Ayn Rand vs. Philosophy in the Flesh: Part 1 Metaphysical Realism and the Correspondence Theory of Truth

I've just started reading a 1999 book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson entitled "Philosophy in the Flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought". The reviews claim that it "radically changes the tenets of traditional western philosophy." Needless to say, this caught my eye. Given the plague of contradictions in most contemporary philosophy, anything which claims to challenge them warrants examination.

This isn't my first foray into Lakoff and Johnson. I had to write a paper on the use of figurative language in translation for my MA in Applied Linguistics. As part of my research on the nature of metaphor I came across the earlier work by Lakoff & Johnson, "Metaphors We Live By". I had to say that the concept was interesting, the idea that metaphors are primarily derived from biological experience, e.g. that Descartes dualism was bunk and that our minds and bodies are an integrated unit. However, I found some of the later conclusions they drew from this argument to be rather sloppy. I ended up using more of Kovesces' work in the final write-up.

What tickled my interest though was the concept of the embodied mind. This is something which Ayn Rand was villified for by the philosophers of her day, embodied objectivism. So, I find it interesting that cognitive science is now producing ideas which seem to echo theories suggested by Rand. As the authors of this volume claim that their "embodied" philosophy "offers radically new and detailed understandings of what a person is", I was interested to see how much these understandings differ from those of Rand. Unfortunately they left her out of their list of philosophies to criticize. So, I've decided that, as time allows, I will analyze their arguments from an Objectivist point of view and see where they're the same, where they're different, and which is left standing.

PART ONE: Metaphysical Realism and the Correspondence Theory of Truth

Well, I hadn't hit page 26 before I found myself hitting the Ayn Rand Lexicon and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to double-check definitions.

I don't think L&J's definitions of cognition or the cognitive unconscious are too problematic. Instead they seem highly compatible with Rand's assertion that concepts are subsumed into the unconscious and guide our thought automatically at a certain level of operation. Until a concept has been integrated into one's consciousness, that concept will only appear in the conscious mind. However, once it has been integrated into one's value system, it becomes a part of one's functional unconscious.

Where we start to see some conflict is when they start to take on two issues, metaphysical realism and the correspondence theory of truth. Now, I realize that they didn't have Objectivism in mind when they were writing their book, but if Objectivism has answers to their problems, then they haven't succeeded in doing away with these fundamental philosophical concepts.
Metaphysical realism, by the way, is basically the assertion that the world is as it is independent of our minds. That is to say, that it doesn't matter what I may feel about the matter, that either there is a puppy licking my feet or there isn't. Period. I may be crazy. There may not be a puppy licking my feet. But if there isn't then there are ways of testing reality to determine whether or not there is, indeed, a puppy there. Reality is. Existence exists. The assumption of a common reality is primary to any attempt to use language. Teaching language would be impossible without it. Just imagine trying to explain "tree" to someone who doesn't know English and has never seen one before. You would probably have to resort to showing a picture, exotic gestures, or perhaps driving them out to a forest. You couldn't explain "tree" disconnected from a common experience of reality.

Nevertheless, this is the first concept that L&J attempt to take on. So, let's look at what they offer.

Their first offering is the color problem. They suggest that "human concepts are not just reflections of an external reality, but they are crucially shaped by our bodies and brains, especially by our sensorimotor system."

Intitially they offer nothing new: that color does not exist as such beyond wavelengths of light at various frequencies, or "electromagnetic radiation" for a more technical term. What we call "color" is how our brains interpret these wavelengths. They further argue that if our concepts of color are directly derived from our interpretation of the properties of light reflected from surfaces then our categorizations of color concepts would reflect the categories of reflectance. They proceed to point out that our concept of color has an internal structure in that some colors are focal. (That is to say that what we consider really really red, would be the central red, and more derivative forms of red may be thinks that are purplish red or orange red, etc.) The problem is that the actual categories of reflectance do not mirror this structure, so this means that our concept of color is "inextricably tied to our embodiment".

Rephrasing, they say that "color concepts are "interactional"; they arise from the interactions of our bodies, our brains, the reflective properties of objects, and electromagnetic radiation."

So far so good, I think. Rand says, "Sensations are the primary material of consciousness and, therefore, cannot be communicated by means of the material which is derived from them. The existential causes of sensations can be described and defined in conceptual terms (e.g., the wavelengths of light and the structure of the human eye, which produce the sensations of color), but one cannot communicate what color is like, to a person who is born blind. To define the meaning of the concept "blue", for instance, one must point to some blue objects to signify, in effect: "I mean this." (Intro to Objectivist Epistemology 52).

L&J then think they have struck gold when they declare that colors are not objective (that colors do not exist independently of the observer) and that they are not purely subjective (colors are not hallucinations). From this they claim that metaphysical realism fails, that color only makes sense in terms of an "embodied realism".

There are a couple problems here. First, colors are not objective, because they are not objects. Metaphysical realism, at least that as maintained by Objectivism does not claim that colors are objective, divorced from a human body.

"You are an indivisible entitiy of matter and consciousness. Renounce your consciousness and you become a brute. Renounce your body and you become a fake. Renounce the material world and you surrender it to evil." (For The New Intellectual, 142).

On the contrary, Rand singles out color as a sensation. Sensations can only ever be defined ostensibly. Taste would fit in this category as well. If you doubt this, simply ask a Japanese person to try and explain "shibui" to you. You can't possibly understand until you've experienced it. But even then, taste in and of itself is not an object in reality. It is a sensation generated by our brains in response to the operations of an object's properties upon our sensorimotor system. L&J claim the sky is not reflective, because it is not an object. No, but it is an array of objects which have a cumulative effect. The calculus of their objective properties invoke the stimulus which triggers our brains to recognize the day-time sky as blue. That "blueness" is only a function of how our brains perceive that stimulus does nothing to undermine the objective existence of that stimulus. Thus I think that metaphysical realism is nicely in tact. (One hopes that this isn't too terribly fundamental to L&J's argument, else it's already undone on page 25.)

Uh, oh! Turn the page and all of a sudden they're demanding that we give up the correspondence theory of truth. They state that if color isn't a metaphysical "primary quality" as defined by Locke, then we must give up on the idea that "truth lies in the relationship between words and the metaphysically and objectively real world external to any perceiver." This is an addition of L&J's and a misstep of many philosophers. Truth does not lie in the relationship between words and reality. "Truth is the identification of a fact of reality" (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 150.)

They states that a sentence like "Blood is red" cannot be true if red doesn't have objective truth value. But the statement does have objective truth value...in a given context. Context is everything. Blood is not red, unless exposed to air. But in that case it is. What they ignore here is that we have an understanding of what it means for something to be red, even if it is an embodied reaction to sensory stimulus. We have a knowledge of what blood is. Blood is an objective existent. It is an object and has certain properties specific to it. Some of these properties have the effect of triggering a response in our brains that assigns to it the color red. These are all facts encapsulated in the statement "Blood is red". And there is no denying them. But once again, it depends on context.

Isolated sentences never appear in nature, they are the province of philosophers. Especially those who like to take advantage of disassociated context to manipulate the natural ambiguity of language. However, this ambiguity disappears when attention is paid to the context of an utterance within a stream of discourse. Discourse contextualizes utterances so that it is possible for them to have a truth value. Every utterance does have a specific meaning in a given context. It is only by creating unnatural representations of language that the truth value of any given statement can be called into question. Context is everything.

Well, that's all I have for now, but I look forward to seeing if they have anything more convincing to come. I hope so, or else I sure wasted my money on this one.