Page 82 - Contribution To Phenomenology

PHENOMENOLOGY AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE 75

and independent of, any concepts" (Lakoff, p. 271). The most basic level
of experience is preconceptual. And it is the human body that structures
the world at this preconceptual level. Moreover, this preconceptual
structure exhibits a "proto-logic" that receives exphcation and elaboration
at the higher levels of conceptualization. The "kinesthetic image schemas"
that connect the acting body to its surrounding world are proto-logical.
An example is the schema of a "container." The human body is
experienced both as a container itself and as a reality contained within
larger spaces, e.g., rooms. This lived schema exhibits certain structural
elements: interior, boundary, and exterior. These structural elements have
their own "logic": Everything is either inside a container or outside of
it—P or not P. If container A is in container B and X is in A, then X
is in B. If all A's are B's and X is an A, then X is a B. Lakoff also
claims that this container "logic" is the basis of the Boolean logic of
classes (p. 272).
In Experience and Judgment, Husserl demonstrated a similar "proto-log-
ic" that already lies embedded in preconceptual experience. Gurwitsch has
characterized the project of a phenomenology of preconceptual experience
as follows:

Its task consists in disengaging the "logos" of the perceptual world, the
logicality which prevails in it. Of course, logicality as here meant must
not be understood in the sense of fiilly conceptualized—still less
formalized—logic but, rather, in the same sense in which Husserl
understands the a priori and the categories of the perceptual world,
namely, determinateness as to style and type but absense of exactness.
Since the logicality in question proves to be the germ from which logic
in the proper and formal sense develops, it may be appropriately
denoted as "protologic." In fact, the transition from protologic to logic
proper (understood in the widest sense so as to include all mathe-
matization, algebraization, and formalization) requires specific indealizing
operations which, of course, work on the protological structures as
underlying pregiven materials (Gurwitsch, 1974, pp. 29-30).

It is tempting, then, to view the detailed analyses developed by
Johnson and Lakoff as expUcating this protological structure. Johnson and
Lakoff could thus be seen as furthering a phenomenological project.
Gurwitsch himself has called for such an advancing of the phenomenolog-
ical project: