(pictures above are just to be pretty and illuminate what simplified N400 results look like; they are not representative of my experimental work or Perichoresis)

Abstract:  A theory of ‘Perichoresis’ is coined in order to hypothesize the kind of mechanism necessary for a number of our highly productive semantic abilities, such as frame shifting, novel metaphor comprehension, and what is called here ‘deep cognition’.  On a first approximation, Perichoretic mechanisms provide the efficiency necessary for physically realizing the structure and dynamics cued by conventional language as modeled by Fauconnier’s Mental Space theory (1985). On one interpretation of the literature, Perichoretic mechanisms non-redundantly project structure from one Mental Space to another in terms of dynamic mappings captured by traditional principles of ‘presuppositional float.’ Projection is given more specific explanation in this article through analogy to Daniel Dennett’s (1991) discussion on ‘filling in’ and Seana Coulson’s (2006) explicit analogy between Mental Space theory and the various forms of interpolation within the human vision system. The theory of Perichoresis is further expanded through a consideration of ERP N400 component effects (Coulson, 2007) that are produced by nonconventional language, in particular:  novel linguistic metaphor and joke punch lines assumed to cue frame-shifting (Coulson, 2001). Perichoretic mechanisms are tentatively described as the opening of mapping pathways that are ‘deep’, both anatomically and semantically, and they are hypothesized to provide a multi-directional bridge between lexical integration and subsequent elaboration. Perichoresis is also developed to handle conventional language assumed to cue ‘deep cognition’, as in the case of simulation (Bergen, 2007). Perichoretic mechanisms should therefore provide the kind of productive semantic accomplishment common to metaphor, frame-shifting, and conventional deep cognition.  The efficiency of perichoretic mechanisms is explained in terms of their primitive nature, which in turn is explained by the principle of embodied experience grounding semantics. Rather than primarily indexing the ‘difficulty’ of lexical integration, the N400 component is reinterpreted as indexing – in part – primitive processes that yield greater semantic accomplishment per processing cost, in contrast to less productive ‘thin cognition’.

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Note on the etymology of ‘Perichoresis’:

Perichoresis is a theological term addressing the nature of the Trinity of historic Christian orthodoxy. The term originated in patristic literature and grew to reference the mutual interpenetration or indwelling between each person of the Godhead. In recent years, this doctrine has been reemployed to emphasize the dynamic and relational nature of the orthodox God, counterpoised to the static, impersonal definitions of scholastics, often involving what is analogous ‘feed-forward’ information processes (Coulson, 2006).  The sort of mechanism proposed through use of ‘Perichoresis’ is intended to engage with tradition within philosophy and cognitive science in a similar way.

Turning now to the ancient mystery of moral responsibility and free will, I can imagine no better place to begin than Herman Melville’s Moby Dick or The Whale:

Now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment (7).

 This much was plain to Melville over a century ago.  And today, we have good reason to suspect that conscious control, the ideal agent, the dispositional self, and timeless propositional content are to some extent illusions. It is therefore not clear to me why we insist on framing ‘will’ and ‘judgment’ as empirical targets of exploration.  Now that the veil has been rent, why continue in the law of the philosophers?  The situation, not dependent on man’s will or effort, hardens whom it will harden and shows mercy to whom it will show mercy.

I do not know if Al Mele has studied Moby Dick at length over the last few years or dedicated himself to the proper Calvinistic interpretation of Pauline literature. What I do know is that he has just received a $4.5 million grant to study “Free Will: Human and Divine”.  It is not yet clear to me that there is something we call “will” to study, specifically, and so I am mildly skeptical about the project of investigating “free will”.  To empirically study ‘white goo’, for instance, as apposed to black goo, there must be something certifiably tangible in the world that goes by the label ‘goo’. Yet, for 2010, $132,000 is allotted to the theology of free will, $165,000 is allotted to the conceptual underpinnings of free will, and $2.8 million is allotted to the science of free will. I am not skeptical about the conceptual underpinnings of free will, as this just might be all there is in the world to study as relevant to our encounters with the linguistic item ‘free will’.  As Dennett once put it: “Philosophers have a choice: they can play games with folk concepts (ordinary language  philosophy lives on, as a kind of aprioristic social anthropology) or they can take seriously the claim that some of their folk concepts  are illusion generators” (2007).

Mele was kind enough to attend my paper presentation on propositions and consciousness a few years ago for a graduate conference at FSU, but from the discussion that followed it was clear that we shared somewhat different intuitions about the existence of certain abstract entities that flutter within the imagination of philosophers. I have not studied Mele’s past work – and I should – yet I will for the purpose of this entry assume that a similar clash of intuitions explains my mild skepticism over this new proposal for a science of free will.   Just as there is no fixed propositional content in my possession when I “know that”, so there is no performance of a discrete action by the faculty of will arising from free, conscious deliberation of fixed, determinant reasons.

Dennett (2003) has offered some critical commentary on Mele (1995), but merely pointed the way to John Fischer for further research on the Harry Frankfurt tradition.  As it turns out, just a couple weeks ago I was fortunate enough to attend John Fischer’s UCSD presentation, in which he presented one of his forthcoming papers. Fischer convinced me that he had arrived at a fairly conclusive argument against moral responsibility’s requirement of alternative possibilities or indeterminism or any other such thing. The argument goes something like this (as far as I recall anyway): 

World 1 (W1) is reality. World 2 (W2) is an invention for the sake of the thought experiment. In W1, a person S considers Action V at Time 1 (T1), decides to perform V at T2, and performs V at T3. Further, S is morally responsible for V.  Consider, however, an alternative scenario: S decides not to perform V at T2, even when S’s conscious deliberations at T1 remain unchanged. Must this alternative scenario be genuinely possible for S to be sufficiently free and therefore morally responsible for V? 

Now consider W2, in which there is a random generator that produces genuinely random outputs of either M1 and M2.  If the output is M2 at T2, nothing happens that does not happen in W1.  The choice at T2 leads to V in the same way as it does in W1.  However, if the output of the random generator is M1 instead of M2, the normal processes from T1 to T3 are bypassed, externally forcing an alternative decision at T2 – perhaps through remote control signals from the generator to a probe in S’s head.  Because of the presence of this random generator, W2 is characterized by the relevant form of indeterminism.  

In terms of moral responsibility, is there any important difference between W1 and W2 when the random generator’s output is M2 in W2?  The intuition is that there is no important difference and what accounts for this intuition is that what is required for moral responsibility is not genuine alternative possibilities or indeterminism or any other such thing, but rather the right kind of “glue” holding together the deliberations at T1, the decision at T2, and the action at T3.  Moral responsibility depends on the right kind of “dispositional features of the sequence” leading from deliberation to action.  The action must be “suitably” related to prior processes. What determines whether S is morally responsible for V or not depends on the “intrinsic” way prior processes lead to V. 

 Fischer’s paper will be published at some point and so my somewhat thin recollection of Fischer’s presentation might need revision.  But minor revisions should not mitigate the modest purpose I have in summarizing this new thought experiment. This is because the important question I have in mind pertains to just what, precisely, these “dispositional features” or “intrinsic sequences” are (I jotted these phrases down during the presentation).

Fischer need not answer this sort of question.  His work is done. I am largely convinced. However, these rough, concluding intuitions must now point us to empirical research. But what if such research reveals aspects to this sort of intrinsic, sequential “glue” that significantly undo the very intuitions that gave rise to Fischer’s thought experiment?  History suggests that this is precisely what we will encounter.

According to Harvard psychology professor Daniel Wegner  (2002), for example, the very idea of the conscious will is an illusion. Dennett (2003) sees no need to fuss about the word ‘illusion’ here, but regardless of which semantic route ends up most empirically healthy, we might end up as concerned about the semi-folk concept of ‘free will’ as we now are about the causal relation between the brain and the immaterial mind – at least once we begin coming to grips with the sophisticated unconscious and the interpenetrating – and in this case competing – parallel cognitive processes that cajole us “into the delusion that it was a choice resulting” from our “own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment”.

I agree with Fischer. It is all in the glue.  But classical Frankfurt thought experiments were not necessary for the contemporary mind sciences to assume just this – at least so long as we keep Moby Dick nearby.  And it will not be to such thought experiments that the mind sciences must now turn.  Or perhaps I missed something. . .

A conservative Christian family member recently sent me Ravi Zacharias’s book The End of Reason: A Response to the New Atheists (2008) and asked that I offer a reply.  The following is my reply.

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1.  Introduction

1.1  The Author
Ravi Zacharias, born in India and now a Canadian/American, is a well known “international” Christian apologist. Zacharias preached in Vietnam and Cambodia during the Vietnam war, participated in Harvard’s first Veritas Forum, and has given presentations at Princeton. He spent a brief time as a visiting scholar at Cambridge University and is currently a visiting professor at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. In all other respects, he appears to enjoy the general career of the apologist: books, website, ministry, conferences, and radio.

1.2  The Occasion
The End of Reason (2008) is Zacharias’s response to Sam Harris’s bestselling Letter to a Christian Nation (2006). As indicated by the subtitle (“a response to the new atheists”), Zacharias intends to also implicitly address Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins.  These other authors are explicitly noted intermittently: Zacharias refers to “Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and a few others” (16), “Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett” (30), “Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris” (43), “Christopher Hitchens, a man too intelligent to write a book as base as The Missionary Position” (101), and “Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and others” (126).  Dennett is on my view the most interesting intellectual out of the four (Hitchens the most notable), yet Zacharias has nothing to say about him. Dennett remains lurking in the evangelical shadows of “and others”.

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2.  The Opening Tale

2.1  Paragraph One
On my view, the most intriguing part of The End of Reason is the opening five paragraphs (13-15), the first two serving as the foundation. Here is the opening paragraph:

A university student arrives home and informs his parents that, after reading a popular atheist’s book, he has renounced his family’s faith.  His mother, particularly, is shattered by the news.  The father struggles to engage his son in dialogue, but to no avail. The deepening grief causes them to distance themselves from their son.  When the game of silence does not work, the mother is plunged further into depression and despair.  The grandparents become involved, watching in anguish as beliefs that have been held dear in the family for generations crumble.  Before long, this family that was once close and peaceable is now broken and hostile.  Abusive words between mother and son are exchanged with increasing frequency and intensity, and the siblings blame their brother’s new strident atheism for the rift in the family. After a long night of arguing with her son, pleading unsuccessfully with him to reconsider his position, the mother takes an overdose of prescription medication and ends her life, unable to accept what she interprets to be the destruction of her family.

This is certainly a sad tale.  But can even the discerning, charitable reader predict what the moral of this story will be?  This short narrative entertains some events that are unquestionably fanciful, such as the son’s declaration that he has “renounced his family’s faith” and the fact that it is the religious father who “struggles to engage” in “dialog”. It is improbable, if not incredible, that a University student would refuse to dialog about an influential book he has just read. With these narrative details put aside, however, the rest of the story appears to me sufficiently realistic given the level of ‘dysfunction’ in many families. It seems reasonable to suppose, for example, that parents as characterized generally by this story would naturally cling not to the seeking after what is empirically true, enlightening, and that which promotes the common good of society, but rather, to the “family’s faith”. Similarly, it is not implausible that grandparents are watching on as traditional beliefs held “for generations crumble”. This appears to be, in fact, a universal story of the conservative mind meeting a changing world.

All we know about the son from this short story is that he was sincerely convinced, after reading a book, that God does not exist, and further, that he is willing to confess this to his parents. The level of grief experienced by the parents is therefore not what we might consider a healthy response.  That it is the parents that distance themselves reveal a particularly unhealthy, albeit common, set of social habits. I appreciate Zacharias’s willingness to include the real possibility of unjust and irrational shunning that often takes place in social situations like this. Zacharias calls this shunning “a game of silence”, implying some level of intentional manipulation. This increases the injustice of the parent’s initial response exponentially. Given this shunning, game of silence, and despair on the part of the son’s parents, the larger family unit becomes “broken and hostile”.  The mother is willing to engage in “abusive words” with her son, which the son now, apparently, begins to offer back. The parents are willing to allow their son’s other siblings to blame his new sincerely adopted and studied beliefs to be the sole cause of the family’s suffering. The university student is therefore unjustly accused by his immediate peers under the oversight of his very own parents.  Even after all this, the parents take it upon themselves to berate  their son long into the night, “pleading” with him.  The mother is apparently unwilling to reconsider her manipulative game of shunning her own son and unwilling to stand up for her son against the unjust accusations from her other children. Rather, so determined that her son’s new beliefs have been the sole cause of the “destruction of her family”, she commits suicide.

2.2  Paragraph Two
So what, then, is the moral of this story?  Why did Zacharias open the book with precisely this moving narrative?  Did the father or mother do anything wrong?  Is there anything they might have done different?  Did their other children respond in ways that were unjust?  Should the parents have rather corrected this problem between their children? Is the shunning, the game of silence, and the accusations against the ‘black sheep’ of the family the target of the forthcoming lesson? As it turns out, none of these issues are to the point of the story.  Rather, the point is that the book that this university student read that helped lead to his new beliefs should not have ever been written.  The person who wrote the book is immoral and deluded. Read the rest of this entry »

George Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things is back in the news.  Mind Hacks has directed attention  to the recent article ‘Tongue Twisters’, published by the The Economist December 17th. Mid-stream, the article modestly notes Lakoff’s memorable contribution to the intellectual history of the 20th century:

 Twain’s joke about German gender shows that in most languages it often has little to do with physical sex. “Gender” is related to “genre”, and means merely a group of nouns lumped together for grammatical purposes. Linguists talk instead of “noun classes”, which may have to do with shape or size, or whether the noun is animate, but often rules are hard to see. George Lakoff, a linguist, memorably described a noun class of Dyirbal (spoken in north-eastern Australia) as including “women, fire and dangerous things”.

 But one cannot mention Lakoff without also mentioning the orthodox:

A fierce debate exists in linguistics between those, such as Noam Chomsky, who think that all languages function roughly the same way in the brain and those who do not. The latter view was propounded by Benjamin Lee Whorf, an American linguist of the early 20th century, who argued that different languages condition or constrain the mind’s habits of thought.

 Whorfianism has been criticised for years, but it has been making a comeback. Lera Boroditsky of Stanford University, for example [you can see Boroditsky recently discussed at Newsweek here  -MPM ], points to the Kuuk Thaayorre, aboriginals of northern Australia who have no words for “left” or “right”, using instead absolute directions such as “north” and “south-east” (as in “You have an ant on your south-west leg”). Ms Boroditsky says that any Kuuk Thaayorre child knows which way is south-east at any given time, whereas a roomful of Stanford professors, if asked to point south-east quickly, do little better than chance. The standard Kuuk Thayoorre greeting is “where are you going?”, with an answer being something like “north-north-east, in the middle distance.” Not knowing which direction is which, Ms Boroditsky notes, a Westerner could not get past “hello”. Universalists retort that such neo-Whorfians are finding trivial surface features of language: the claim that language truly constricts thinking is still not proven.

The author of this article (I cannot find the author’s name) provides evidence for the fact that language does indeed constrict thinking, and references to Lakoff, Boroditsky, and Whorf are not counterbalanced by the hat tipped to Chomsky. Even this tipped hat is a gesture too kind, veiling what is really no kindness at all. Coyly left unsaid – a quality of good journalism I have come to appreciate – is the fact that a universal language of thought is more strikingly “not proven” than its competitor. 

Yet, I would wish to frame the issue a little differently.  I do agree that language constrains thought. Inserting oneself into another language community will constrain how one will or must think.  And it seems right that language development will form ways of thinking particular to that language. As Boroditsky concludes in Cognitive Psychology 43, 1–22 (2001): “When sensory information is scarce or inconclusive (as with the direction of motion of time), languages may play the most important role in shaping how their speakers think.”  Alternatively, the experience of speaking and hearing a language can influence overall ‘world view’, for lack of a better word – an idea I had years ago as my dark, inner warrior came alive to the tune of my friend’s recitation of Homer’s Illiad in the original language.

But what currently appears to me a more important point is that observable language provides evidence for the sort of cognition responsible for producing and sustaining it. So I would want to emphasize the photo-negative of Boroditsky’s thesis: the culturally developed mind/brain constricts what form of language is observed. In other words, thought conditions speech, at least as much as speech conditions thought. Whether or not the chicken comes before the egg is here an empirical question. Boroditsky (2001) does not address this question, but she does provide reason to consider it relevant. For example, the age of acquisition determines the extent to which a Mandarin’s concept of time is influenced by learning English (Mandarins speak more often of time along the vertical axis than English speakers). This suggests that once a conceptual system is in place, language acquisition might have little influence (although, Boroditsky does provide mitigating evidence here to preserve her original thesis). But regardless, the mature conceptual system will continue to produce the form of language that originally evidenced that very conceptual system, a point I will return to momentarily.

Boroditsky appears to agree that a direct, universal experience of the world provides the semantic grounding of any language, whereas language and other cultural conventions, such as direction of reading (the Mandarin read along the vertical axis), determine the unique features of more abstract thought. So in reality, Boroditsky has shown that language is one powerful environmental influence on how we think, whereas I want to emphasize that language is likewise a powerful source of empirical data that provide evidence for the more general cognitive mechanisms language makes use of.  ”Language is, after all”, as Lakoff put it, “an aspect of cognition” (1987, 21). Lakoff expands the point later: “Linguistic categories, like conceptual categories, show prototype effects . . . I take the existence of such effects as prima facie evidence that linguistic categories have the same character as other conceptual categories” (67).

Speaking of Lakoff, women, and other sundry dangerous things, I make further note of how our basic-level domain of experience grounds, metaphorically (metaphorically speaking), higher level cognition, as this article from The Economist evinces:   

The noun classes (genders) in Tuyuca’s language family (including close relatives) have been estimated at between 50 and 140. Some are rare, such as “bark that does not cling closely to a tree”, which can be extended to things such as baggy trousers, or wet plywood that has begun to peel apart.

I have pictures of myself while naked (and three years old) peeling bark from a large pine tree, and I think it probable that this experience, hardwired into my brain (and perhaps body), has helped me conceive of the disintegration of asteroids as they plummet through the earth’s atmosphere and of the force binding the negative and positive charges of a penny (separate them the diameter of the earth and still, even given the inverse proportionality of distance and force, we are left with thousands of tons of pressure – from what I recollect anyway).  More strikingly here: the cultural attire of baggy trousers and the adverse effects of getting plywood wet are conceptualized, as evidenced by an observable noun class, in terms of this basic level experience with trees and bark. But these Tuyuca users were not poetic softies. If you are a user of Tuyuca you are constrained to be more of a scientist and a philosopher than 80 percent of the current U.S. population:

Most fascinating is a feature that would make any journalist tremble. Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb. Evidential languages force speakers to think hard about how they learned what they say they know.

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Lakoff and Johnson (1980) offered a fresh understanding of an old saying: Life is a journey. Well, to travel back up into the article a bit we can land on a section that has something to teach us a bit more about this fact:

Slavic languages force speakers, when talking about the past, to say whether an action was completed or not. . . And to say “go” requires different Slavic verbs for going by foot, car, plane, boat or other conveyance. For Russians or Poles, the journey does matter more than the destination.

When asking someone from Ojibwa how they got to the party, they would say something like “I stepped into a canoe” (Lakoff, 78). In addition to metonymy this might show a conceptual similarly with people speaking Slavic languages, in contrast with the American’s life: ‘I do not know how I am going to get there, baby, but I am on my way.’  It might prove fruitful to formulate some experiments comparing different language communities’ abstract use of both vehicle of travel and destination.

Hey! Our friend Eric Schwitzgebel is in the New York Times, which you can find here.  Eric hasn’t yet advertised this fact; I had to find out from the recent entry  at Mind Hacks.

According to two experiments conducted by Bergen, Lindsay, Matlock, and Naryanan (in Cognitive Science 31, 2007), sentence comprehension yields interference during object categorization when the object is presented in the same location of the subject’s visual field as the event denoted by the sentence (you can locate this article through my link on the right to Bergen’s papers).

In other words, perceiving an object as a particular sort of object is hindered (in terms of processing time) by the pre-triggering of automatic and unconscious mechanisms during normal comprehension of sentences that describe events with the same ‘location’ as the perceived object. This is a reliably produced effect and rigorous controls in the experiments confirm, at the very least, a weak form of simulation theory. So another way of saying this, albeit with a dangerous dose of imprecision and extrapolation, is that the simulated imagery utilized during sentence comprehension is realized by the same mechanisms or neural architecture responsible for visual perception. This can be seen as a linguistic extension of what we have learned about ‘mirror neurons’ found in monkeys, which are structures that activate for both the execution and the perception of a given motor activity or action (Wheeler and Bergen, 2006).

But I introduce these two experiments by way of introduction, since it was the third and the fifth experiments that motivated me to write. (For lack of time and readable space I will not discuss the background experimental details – which is my readers’ loss, since they are brilliant.) These reliably produced interference effects were not found at all during a third experiment, in which concrete actions or events were implied only metaphorically. A fifth experiment was designed to further probe this effect, only to confirm it. Therefore, as a first approximation, linguistic metaphor does not utilize embodied simulation, at least at this fine-grained level of specific location in the visual field.

A fourth experiment had already confirmed that abstract description also failed to produce this interference effect. Sentences were chosen to test specifically for the hypothesized conceptual metaphor MORE IS UP (a metaphor only metaphorically). This suggests that conceptual metaphor likewise does not utilize embodied simulation, at least at such a fine-grained level. However, according to Richardson, et al. (2003) more course-grained, axis specific simulation (e.g. vertical or horizontal planes) does produce the interference found in Bergen et al.’s first two experiments. I am comfortable with Bergen et al.’s suggested explanation that up and down locations are perhaps ‘collapsed’ along the vertical axis during comprehension of more abstract content. (Which calls to mind Fauconnier and Turner’s mechanism of ‘compression’ during conceptual integration).

What I hypothesize from here is that more course-grained simulation is to be found during linguistic metaphor comprehension, whereas the kind of mapping involved in conceptual metaphor does not produce on-line simulation in the same way, if at all. It is tempting – at least for me – to conflate metaphor with conceptual metaphor, but conceptual metaphor is not literally metaphor at all and does not, so I hypothesize, involve mechanisms that can produce the kinds of conscious effects that have motivated simulation theory. I would also think that interpretive cognitive linguistics, in addition to norming studies, might prove illuminating – a thought I had while investigating the sentences used for the fourth experiment, motivated by the conceptual metaphor MORE IS UP. I hypothesize that conceptual metaphors are complex and interpenetrating mappings, such that, ARGUMENT is either WAR, or a GAME OF CHESS (Ritchie), or perhaps both, depending on what precisely it is to be and what it is like to be S at time sequence t.

I would also be interested in integrating these findings with eye tracking experiments during fictive motion (e.g. the chalk board runs along the wall), research suggested by Bergen et al. . I currently see no reason to think that these experiments cannot dovetail with Coulson’s work on the N400 ERP component, which perhaps can be linked to the RTs responsible for the distinction between compatibility (priming) effects and the interference effects discussed in Bergen et al.; relevant RTs appear to be situated between 200 and 1000 ms. Also highly fascinating to me, in consideration of my hypothesis that the boundary between conscious and unconscious simulation and emulation might reveal the underlying structure of consciousness, are the neurological disorders that produce dissociation between axis and location (Bergen et al. 2007, p.755).

The New Enlightenment, I will so far continue to assert, is represented well by a blend of Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and George Lakoff. You know enough about Hitchens for my purposes here, but I call your attention to the book Dennett published in 2003 titled Freedom Evolves. Trying to undo his life of sins and blasphemy, Dennett is now pretending that he has all along been for moderation, morality, free-will, the arts, and consciousness. Or maybe not. Dennett evidently has been for all these things, as suppored by citations from Dennett’s work over the last 30 years.

George Lakoff is in a similar but worse predicament. During my interdisciplinary research in 2005 and 2006, the literature I was exposed to took a largely disparaging view of conceptual metaphor, and so I did not read the original work by Lakoff & Johnson, which was regularly, albeit insufficiently, summarized by others. I have learned that this shortcut was a mistake. It is a shame I did not read Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (1987) many years ago, a thought that recently motivated me to pick up my still unread copy of Lakoff’s and Johnson’s three decade old Metaphors We Live By (1980, 2003). I went right for the material at the back of the book (‘Afterward, 2003′) hoping for some attempted explanation for academia’s commitment to old and empirically unhelpful ideas. Here is the result of this 40 second research project, the conclusion of the 2003 new edition:

The Present Situation

In spite of the massive and growing evidence for them, our basic claims have nonetheless met resistance for an obvious reason: they are inconsistent with assumptions that many people in the academic world and elsewhere first learned and that shaped the research agenda they still pursue. Many mainstream philosophers, linguists, and psychologists either have vehemently denied these claims or have preferred to ignore them and to go about their ordinary business as if the claims were false. The reason is clear – our claims strike at the heart of centuries-old assumptions about the nature of meaning, thought, and language. If the new empirical results are taken seriously, then people throughout our culture have to rethink some of their most cherished beliefs about what science and philosophy are and reconsider their values from a new perspective.

Above all, the key sticking point is the existence of conceptual metaphor. If conceptual metaphors are real, then all literalists and objectivist views of meaning and knowledge are false. We can no longer pretend to build an account of concepts and knowledge on objective, literal foundations. This constitutes a profound challenge to many of the traditional ways of thinking about what it means to be human, and about how the mind works, and about our nature as social and cultural creatures.

At the same time, what we have discovered is fundamentally at odds with certain key tenets of postmodernist thought, especially those that claim that meaning is ungrounded and simply an arbitrary cultural construction. What has been discovered about primary metaphor, for example, simply does not bear this out. There appear to be both universal metaphors and cultural variation.

For these reasons, this book remains just as controversial and radical today as when it first appeared. It calls into question business as usual and requires new collaborative cross-disciplinary methods of inquiry.

If you are interested in engaging in such an inquiry, the following references provide a place to start. . . .

UCSD’s Seana Coulson (find link to the right) and Rafael Nunez  are not necessarily “a place to start”, I suppose, so it is perhaps not a surprise that they are not listed in the short reference list that follows this new afterward – although the inclusion of Coulson’s Semantic Leaps (Cambridge 2001) might have been fitting. However, UCSD’s Gilles Fauconnier  and Ronald Langacker  are listed.

Also listed:
Lera Boroditsky  (Stanford), see Newsweek on Boroditsky
Fernandez-Duque  (Villanova University)
Charles Fillmore  (UC Berkley)
Raymond Gibbs   (UC Santa Cruz, PhD UCSD)
Adele Eva Goldberg   (Princeton, previously UCSD)
Grady, C (?)
Mark Johnson  (U of Oregon)
Zoltan Kovecses (?)
David McNeill (U of Chicago)
Srini Narayanan  (UC Berkley)
Terry Regier   (U of Chicago)
Eve Sweetser (UC Berkley)
Leonard Talmy  (U at Buffalo, NY; PhD UC Berkeley)
S. Taub (?)
Mark Turner   (Case Western Reserve University, Ohio; lived in San Diego)
Stephen Winter (Wayne State University Law School, Detroit).

Thus, the intractability of the situational enviroment 30 years ago looks much the same in “the present situation”. This is a situationist insight illustrated, however ironically, by the most recent entry  at Harvard Law’s The Situationist. Marc Hauser  proposes a Chomsky-ish universal grammar-like mechanism of computation that precedes emotion, and presumably, embodied semantics, during the formulation of a moral judgment. And yet the simple experiments Hauser provided seem to be better predicted by embodied prototype effects, a basic thesis of Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (1987). So I offered the following comment:

I do not think Chomsky has proven to be a serviceable heuristic, particularly here. Development within the mind sciences also has little use for static propositional content held within the unconscious mind and so I am likewise not hopeful that talk of a non-semantic calculus and unconscious principles that drive conscious judgment is going to be of much help in interpreting basic experimental data. Rather, I think Hauser’s experiments on double effect, in keeping with Lakoff (1987), reveal asymmetric prototype effects, where causing harm through direct physical causality is the central case.

Michael Metzler
www.poohsthink.com

The sociology contained in my book ( The Kirk: Mother of War ) is thus far of folk origin. I began writing to chronicle my personal experience within the Kirk and to continue the social analysis I had already began promulgating for Pooh’s Think, Part 1. But I originally had little to guide me as I sought to understand my eventual expurgation. Fairly cloistered from the news media, I was influenced largely by bits and pieces of my philosophy education over the years – notably from graduate education at the University of Idaho, which began soon after the launch of Pooh’s Think, Part 1. I received highly concentrated help towards the end of my expurgation from the new start up of Harvard Law’s The Situationist, which remains an important resource for me.

More recently, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and George Lakoff have been highly influential – although Dennett’s intentional stance has been a thorn in my side since 1997. I am shy to begin enumerating the others, fearing I will mistakenly leave someone out, but I will here venture what comes immediately to mind: H.L. Menken, George Orwell, Barbara Ehrenreich, Michael O’Rourke, John Bargh, Onora O’Neill, Phillip Zimbardo, Patrick Hogan, and my were-local discussion partners at Moscow’s Vision 2020  list.

Likely, my folksy sociology will remain largely in tact, as it so far seems consistent with my new explorations. Yet, more research is in order. In many ways, the first inchoate version of my book was the completion of a vigorous, painful research experiment that lasted 15 years. But now I find myself at the beginning of an exciting new project that was given birth through the death of that first book. As time allows, I hope to investigate the new academic and journalistic work on religion, power, violence, communitarianism, and war. This is what I hope to accomplish on the side of still other work that is likewise already on the side: work in consciousness, the sophistication of the unconscious mind, cognitive science, metaphor, narrative, and neurobiology.

I am inclined to begin with some books on the ‘new book’ shelves at the University of California down the road (San Diego). The following is a short introduction to 7 of these books. Perhaps I can at some point actually read them cover to cover!

1) Timothy Longman’s Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda (Cambridge, 2010).

Longman lived in Rwanda from 1991 to 1993 while working on his dissertation regarding church-state relations in Africa. He returned in 1995 to work in the field office of Human Rights Watch, the year after the infamous three month genocide infiltrated Rwanda. He has finally published his findings after comparing two local Presbyterian parishes in Kibuye. On page 312, Longman writes:

Ultimately, church leaders embraced ethnic chauvinism not only because they supported political authorities who adopted an anti-Tutsi ideology but because it was a means of co-opting people back into the patrimonial network. By defining Tutsi as a threat, church leaders were able to appeal to their members along lines of ethnic solidarity and shatter the emerging class solidarity that was challenging their control.

The introduction page explains that “Although Rwanda is among the most Christian countries in Africa, in the 1994 genocide, church buildings became the primary killing ground.” My Kirk brethren might be inclined to see my interest in this book as just more whining. I am after all the ’sucking chest wound’ version of the bleeding heart and the reports about what happened in Rwanda sound very much like the glorious routs of the Old Testament. Take for example Philip Zimbardo’s report in The Lucifer Effect (2007): “One of the young men told a translator that they couldn’t rape them because ‘we had been killing all day and we were tired. We just put the gasoline in bottles and scattered it among the women, then started burning’”.

Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, a Tutsi and “former social worker who lectured on women’s empowerment” could have helped her people, but she instead led the village of Butare into a trap, promising help from the Red Cross. “They were machine-gunned, grenades were thrown into the unsuspecting throngs, and survivors were sliced apart with machetes. Pauline gave the order that ‘Before you kill the women, you need to rape them’.” According to Zimbardo, the U.N. reported that at least 200,000 women were raped during the three month massacre.

2) William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence (Oxford, 2009).

Cavanaugh challenges the social-political research of the majority, arguing that “there is no transhistorical and transcultural essence of religion and that essentialist attempts to separate religious violence from secular violence are incoherent.” The prevailing concept of religion “that is essentially prone to violence is one of the foundational legitimating myths of the liberal nation-state.” Cavanaugh challenges as incoherent “the argument that there is something called religion . . . which is necessarily more inclined toward violence than are ideologies and institutions that are identified as secular” (4-5). While I will likely take issue with the more provocative features of this thesis, I would be surprised if I do not find a wealth of wisdom to be gained in taking issue with essentialist and timeless concepts contracted for ideological and political purposes (such as the timeless notion of ‘covenant’ in reformed theology, a thesis still unique to me as far as I know). Canvanaugh notes that the religious-secular distinction was not established through argument, but “through violence” (7).

3) Marc Hetherington & Jonathon Weiler, Authoritarianism & Polarization in American Politics (Cambridge, 2009).

Front, introductory material reads:

Although politics at the elite level has been polarized for some time, a scholarly controversy has raged over whether ordinary Americans are polarized. This book argues that they are and that the reason is growing polarization of worldviews – what guides people’s view of right and wrong and good and evil. These differences in worldview are rooted in . . . authoritarianism. . . . [D]ifferences of opinion concerning the most provocative issues. . . reflect differences in individuals’ level of authoritarianism.

After reading the first few pages, I suspected that Lakoff (2008) influenced this thesis. While not acknowledging influence, Hetherington and Weiler note on page 192 the correspondence:

George Lakoff’s (1996) treatment of morality in contemporary American politics tracks helpfully with our analysis in this regard . . . His conception of conservatism, which is premised on a ’strict father morality,’ is closely related to our conception of authoritarianism.

 

4) Brett Whalen, Dominion of God (Harvard, 2009).

On page 6:

Ambivalence characterized the idea of Christendom, which formed a limitless community of the faithful, a cosmic congregation, but also an earthly society of believers in the here-and-now. Christendom had borders and was universal. It could be spread by the righteous power of the sword or by the spiritual grace of God . . . Within this apocalyptic ethnography, both Christian and non-Christian peoples had roles to play in the realization of history. The expectation of Christian world order relied – somewhat paradoxically – on mutually reinforcing languages of exclusion and inclusion, on the identification of God’s enemies and the promise of their ultimate redemption, or at least their opportunity to be redeemed . . . The pursuit of Christendom . . . engaged . . . the sensibilities of medieval Europe’s ecclesiastical elite, sometimes including popes themselves, who anticipated the ultimate triumph of their sacerdotal authority on the grandest of scales.

5) Michael Ryan & Les Switzer, God in the Corridors of Power (ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, 2009).

My introduction: This book’s 500 pages appear to be a thorough analysis of the role that conservative religion has played in the religious and non-religious political Right. Ryan and Switzer, together representing American Protestantism and Catholicism, offer an abundant set of tools, from demographics to American history. Topics include media, conservative conceptual worlds, the constitution, abortion, sex, gender, science, Darwinianism, terrorism, militarism, and the contemporary Christian life.

6) Bayne, Cleeremans, & Wilken, The Oxford Companion to Consciousness (Oxford, 2009).

My introduction: This 700 page tome looks to be an excellent long-term resource. I see a good deal of mind science, and the selection of entries reveals an unusual interdisciplinary flavor. Bayne, Cleeremans, and Wilken have included an entry on ‘wine,’ and I found the latest answer we have to the question my son posed the other day: “why can I not tickle myself?” Recent experiments are detailed in an entry titled ‘tickling’.

7) David Thompson, Daniel Dennett (Continuum Publishing Group, 2009).

My introduction: Although not important research material for my book, I recommend this to the average visitor of the Wood. This appears to be an excellent introduction to the work of Daniel Dennett, written by a retired Canadian philosophy professor. I even noted a subtle play between the epistemic and phenomenal use of the word ’seems’  in the section on Heterophenomenology.

 A motion-picture is worth a thousand words:

That is just so like Palin.  You know?  But I refuse to resign my dignitity as an alumnus of the Universtiy of Idaho. Palin, as you can certainly see, is an alumna (We were both taught by the distinguished Dr. Roy Atwood too).

Newsweek has responded to the poltical noise generated from this cover.  But you can hear a pin drop as you turn the page to this edition’s article  by Christopher Hitchens. Please read. It is ambrosial – and true.  Hitchens somehow punches numerous 10d nails all the way in with one swing of the hammer.  Palin best not comment on the actual written content of this week’s issue.

I worked with a couple guys last year who said they voted for Palin. She was “hot”, they explained.  They invisioned a movie called “Nailin’ Pailin”.  Not that’s sexist, if you ask me.

Update: For what appears to be an excellent, scientifically informed response to these illegally obtained emails, see Real Climate’s original entry and their subsequent entry  intended to provide proper context to key issues and players. Will Powerline and other head-in-sand political hacks apologize? Doubt it.  Will the spin-scum cleric quoted below retract his statement about “fraud”? Of course not. They will all, as Hitchens once said, “just keep talking”.

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Powerline’s analysis of the emails illegally obtained from a leading climatic research center appears to be somewhat meretricious (if you search my blog, you will not find anything on global warming). You can see the primary, leaked documents here.

Powerline’s first post  explains:

Someone hacked into a computer at the University of East Anglia’s Hadley Climatic Research Centre, one of the main centers of anthropogenic global warming research. The hacker downloaded 62 megabytes of data from the server, consisting of around 1,000 emails and a variety of other documents.

I was eager to observe groupthink and system justification tendencies within a small scientific community, and although I do find some interesting data, I was disappointed in the largely innocuous material that was “cherry picked” by Powerline from 1000 emails. With such robust resources at hand, I would have hoped for more intriguing results, considering that scientists are only human mammals. Yet, Powerline seems to admit more than intended by the comment: “They are remarkably candid; these individuals talk to each other with the knowledge that they are among friends.” Powerline proceeds to build a vague case for the mass readership, equivocating between natural mechanisms of bias and intentional fabrication of facts. Compare the two statements:

1) The emails I’ve reviewed so far do not suggest that these scientists are perpetrating a knowing and deliberate hoax.

2) . . . this story was told about accountants: A CEO is going to hire a new accountant and summons a series of candidates. He asks each applicant, “What is two plus two?” The first two candidates answer, “Four.” They don’t get the job. The third responds, “What do you want it to be?” He gets hired. The climate alarmists’ attitude toward data appears to me much the same . . .

But Powerline concludes with the hedging disclaimer:

The language is certainly suggestive. . . but it’s possible the words used could have a relatively benign explanation. The surrounding emails do not provide context that sheds any light on what those words mean.

Determined to take a “political” stance on this issue, instead of providing an impartial analysis of these emails and what they broadly suggest in their entirety, a second post  was made, revealing very little not already made public through corporate scientific investigation and journalism.

This is perhaps one reason why it is illegal to procure information in this fashion: it leaves sensitive, private correspondence open to irresponsible hacks. Yes, I know these hacks at Powerline are practicing attorneys. (Perhaps I could just say that I rest my case – although they are well published, and one was trained at Harvard Law).  In turn, these hacks then provide further meat that anti-science, anti-civilization spin-scum clerics can throw out to their philistine admirers, as can be seen here :

And what we now know is that global warming is not just an egregious scientific mistake (which it always was). It is a mistake that certain dedicated true believers are prepared to persist in, by means of scientific fraud as necessary. . . . the thing will be completely over. Stick a fork in it; it’s done.

All the while, ultra-conservative leaders continue to warn their followers of the liberal bias and lies of big media. Hopefully, a more responsible story comes out of all this. I bet it does.

Update: An attorney from the Alliance Defense Fund sent a letter  to the CEO of the rocket center on the behalf of their “client” Vision Forum. The CEO of the rocket center in turn welcomed  the use of the facilities.

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Doug Philips’ new movie  The Mysterious Island was banned after initial go-ahead from the theater of the Davidson Center Auditorium at the United States Space and Rocket Center:

a government-run agency and taxpayer-subsidized venue which is open to the general public for private rentals and screenings. According to federal law, it is not supposed to discriminate on the basis of religion.

Phillips claims that officials “have rejected the film which is critical of Charles Darwin, as being too controversial.”  While not doubting the unscientific propaganda in the movie, my past experience with Phillips would suggest that this report is accurate.

I do not have time to investigate. Any comments or information welcomed.