The Body's Role in The Cognitive Process
The second aspect draws heavily from George Lakoff's and Mark Johnson's work on concepts. They argued that humans use metaphors whenever possible to better explain their external world. Humans also have a basic stock of concepts in which other concepts can be derived from. These basic concepts include spatial orientations such as up, down, front, and back. Humans can understand what these concepts mean because they can directly experience them from their own bodies. For example, because human movement revolves around standing erect and moving the body in an up-down motion, humans innately have these concepts of up and down. Lakoff and Johnson contend this is similar with other spatial orientations such as front and back too. As mentioned earlier, these basic stocks of spatial concepts are the basis in which other concepts are constructed. Happy and sad for instance are seen now as being up or down respectively. When someone says they are feeling down, what they are really saying is that they feel sad for example. Thus the point here is that true understanding of these concepts is contingent on whether one can have an understanding of the human body. So the argument goes that if one lacked a human body, they could not possibly know what up or down could mean, or how it could relate to emotional states.
‘magine a spherical being living outside of any gravitational field, with no knowledge or imagination of any other kind of experience. What could UP possibly mean to such a being?'
While this does not mean that such beings would be incapable of expressing emotions in other words, it does mean that they would express emotions differently than humans do. Human concepts of happiness and sadness would be different because human would have different bodies. So then an organism's body directly affects how it can think, because it uses metaphors related to its body as the basis of concepts.
Read more about this topic: Embodied Cognitive Science, The Embodied Cognitive Approach
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