Cognitive Science and Linguistics
George Lakoff and his collaborators have developed several lines evidence that suggest that people use their understanding of familiar physical objects, actions and situations (such as containers, spaces, trajectories) to understand other more complex domains (such as mathematics, relationships or death). Lakoff argues that all cognition is based on knowledge that comes from the body and that other domains are mapped onto our embodied knowledge using a combination of conceptual metaphor, image schema and prototypes.
Read more about this topic: Embodied Cognition
Famous quotes containing the words cognitive and/or science:
“Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatist I have so carefully posited reality ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist.”
—William James (18421910)
“Consider the China pride and stagnant self-complacency of mankind. This generation inclines a little to congratulate itself on being the last of an illustrious line; and in Boston and London and Paris and Rome, thinking of its long descent, it speaks of its progress in art and science and literature with satisfaction.... It is the good Adam contemplating his own virtue.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)