Page 74 - Contribution To Phenomenology

Chapter 2

Phenomenology and Cognitive Science

Osborne Wiggins
University of Louisville

Abstract: Concepts central to phenomenology are compared with recent
proposals in cognitive science. Both emphasize the role of the embodied
mind in constituting a meaningful world, both emphasize the primacy of
preconceptual experience, and both approaches view language, logic, and
mathematics as constructed on the basis of preconceptual typifications,

I. Introduction

In this essay I shall contend that recent claims by cognitive scientists
indirectly support and extend some of the phenomenological descriptions
of Edmund Husserl, Aron Gurwitsch, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Cognitive science is a large and diverse field. Those views on which
I shall concentrate represent only one subfield among others. I shall rely
on two books. The first one is George LakofFs Women, Fire, and
Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (1987). In this
book, he both summarizes the main findings of empirical studies in
cognitive science and develops a general philosophical interpretation of
these findings. Lakoff maintains that these empirical findings render
implausibe the reigning philosophical position that he calls "objectivism."
After critically rejecting objectivism, Lakoff defends his own philosophical
approach which he labels "experiential realism." The second book on
which I shall draw is Mark Johnson's The Body in the Mind: The Bodily
Basis of Meaning Imagination, and Reason (1987). Johnson too criticizes
"Objectivism" and offers his own alternative position which emphasizes
the foundational roles of the body and the imagination in the constitution
of a meaningful world. The similarities between LakofFs and Johnson's
views are not coincidental. They collaborated in writing the book.
Metaphors We Live By (1980).

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M. Daniel and L. Embree (eds.), Phenomenology of the Cultural Disciplines, 67-83.
© 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.