Friday, April 8, 2011
Mark Johnson
Last Friday, the CMBC hosted a lunch discussion led by Dr. Mark Johnson of the University of Oregon. Following a presentation by Dr. Johnson entitled “The Bodily Aesthetics of Human Meaning-Making,” faculty and student attendees engaged in a lively open group dialogue on the nature of meaning at multiple levels of explanation – aesthetic, emotional, linguistic, and cultural.
In his pioneering work with George Lakoff, Johnson argued that meaning is of a fundamentally embodied nature, with conceptual structure derived from – and inextricably tied to – sensory-motor experience in the world. More recently, Johnson has delved more deeply into the bodily bases of meaning, drawing inspiration from the ideas of the philosopher John Dewey. In his presentation, Johnson highlighted the Deweyan maxim that meaning emerges from an organism’s ongoing interaction with its environment. On this view, Johnson argued, aesthetic dimensions of bodily experience (e.g., feelings, emotions, image schemas) are the very source of meaning. This view contrasts with the more impoverished notion of meaning in much of Western thought, namely that meaning is solely a property of language and thus strictly conceptual and propositional in nature.
Johnson went on to suggest that artistic works can offer a window into meaning beyond the abstract propositional content encoded in language. According to Johnson, encountering art is a qualitative experience (i.e., we focus on discrete features or categories, such as the redness of one’s lips or the muskiness of old wood), and it is these qualities that are the basic units, or building blocks, of meaning. Qualities are non-conceptual in that they may occur outside of consciousness and are felt directly by the body, rather than conceived at a more abstract level. Johnson used an example from music to illustrate the bodily qualities automatically elicited by art. Through dramatic changes in pitch, the first few notes of “Over the Rainbow” in turn lift us up, bring us down, and pull us back up once again, invariably giving rise to a sequence of emotions, or a feeling contour, within the body. Feeling contours, Johnson suggested, are the structures within embodied experience that constitute meaning, even though we often cannot put them into words.
At the end of his presentation, Johnson elaborated on the problems that an aesthetic view of meaning poses for cognitive science. In particular, while cognitive scientists have made great progress toward understanding meaning at the linguistic or propositional level, we may not be equipped with the resources or theoretical vocabulary to explain more aesthetic aspects of meaning. As a consequence, to the extent that aesthetic qualities are the units that undergird human conceptual structure, we may be quite far from explaining even the very basic mechanisms by which humans make sense of the world. As humans are not primarily “proposition crunchers” (in Johnson’s words), it is essential that we develop tools to examine experience in its pure, unintellectualized form.
Johnson’s presentation sparked a fascinating discussion. Below I summarize some of the topics brought up by attendees and offer my own thoughts on the issues at stake, from the perspective of a graduate student in cognitive psychology:
How to Characterize Aesthetic Experience
The challenge of developing a theoretical vocabulary to explain nonlinguistic, aesthetic qualities of meaning implies, somewhat paradoxically, that such qualities must eventually be packaged in language. On Johnson’s view, however, characterizing the ongoing flow of experience in linguistic terms will inevitably be inadequate because there are certain dimensions of experience that language cannot capture. Johnson offered the example of logicians who report that they know they have arrived at the end of a proof when they feel a sense of resolution or fulfillment. If even logical propositions have an aesthetic component, meaning may never be fully specified through symbols. It seems, then, that the challenge for cognitive scientists is to devise clever nonlinguistic measures capable of providing a fuller characterization of aesthetic experience. For example, patterns of neural activity in response to different types of art might provide some insight into the nature of the sensory-motor representations associated with particular aesthetic “qualities.” An exciting outcome of this work would be the potential to study concepts apart from language. As recent research in cognitive science has suggested differences in the range of meanings captured by linguistic and nonlinguistic representations, characterizing the representations associated with aesthetic qualities might bring us closer to understanding what “concepts” actually are. As one audience member suggested, the construction of such representations may be a matter of “aesthetic education”; that is, training the mind to recognize patterns in sensory input. I would think, though, that much of the so-called training would occur implicitly as we go about our lives and naturally develop expectancies about how the world is organized.
Abstraction and Language
During the presentation, it struck me that Johnson’s characterization of aesthetic qualities highlighted their categorical nature. If the basic units of meaning are categories (e.g., red, as opposed to a particular red thing), it would imply that we experience the world as abstractions over exemplars, rather than the exemplars themselves. If so, does that mean some fine-grained components of sensory input will inevitably escape us? Is there an advantage to experiencing the world at a relatively coarse level, rather than having access to all the fine detail that the world offers? Experiencing the world categorically also suggests how aesthetic qualities may ultimately be related to language. Words are markers of categories, so the full range of aesthetic qualities taken in by the senses may represent a sort of semantic possibility space for what can be encoded as a word. That is, the set of meanings that can be lexicalized in language may be constrained by the range of categories that the sensory-motor system is capable of accessing. Of course, any given language will only lexicalize a portion of these categories, with the rest possibly consisting of a set of meanings that are conceivable even though they are nameless. Perhaps Johnson’s approach could offer new insights on cross-linguistic differences in word meaning by specifying the cultural factors that determine which aesthetic qualities become lexicalized across languages. One audience member suggested that aesthetic experience might be defined collectively rather than at the level of the individual. An examination of cross-linguistic differences might inform what Johnson called the “character of a culture”; aspects of aesthetic experience that are codified in the lexicon are likely to be those that are highly valued by a culture.
Comparative Aesthetics?
Although Dewey drew a distinction between human and non-human animals in his writings, Johnson suggested that there is a large degree of continuity across species in aesthetic experience. It is likely, for example, that non-human animals also experience feelings and emotions as qualitative units. Johnson posited that the ability to engage in symbolic abstraction may be what separates humans from other animals. It may come as no surprise, then, that symbols have been reified in Western philosophy as constituting the fundamental units of meaning, perhaps obscuring more basic bodily aspects of experience. Johnson’s earlier work with Lakoff suggests, however, that even abstract symbolic operations are grounded in bodily experience, so where does concrete experience end and symbolic abstraction begin? If there is no clear line between the two, it becomes more difficult to specify exactly what makes human cognition unique. Indeed, if research inspired by Johnson’s ideas were to take a comparative approach, it might reveal a substantial degree of continuity across species in cognition more generally.
