The Evolution Of Lakoff’s Embodied Cognition

The west has a long history in the study of cognition.The traditional view is that the cognition and our bodies irrelevant or not. In fact, more and more research have proved that cognition is closely related to the body. Since the1980s, the concept has been more and more emphasized in cognitive science.On the basis of a large number of cognitive science research,Lakoff proved the embodied cognition thought. He thinks, our cognition is embodied, and is closely related to the body. Traditional theory which weakening the relations of cognition and body is wrong.The epistemological meaning and methodological meaning of Lakoff’s embodied cognition is very important in the cognition philosophy field.In this paper, cognitive historical analysis,document analysis and comprehensive analysis are used to search the history of the formation and development of his embodied cognition by analyzing the concept of embodiment and based on the relevant works of Lakoff, and revealed its rich connotation.This paper mainly consists of three chapters, The first chapter reviews the theoretical background of the formation and development of embodied cognition,introduces the disembodied cognition, experience embodied cognition,situated embodied cognition,emergence embodied cognition and off-line embodied cognition.The second chapter researches the evolution process of the embodied cognition of Lakoff. The first part introduces the budding stage of the embodied cognition of Lakoff, at this stage, Lakoff studied our everyday conceptual system through metaphor phenomenon, the conceptual metaphor theory can be seen as the origin of the embodied cognition of Lakoff.The second part introduces the emerging stage of the embodied cognition of Lakoff, at this stage, Lakoff by introducing the achievements on category of other cognitive domains to show the importance of categorization,he pointed out that at least some categories are embodied. The third part introduces the connotation extension stage of the embodied cognition of Lakoff, at this stage,Lakoff extended the connotation of embodiment from three aspects:the cognitive uncouscious,the embodiment of mind and metaphorical thought. The third chapter is the evaluation of the embodied cognition of Lakoff:to break the traditional rational thought,to criticize the traditional intuitive truth,to inherit the traditional theory and to surpass the scope of scientific investigation.