Experiential realism
المؤلف:
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green
المصدر:
Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
C2P47
2025-11-30
21
Experiential realism
An important consequence of viewing experience and conceptualisation as embodied is that this affects our view of what reality is. A widely held view in formal semantics is that the role of language is to describe states of affairs in the world. This rests on the assumption that there is an objective world ‘out there’, which language simply reflects. However, cognitive linguists argue that this objectivist approach misses the point that there cannot be an objective reality that language reflects directly, because reality is not objectively given. Instead, reality is in large part constructed by the nature of our unique human embodiment. This is not to say that cognitive linguists deny the existence of an objective physical world independent of human beings. After all, gravity exists, and there is a colour spectrum (resulting from light striking surfaces of different kinds and densities), and some entities give off heat, including body heat, which can only be visually detected in the infrared range. However, the parts of this external reality to which we have access are largely constrained by the ecological niche we have adapted to and the nature of our embodiment. In other words, language does not directly reflect the world. Rather, it reflects our unique human construal of the world: our ‘world view’ as it appears to us through the lens of our embodiment. In Chapter 1 we referred to human reality as ‘projected reality’, a term coined by the linguist Ray Jackendoff (1983).
This view of reality has been termed experientialism or experiential realism by cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Experiential realism assumes that there is a reality ‘out there’. Indeed, the very purpose of our perceptual and cognitive mechanisms is to provide a representation of this reality, and thus to facilitate our survival as a species. After all, if we were unable to navigate our way around the environment we inhabit and avoid dangerous locations like clifftops and dangerous animals like wild tigers, our cognitive mechanisms would be of little use to us. However, by virtue of being adapted to a particular ecological niche and having a particular form and configuration, our bodies and brains necessarily provide one particular perspective among many possible and equally viable perspectives. Hence, experiential realism acknowledges that there is an external reality that is reflected by concepts and by language. However, this reality is mediated by our uniquely human experience which constrains the nature of this reality ‘for us’.
الاكثر قراءة في Linguistics fields
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