文档介绍：Why cognitive linguistics requires
embodied realism
MARK JOHNSON and E LAKOFF
In our book Metaphors We Live By (1980), we presented evidence that
taking the existence of conceptual metaphor seriously would require
a massive rethinking of many foundational assumptions in the Western
philosophical tradition concerning meaning, conceptualization, reason,
knowledge, truth, and language. In the twenty years between that book
and Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), a mushrooming body of additional
empirical evidence from linguistics, psychology, cognitive neuroscience,
and anthropology became available, which not only reinforced our
original claims about the pervasive, constitutive nature of conceptual
metaphor, but also revealed implications for traditional philosophy that
were even more devastating than we at first imagined.
What we saw, especially in light of sweeping, rapid developments in
cognitive neuroscience, was that meaning is grounded in our sensorimotor
experience and that this embodied meaning was extended, via imaginative
mechanisms such as conceptual metaphor, metonymy, radial categories,
and various forms of conceptual blending, to shape abstract conceptu-
alization and reasoning. What the empirical evidence suggests to us is
that an embodied account of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and value is
absolutely necessary for an adequate understanding of human cognition
and language. You cannot simply peel off a theory of conceptual metaphor
from its grounding in embodied meaning and thought. You cannot give
an adequate account of conceptual metaphor and other imaginative
structures of understanding without recognizing some form of embodied
realism.
The reasons are discussed at length in Philosophy in the Flesh
(1999: chapters 3, 4, and appendix). As Grady (1997) and Johnson
(1997) have (jointly) observed, there is a system of hundreds of primary
conceptual metaphors that we all learn by the age of four or earlier on the
basis of ‘‘