Three dogmas of embodiment: Cognitive linguistics as a cognitive science
A brief history of embodiment in Cognitive Linguistics
Origins of the embodiment hypothesis in observations about conceptual metaphors
To understand how these three dogmas of embodiment have emerged as a crisis in Cognitive Linguistics, it is helpful to examine the genealogy of embodiment theory within a single strand of Cognitive Linguistics. Here, I will trace its history in terms of conceptual metaphor theory within cognitive semantics; elsewhere, I have discussed its genealogy in terms of spatial and linguistic frames of reference (Rohrer in press, 2001a). For some time, the conceptual metaphor and embodiment hypotheses were nearly inextricable. Beginning in the late 1970s with a mass of empirical linguistic examples of metaphor, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) discovered that much of the ordinary language we use to characterize a wide variety of experiences is systematically shaped by a relatively small number of metaphors. Their work called into question the traditional distinction between the deeply conventionalized, ‘dead’ metaphors on one hand and the more creative, literary ‘live’ metaphors on the other hand. Amassing a large body of examples, they showed that linguistic expressions which were supposed to be ‘dead’ metaphors are in fact part of larger systematic metaphors which also have very noticeable ‘live’ metaphorical extensions. They argued that the ‘live’ metaphorical expressions are the inferential and creative extensions of an underlying metaphor, while the ‘dead’ metaphorical expressions comprise the core of the metaphor– so well understood that they are hardly noticeable to us as we listen to everyday speech. They dubbed this more systematic notion of metaphor ‘conceptual metaphor’, both in order to distinguish it from the prior tradition of ‘linguistic metaphor’ (or ‘literary metaphor’) and in order to emphasize that conceptual metaphors are a matter of cognition and conceptual structure.
Yet the systematicity of conceptual metaphors was neither their most important nor their most controversial finding. What was even more intriguing was their argument that most conceptual metaphors draw primarily on domains stemming from bodily experience, and that these bodily source domains do the vast majority of the work of structuring more abstract human concepts. In its earliest formulation, the embodiment hypothesis came from a generalization about the directionality of metaphorical projection. Conceptual metaphors tended to characterize the abstract in terms of the concrete:
First, we have suggested that there is directionality in metaphor, that is, we understand one concept in terms of another. Specifically, we tend to structure the less concrete and inherently vaguer concepts (like those for emotions) in terms of more concrete concepts, which are more clearly delineated in our experience. (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 112)
Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 117–119) identified three sources for these more concrete concepts. They argued these more concrete concepts constitute the ‘natural kinds of experience’ and are comprised of ‘experiential gestalts’ more basic than other concepts because they are the natural products of our bodies, our interactions with the physical environment, and our interactions with other people in our culture. Reserving judgment for future research, they also indicated that while some of these natural kinds of experience might be universal, others might very well vary from culture to culture. They explicitly pointed out that they were using the terms ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ in a sense which at least encompassed the possibility of cultural variation, and not in the sense of a rigid ‘nature culture’ distinction. Lakoff and Johnson concluded this topic by arguing that these more concrete concepts can be used in the ‘metaphorical definition’ of more complex concepts. In short, they argued that these three natural kinds of experience– experience of the body, of the physical environment, and of the culture– are what constitute the basic source domains upon which metaphors draw.
