The philosophy of embodied realism: A high price to pay?

The indisputable advantage of cognitive linguistics is that it places questions of metaphor and polysemy in the broader perspective of human cognition and conceptual organization. Experientialism, a philosophical theory developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, grounds conceptual structure in certain patterns of our bodily experience. It is a very elegant theory, progressing from the notions of embodiment and kinesthetic image schemas to abstract concepts vis the mechanism of metaphorical projection. However, as I argue in this article, certain parts of this very elegant picture are difficult to accept. Some claims are philosophically inconsistent, other claims are contradicted by empirical evidence. The idea of metaphysical structuring of concepts turns out to depend crucially on accepting a kind of extreme empiricism which is unlikely to be true. I argue that the latest version of Lakoff and Johnson's theory - the philosophy of embodies realism - fails to resolve the problems that were inherent in the earlier experientialist proposals,. My critique thus concentrates on the following three issues: the empiricist claims, the reductionism-relativism dilemma, and the status of abstract concepts.