistic models are maximum entropy models. In this paper we concentrate on statistical inference procedures for learning the parameters that define these probability distributions. We point out some of the practical problems that make (...) straightforward ways of estimating these distributions infeasible, and develop a “pseudo‐likelihood” estimation procedure that overcomes some of these problems. This method raises interesting questions concerning the nature of the data available to a language learner and the modularity of language learning and processing. (shrink)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 RECORDER'S PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (...) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 THE DISCUSSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether the fundamental linguistic insights and intuitions of Lexical Functional Grammar, which is usually presented as a constraint-based linguistic theory, can be reformulated in a resource sensitive framework using a substructural modal logic. In the approach investigated here, LFG's f-descriptions are replaced with expressions from a multi-modal propositional logic. In effect, the feature structure unification basis of LFG's f-structures is replaced with a very different resource based mechanism. It turns out that some linguistic analyses that required non-monotonic (...) devices in LFG analysis of Icelandic) can be straightforwardly expressed in the framework presented here. Moreover, a Curry– Howard correspondence between proofs in this logic and -terms provides a semantic interpretation as a by-product of the process of showing syntactic well-formedness. (shrink)