ABC seminar

Mark Johnson: Embodied cognition: how we make and experience meaning through our sensory, motor, and affective processes.

Mark writes” My interest in embodiment originally grew out of my work with George Lakoff on the nature of conceptual metaphors that define virtually all of our abstract concepts. We found that the source domains of these systematic metaphors typically involved aspects of our sensory-motor experience, such as the coactivation of our perception of changing in verticality correlated with judgments about changes in quantity, giving rise to the MORE IS UP metaphor. Considerations of this sort led me to think about the role of the body in the constitution of human meaning, conceptualization, and reasoning. Lakoff and I hypothesized that what we called “image schemas” – such as VERTICALITY, SOURCE-PATH-GOAL, BALANCE, CONTAINMENT, FORCE, INTENSITY, and so forth, play a key role in the structuring of our concrete and abstract concepts. I published some of this work in my book The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (1987) and later with Lakoff in Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (1999). In this latter book, we surveyed empirical evidence for the body bases of meaning and concepts, and we began to explore some of the emerging neuroscience evidence for this embodied cognition view”

(http://pages.uoregon.edu/markj/topic1.html)

Books:

The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, University of
Chicago Press, 2007.

Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western
Thought (co-author George Lakoff), Basic Books, 1999

The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason,
University of Chicago Press, 1987.

This event is organised by Crucible Studio, Department of Media, Aalto
School of ARTS, and ABC Aalto Brain Centre, Aalto School of Science.