Three dogmas of embodiment: Cognitive linguistics as a cognitive science
A brief history of embodiment in Cognitive Linguistics
Embodiment and image schemas
The enlarging scope of the embodiment hypothesis led to criticisms that its central tenets were underspecified. For example, the idea of embodied ‘experiential gestalts’ needed further elaboration.1 Building on work done at Berkeley by Talmy (1985: 293–337, 2000) on the role of force-dynamic patterns in shaping syntactic constructions, Johnson developed a theory of image schemas. He defined an image schema as a recurrent pattern, shape or regularity in, or of, our actions, perceptions, and conceptions.
He argued that “these patterns emerge primarily as meaningful structures for us chiefly at the level of our bodily movements through space, our manipulation of objects, and our perceptual interactions” (Johnson 1987: 29). For example, the CONTAINMENT schema structures our regular recurring experiences of putting objects into and taking them out of a bounded area. We can experience this pattern in the tactile modality with physical containers, or we can experience this pattern visually as we track the movement of some object into or out of some bounded area or container. It is particularly important to see that an image schema can also be experienced cross-modally, as when we use the visual modality to guide our tactile and kinesthetic experience when we reach into a container and grasp an object.
Johnson argued that these patterns can then be metaphorically extended to structure nonphysical, nontactile, and nonvisual experiences. In a particularly striking set of examples, he traced many habitual notions of containment we might experience during the course of a typical morning routine: we wake up out of a deep sleep, drag ourselves up out of bed and into the bathroom, where we look into the mirror and pull a comb out from inside the cabinet. Later that same morning we might wander into the kitchen, sit in a chair at the breakfast table, and open up the newspaper and become lost in an article. Some of these experiences are spatial and physical but do not involve the prototypical CONTAINMENT image schema (as in the example of sitting in a chair) while some of these experiences draw on purely metaphorical extensions of CONTAINMENT (as in the example of getting lost in the newspaper article).
Such image schemas are preconceptual embodied structures of meaning in at least two important ways. First, image schemas are developmentally prior to conceptual thinking. Johnson drew on work by the developmental psychiatrist Daniel Stern (1985) and the developmental psychologist Andrew Meltzoff (summarized in Meltzoff 1993). Stern argued that the activation, buildup, and release of emotional intensity is among the earliest and most foundational of our preconceptual experiences:
For instance, in trying to soothe the infant the parent could say, “There, there, there …,” giving more stress and amplitude on the first part of the word and trailing off towards the end of the word. Alternatively, the parent could silently stroke the baby’s back or head with a stroke analogous to the “There, there” sequence, applying more pressure at the onset of the stroke and lightening or trailing it off toward the end … the infant would experience similar activation contours no matter which soothing technique was performed. (Stern 1985: 58)
As infants we experience these patterns of feeling (image schemas) before we develop a linguistic self, and these image schemas are not unique to any one perceptual modality but have a structure which is shared across them.
Second, Johnson argued that image schemas are preconceptual in that they can underpin the mappings of multiple conceptual metaphors. We can extend– by means of metaphor– these directly emergent experiences to characterize nonspatial experiences, such as falling into a depression or getting lost in the newspaper (STATES OF MIND ARE PLACES) or being in a meeting (TIME IS SPACE). Further, we can project the inference patterns of the CONTAINMENT schema into the metaphorically structured domain. For example, just as we reason that the deeper an object is in a container the harder it will be to get it out, we reason that the deeper someone is in a depression the harder it will be to get them out of their depression. It is important to note that image schemas serve as the preconceptual basis for metaphors in both a developmental and a structural sense. The embodiment hypothesis is thus not only a hypothesis about how image schemas and conceptual metaphors structure adult cognition, but about the ontogenetic acquisition of metaphorical structure as humans develop from infants to adults. Embodiment is not temporally static.
Though calling patterns which are supposed to be cross-modal ‘images’ may seem to be a little misleading, Johnson fortuitously chose the term ‘image schemas’ in accordance with burgeoning research in the cognitive sciences on the role of images in our embodied mental conceptualization. In the early 1970s, the psychologists Shepard and Metzler (1971) asked experimental subjects to determine whether a pair of two-dimensional pictures of three-dimensional objects were identical. They discovered that subjects rotated these objects mentally at a fixed speed of approximately 60 degrees each second, suggesting that humans manipulated the images as a whole. That finding was extremely controversial, as the then prevalent view of the mind as a symbol manipulation system favored theories of mind and brain in which perceptual images were decomposed into image-independent propositional representations, much as they would have been represented in the computers of that time (Kosslyn 1980, 1994).
Shepard and Metzler’s (1971) original work on visual imagery was one of the key factors that led to a revolution in the cognitive sciences in which the mind and brain are now increasingly understood to be organized in terms of image-like wholes. This revolution has been most dramatically borne out by convergent evidence from cognitive neuroscience (Kosslyn 1994; Kosslyn et al. 1995). In particular, researchers using neuroimaging and neuroanatomical techniques have been able to isolate regions of the cortex which maintain topologically consistent images of (for example) the visual field as perceived, top-down visual imagery, and spatial (i.e., nonvisual, tactile, or kinesthetic) imagery. As the Shepard and Metzler results suggest, humans have topologically mapped neural circuitry for both the visualization and the visual perception of spatial form. Similarly, starting in the 1930s, the neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield and colleagues had shown that the somatosensory and motor regions of the human cerebral cortex topologically map the body’s tactile and kinesthetic experience. Such image-like maps are considered to be topological because they preserve the contours of perceptual experience, albeit not in a perfect topography.
Similar topological maps of perceptual experience have been found for the other sensory modalities, such as pitch maps for auditory experience. We now know that these topological maps are refined into more selective maps which respond to higher-order and more selective kinds of contour patterns. Though recent work on grasping schemas in humans and monkeys is promising (Gallese and Lakoff 2005), the current state of cognitive neuroscience stops short of specifying neural maps embodying the exact sets of perceptual contour patterns Johnson identifies as image schemas. This is especially true when image schemas are considered as perceptuo-linguistic structures, though several recent experiments comparing linguistic and perceptual stimuli have shown promise (Hauk et al. 2004; Rohrer 2001b). At present, the possible neurophysiological instantiation of image schemas remains an intriguing area for future research (Rohrer 2005). Yet the embodiment hypothesis’ proposal of image schemas is still both highly consistent with the known facts about neurophysiology, particularly the ways in which the visual system and other perceptual modalities map perceptual experience, and highly consistent with the kinds of structures we observe in linguistic conceptualizations.
3. Another source of inspiration that Johnson acknowledges for the idea of image schemas came from the German school of ‘gestalt perception.’ Many of the notions of pattern completion in visual imagery, of the felt sense of aesthetic organization, as well as pattern completions in auditory imagery and music that contributed to their ‘cross-modal’ character, were inspired by observations expressed in (for example) Wertheimer (1923).
