A Critical Review Of Experientialism Philosophy

Experientialism is a new philosophy founded by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson on the basis of the second generation cognitive science.Experientialism attempts to criticize and replace The Objectivism Myth which has been dominating western culture and philosophy.Experientialism is grounded on Lakoff and Johnson’ s research in cognitive science,especially on their Conceptual Metaphor Theory.The central idea of Conceptual Metaphor Theory is that abstract thoughts do not have the rules of their own,but inherit the sensory-motor rules from the bodily thoughts,and that one can only understand an abstract concept from a certain perspective by importing the understanding of a certain bodily concept into the abstract domain through a certain metaphorical mapping.Conceptual Metaphor Theory provides a pivotal clue for studying cognitive science that the sensory-motor functions of the body may be the middle layer to connect the subjective mental life and its biomechanical basis.Following the clue,Lakoff and Johnson launched other projects in cognitive science to supplement to Conceptual Metaphor Theory.The most important one among them is Lakoff’s study on categorization.The central idea of Lakoff s study on categorization is that things and their properties are not objective,independent of human cognition,and that one’s categorization of things is fundamentally determined by the interaction between human and environment.The main body of Experientialism philosophy is about criticizing the so-called objectivism,which has dominated western culture and philosophy since ancient Greece,with the support of some advanced researches in cognitive science.Objectivism in its simplest form is the assertion that the world exists objectively,composed by objects independent of human cognition.The objectivist view of cognition is no other than the correspondence view of cognition.The conclusions of the studies on metaphor and categorization by Lakoff and his colleagues are fundamentally different from the objectivist ideas,which are that abstract knowledge is literal and unitary,and that one’s category system is arbitrarily carved out of objective properties.These studies are empirical studies with plenty evidences,while the objectivist counterpart are inferred from the objectivist philosophical dogmas.And both abstract conceptualization and categorization are fundamental and pervasive in human cognition.Therefore,these studies present a decisive,though not comprehensive,critic on objectivism.Experientialism introduced new resources into philosophy and opened up a vast prospect,yet is far from completion.Experientialism entails at least two major inadequacies.The first major inadequacy is that the second generation cognitive science is not fully developed to support the philosophical claims.Especially,Conceptual Metaphor Theory,as the pioneer of the second generation cognitive science and the major pillar of the ideas of embodiment and Experientialism,entails essential problems.Conceptual metaphors are defined so loosely that many conceptualization mechanisms which meet the definition of ’understanding one kind of things in terms of another’ do not entail the standard structure of a conceptual metaphor.Primary metaphors cannot be explained by cross-domain mapping thesis,then compound metaphors cannot be explained by primary metaphors.The second major inadequacy is that Experientialism covered its physicalism basis,therefore avoided some problems it should have been struggling with.It is being the frontline of natural sciences in cognition domain that grants the second generation cognitive science its privileges in philosophical debate.If Experientialism admits its physicalism basis,its project should be expanded to the pursuit of a refined physicalism philosophy.A refined physicalism philosophy should be able to solve the problem of conscious experience,which has been haunting physicalism for long.A refined physicalism should also be able to solve the contradiction between the embodiment of cognition and the objectivity of scientific knowledge,which is becoming prominent as cognitive science develops.This dissertation attempts to improve on three specific branches of Experientialism study,which are improving Conceptual Metaphor Theory,dissolving the problem of consciousness,and accounting for the validity of scientific knowledge.Chapter Ⅱ presents the simplify-reconstruct thesis on conceptual metaphor to revise the cross-domain mapping thesis.The simplify-reconstruct thesis makes the following claims.Thoughts of sensory and motor are the simplest and most fundamental.All the other thoughts are constructed by thoughts of sensory and motor in terms of spatial-temporal frames of experience.A human is capable of intuitively understanding a compound conceptual structure within a certain extend of complexity.When processing an overly complex compound conceptual structure,a human extracts part of thoughts of sensory and motor out of it,reconstructs them into a less complex compound conceptual structure,and understands the more complex structure in terms of the less complex one,which makes a compound metaphor.The same thought of sensory and motor is incorporated in different structures,which makes a primary metaphor.The simplify-reconstruct thesis preserves the explaining power on multiple properties of compound metaphors without introducing primary metaphors as cross-domain mappings.The simplify-reconstruct thesis enjoys some other advantages,including being able to explain the identification of abstract things,being able to provide an integrated explanation for more discoveries in second generation cognitive sciences,and being supported by more detailed evidences in neural science.Chapter Ⅲ attempts to dissolve the problem of consciousness in the light of the revised conceptual metaphor theory.The popular idea on consciousness claims that conscious experience can be privately,subjectively undergone,cannot be publicly,objectively discussed,therefore cannot be studied and explained scientifically.However,the metaphor analysis on ’ consciousness’ and associated concepts suggests that conscious experience does not exist literally as an entity,but is made up in the literal interpretation of metaphorical expressions.In the ordinary language,words like ’feeling’,’memory’,’thought’,and ’idea’are used to describe practices like perceiving,recalling,imagining,and speculating.These metaphorical expressions are literally interpreted as some entities in human head being observed and manipulated secretly,then are inferred that these entities are of the same essence,so-called conscious experience.The problem of consciousness does involve confusions aroused by the inconsistency among empirical knowledge.But all these confusions can be dissolved by restricting the validity of specific empirical knowledge in specific context.Chapter Ⅳ presents the model thesis on science to dissolve the contradiction between the embodiment of cognition and the objectivity of scientific knowledge.From the perspective of conceptual metaphor,not only the humanities,but also the microscopic physical domains are abstract domains that have to be understood through metaphors.The true object of scientific studies,is actually the human experience of macroscopic interactions.The model thesis claims as follow.The scientific formulation of human experience,though usually regarded as objective,does not actually state the states of affairs of the objective world itself,but rather construct a model in human imagination.The model is constructed according to the scientific theory which is adopted.A model can be complex enough to contain human body and its activities.The stable and repeatable patterns of human-environment interactions would eventually give rise to human conceptual system and conceptualized experience.Because human experience is conceptualized,the human experience in the model and that in the real world can be compared directly.The construction of the model can be revised from time to time,until the human experience in the model is indistinguishable from that in the real world.Then this scientific theory is able to explain and predict the human experience in the real world.