会員(一般・学生共通) |
非会員(一般) |
非会員(学生) |
|
参加費 |
無料 |
4,000円 |
2,000円 |
予稿集 |
1,000円 |
1,000円 |
1,000円 |
計 |
1,000円 |
5,000円 |
3,000円 |
I argue that humans are embodied meaning-makers. All our meaning, concepts, and thinking are rooted in structures and processes that arise from our bodily interactions with our physical, social, and cultural environments. Everything we can mean, think, communicate, and do depends on what our bodies, brains, and environments allow us to mean, think, communicate, and do. I give examples of how bodily movements within our surroundings give rise to meaning. This includes brief accounts of key aesthetic dimensions of meaningful experience, such as schemas, metaphors, qualities, emotions, and feeling contours. The result is an “aesthetics of meaning” which sees human arts as exemplary enactments of meaning that are no different in kind from our mundane experiences of meaning. This embodied, aesthetic perspective supports what is known as an Embodied Simulation Theory of Meaning. |
The first half of the seminar is entitled “The Need for an Embodied Theory of Meaning and Language.” I survey a couple of major disembodied views and show how they gave rise to a first-generation “disembodied” theory of meaning, thought, and language. In contrast with this inadequate view, I then argue that recent research coming out of second-generation “embodied” cognitive science, set within an American Pragmatist philosophical perspective, reveals the central role of body-based structures and processes of meaning-making. I end with a couple of examples of body-based meaning structures.
The second half of the seminar is “Embodied Meaning and Image Schemas.” Following on the first lecture, I examine several kinds of body-based meaning processes, such as perceptual concepts, body-part projections, spatial relations, and image schemas. I give a fairly detailed account of the nature and operation of image schemas, using several examples of how they give rise to meaning, understanding, and reasoning.
I argue that humans are embodied meaning-makers. All our meaning, concepts, and thinking are rooted in structures and processes that arise from our bodily interactions with our physical, social, and cultural environments. Everything we can mean, think, communicate, and do depends on what our bodies, brains, and environments allow us to mean, think, communicate, and do. I give examples of how bodily movements within our surroundings give rise to meaning. This includes brief accounts of key aesthetic dimensions of meaningful experience, such as schemas, metaphors, qualities, emotions, and feeling contours. The result is an “aesthetics of meaning” which sees human arts as exemplary enactments of meaning that are no different in kind from our mundane experiences of meaning. This embodied, aesthetic perspective supports what is known as an Embodied Simulation Theory of Meaning. |