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mind. In this sense, then, the world and all of its components and
features are "mind-dependent." On the other hand, this embodied mind
is a real being, existing as a part of a real world that encompasses it and
transcends it. From this realistic point of view the nature of the
embodied mind is dependent upon the worldly processes that have
produced it and are now acting on it: real processes determine and shape
the human mind. In this philosophy, then, both mind and world have a
dual status. (1) The embodied mind bestows structure and meaning on
the world: the mind is constituting, and the world is constituted. (2) The
mind is shaped by worldly events. From this point of view the world has
the features and events it has independently of mental processes. The
world is causally determining, and mind is causaUy determined.
Husserl has offered numerous criticisms of realistic philosophies that
ascribe this dual status to both mind and world (Husserl, 1970). Modern
philosophy from Descartes through Kant has come to recognize and
analyze more and more fully the world-constituting status of mental life
and the mind-constituted status of the world. On the other hand, a
persistent "natural attitude'' has prompted philosophers to assume the
real existence of the world, an existence independent of mental life. The
world turns out, then, to be both transcendentally dependent on the mind
and really independent of the mind. Husserl thmks this duality generates
absurdities.
I shall not attempt here to adjudicate this complex disagreement
between experiential realism and transcendental phenomenology. I wish
only to mark its presence and to suggest a need for its resolution.
A second area of disagreement lies in what Husserl would call
"anthropologism" (Husserl, 1987). The world-constituting mind can be
viewed as a human mind. If we deem it a human mind, however, then
we must view it as shaped by all those realities—biological, evolutionary,
historical, and cultural—that shape the human mind. There might thus be
features of reality that we humans experience in a certain manner
because our neurophysiological make-up and our sociohistorical condition-
ing determine us to experience them in this manner. Human experience
is dependent upon the contingent deliverances of human biology and
history; and hence human experience is relative to the contingent
constellations of biology and history. Epistemological relativism threatens
to undermine any truth-claims, including, of course, the truth-claims of the
theory that implies relativism. Lakoff and Johnson directly confront the
problem of relativism (Lakoff, pp. 304-307; Johnson, pp. 195-202). But