Embodied Realism Quotes

“The problem with classical disembodied scientific realism is that it takes two intertwined and inseparable dimensions of all experience - the awareness of the experiencing organism and the stable entities and structures it encounters - and erects them as separate and distinct entities called subjects and objects. What disembodied realism ... misses is that, as embodied, imaginative creatures, we never were separated or divorced from reality in the first place. What has always made science possible is our embodiment, not our transcendence of it, and our imagination, not our avoidance of it.”
― George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought

“Any truth must be in a humanly conceptualized and understandable form if it is to be a truth for us. If it's not a truth for us, how can we make sense of its being a truth at all?”
― George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought

“...there is no real person whose embodiment plays no role in meaning, whose meaning is purely objective and defined by the external world, and whose language can fit the external world with no significant role played by mind, brain, or body. Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies. Because a vast range of our concepts are metaphorical, meaning is not entirely literal and the classical correspondence theory of truth is false.”
― George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought

“The embodiment of mind leads us to a philosophy of embodied realism. Our concepts cannot be a direct reflection of external, objective, mind-independent reality because our sensorimotor system plays a crucial role in shaping them. On the other hand, it is the involvement of the sensorimotor system in the conceptual system that keeps the conceptual system very much in touch with the world.”
― George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought

“...[P]hilosophical theories are structured by conceptual metaphors that constrain which inferences can be drawn within that philosophical theory. The (typically unconscious) conceptual metaphors that are constitutive of a philosophical theory have the causal effect of constraining how you can reason within that philosophical framework.”
― George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought