Reviews: Books, Films, Music
In a series of books, one co-authored with linguist George Lakoff, Mark Johnson has articulated a vision of human thinking that is compelling and important. That vision centers on the key insight that our conceptual frameworks and ways of thinking are structured by metaphors. Often hidden, these metaphors play a central role in our thinking. Johnson draws on emerging interdisciplinary work in cognitive science to support his claims. His views are noteworthy because of their philosophical sophistication, their appeal to contemporary cognitive science, and their focus on one of the most significant philosophical problems of this century: how we can understand human thinking in such a way that we avoid a dangerous and problematic form of objectivism and moral absolutism without falling into an equally dangerous form of relativism. The account of mind that emerges in this account is one that gives central place to the imagination in constructing conceptual frameworks and in making sense of experience. It opposes any account of cognition that does not find a role for imaginative uses of metaphor, similarity, narrative, the framing of descriptions, paradigmatic exemplars of concepts, and so forth. The imaginative uses of these devices takes the place held by rule-governed concepts in more intellectualist accounts of mind and knowledge. But in avoiding what Johnson calls the myth of objectivism (the mind making a mirror of a prestructured world), he also attempts to stear clear of the equally troublesome myth of subjectivism (the mind being free to think whatever it likes). Against