| Bryn Mawr
College
To facilitate the broad conversations,
involving both scientists and non-scientists, which are
essential to continuing explorations of - the natural
world and humanity's place in it,
- the nature of education,
- the generation, synthesis, and evaluation of information,
- technology and its potentials,
- the relationships
between forms of understanding.
| |
Language: A
Conversation
Meeting Notes
15 April 2002
Participants:
Doug Blank (Computer Science), Carol Bernstein (English), Sharon Burgmayer (Chemistry), Anne Dalke (English), Paul Grobstein (Biology), Ruth Guyer (General
Studies, journalist), Mark Lord (Theater), Eric Raimy (Linguistics), George Weaver (Philosophy)
One Summary View (prepared by Eric Raimy; views by
other participants encouraged and can be sent either by email
or posted using our working group forum
area):
This week's discussion centered around the reading from George
Lakoff's book Philosophy in the flesh. Discussion
began with the question about how philosophy is done. One of
Lakoff's main claims in the readings is that current findings in
cognitive science should comepletely rewrite how we do
philosophy. A point that was raised is that philosopher's are
constantly using metaphor (and thus in my mind I asked why Lakoff
would have a problem with philosophers). Paul pointed out that
philosophers need to use metaphor because it is all we have according
to Lakoff.
Carol chimed in an asked what difference does all of this make
with respect to doing philosophy. In other words, how should
philosophy change in light of Lakoff's claims? Anne further
sharpened this question by asking whether 'abstraction' was a mistake
in realms like these. Paul answered the abstraction question by
pointing out that Lakoff did not defend this position (that
abstraction is inevitable) in the best possible way. Paul
stated that it appears that the brain categorizes from the very
beginning and that the Lakoff 'downsampling' example (vision going
from 100 million retinal cells to 10 million neurons) was not the
best example of this.
At this point George arrived and was put on the spot to answer
questions about how Western Philosophy is being practiced in this day
and age. Unfortunately, George balked at the question and
claimed that he had no idea as to an answer. Mark
produced a quote from Nietzsche, "We can't go any further due to
our coarse organ" which appears to indicate that 20th century
Western Philosophers were not that far off the mark from Lakoff's
points. Mark further pointed out that philosophers would
probably not object to Lakoff's claim that 95% of thought is
unconscious. Philosophers are just trying to use the 5% of
thought that is conscious to investigate 'cognition' and the human
situation in general.
This line lead into the question of 'objective reality'.
Paul claims that Lakoff would reject the idea of 'objective reality'
based on the fact that the brain is abstracting and categorizing all
of our sensory data. This point prodded many in the group to
try and devise scenarios to get at 'objective reality' or at least to
get outside of our minds.
Ruth suggested that we could try and create some type of crazy
drama (i.e. the Blue Man Group) and use this as a tool to investigate
our world. Eric pointed out that if Lakoff is right, we are not
able to do this because no matter how crazy we can imagine something,
it would still be the result of the embodied mind that we have.
Doug then raised the issue of computer models. This
appears to be a successful way to get 'outside of our body' in order
to investigate 'objective reality'. Since a computer is not
built from the same biological structures as a human mind, if our
thoughts are shaped or limited by our embodied mind we should be able
to create a different type of thinking creature by using different
materials. Computer modelling and robotics appears to be the
exact area to look for this type of information. One
possible problem with this line of thought is that any knowledge we
gain here may just be simply irrelevant in the study of human
beings. If we do discover that the embodiment of the mind
determines its cognitive properties then we won't be able to use what
we learn about 'cognition' from computers/robots in our study of
human beings.
Eric then raised the question about how new tools expand the
possible inputs to our senses. In particular, Eric brought up
the example of x-rays. We are unable to see or sense x-rays
given our natural biological senses but we have built tools to
measure and 'see' x-rays though. This raises the question about
whether our embodied minds will change (or have changed) now that we
have access to another spectrum of energy.
To finish the case studies of embodied minds, the topic of
paralysis and 'phantom limbs' was raised. These cases appear to
raise the question as to how productive the metaphors that Lakoff
posits really are. The real question is how would the spatial
language of a congenitally paralyzed person would be affected.
Lakoff claims that many if not all of our language is based on
motor/sensory metaphors so if a person is born without access to a
particular sense, we might expect that persons language to be
affected. Paul pointed out that the phantom limb phenomena
appears in congenitally paralyzed people so this suggests that some
of the metaphors based on sensory/motor information have migrated
into the human genome. This fact does not appear to refute any
of Lakoff's claims but it does complicate matters a bit.
The discussion ended dealing with a final topic brought up by
Anne. Anne asked what we should take away from Lakoff's claim
that all metaphors result from the mapping of sitmulus and internal
experience. Specifically, Anne asked what this position does to
the prior discussion of Two Cultures. Eric claimed that since
everything is metaphor for Lakoff, the Two Cultures division no
longer exists. Both cultures are metaphorical. Paul
corrected Eric by pointing out that not everything is metaphorical
for Lakoff. Sensory experience (at some level in the brain ) is
literal and metaphors only arise when knowledge from one module
(sensory) is transferred or mapped to another module (internal
experience) in the mind. At this point the group decided that
in order to fully understand Lakoff's position is we should read with
much more attention to detail. Time had run out at this time
and the group adjourned.