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Three dogmas of embodiment: Cognitive linguistics as a cognitive science Introduction

المؤلف:  Tim Rohrer

المصدر:  Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications and Future Perspectives

الجزء والصفحة:  P119-C1

2026-11-13

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Three dogmas of embodiment: Cognitive linguistics as a cognitive science

Introduction

No one would dispute that as academics we run the risk of becoming lost in our thoughts. One of the merits of a proper philosophical education is that we acquire a keen sense of when theorists become so engrossed with their own theories that they lose touch with the chaos of the real world. Or perhaps it is more accurate to note that such theorists do not lose touch with the real world in its entirety, but spend their days exploring the nooks and crannies of a metaphoric monastery built upon the craggy point of their original insight into the real world. Thus Spinoza the lens-grinder constructed a rationalist philosophy replete with optical metaphors for knowledge, metaphysics and ethics. Within linguistics and the philosophy of language, the metaphoric conception of language as a communicative conduit carrying meaning and ideas from speaker to listener (Reddy’s (1979) CONDUIT metaphor) has spawned myriad theories divorcing meaning (conceptualized as semantic content) from grammar (where the ‘underlying’ logical and syntactic structure is conceptualized as the conduit carrying the semantic content). For example, Chomsky and his followers have constructed theories of nonsense from the insight that even well-formed syntactic constructions do not necessarily carry semantic content, as exemplified by his famous nonsensical sentence ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.’ Alfred Korzybdski acerbically referred to this general phenomenon of theorists losing touch with the real world as “mistaking the map for the territory” (1948/1972: 34).

Cognitive linguists are not immune to this peril. Although elsewhere I have hailed the return of an awareness of how the body shapes thought and language as an antidote to habits of linguistic abstraction engendered by Chomskyian rationalism and first-generation cognitive science, I am now deeply concerned with what I will call the three false dogmas of embodiment. All three of them, as we shall see, rely on overly narrow and non-radical conceptions of embodiment. If we are not careful, the revolution engendered by Cognitive Linguistics is in danger of becoming institutionalized.