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Delivery date: 11 Nov 2013
EMBODIED CRITICAL REALISM
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Kevin Schilbrack
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ABSTRACT
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Christian Smith’s What is a Person? provides an account of the person from the perceptive of critical realism. As a fellow critical realist, I support that philosophical position and in this response I seek to support it by connecting it to the embodied realism developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. In order to bring the two forms of realism together, I critique both the relativism of embodied realism and the idea, found in Smith, that the person’s awareness of the world is mediated by her experience. The goal of this paper, then, is an embodied critical realism, a more coherent realist position that combines the best parts of each.
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KEY WORDS: Critical realism, embodied realism, personalism, constructive postmodernism, mediation, epistemic relativity, ontological realism
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1. Introduction
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The critics who generate the most fireworks and are the most entertaining are those who find a book terrible. But, like Christian Smith, I am a critical realist and therefore committed to the view that one can and should “distinguish between people’s beliefs about reality and reality itself” (Smith 2010, 127), and I find his marriage of critical realism to personalism to be rich and theoretically sound. My aim in this response is therefore not to attack the central theses of this book—all of which I agree with and would defend1—but rather to seek to critique his critical realism
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Kevin Schilbrack is Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Western Carolina University. A graduate of the University of Chicago Divinity School, he writes especially on the conceptual and philosophical issues that arise in the cross-cultural study of religions. He is the author of Philosophy and the Study of Religions (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014) and the contributing editor of Thinking through Myths (Routledge, 2002), Thinking through Rituals (Routledge, 2004), and The Blackwell Companion to Religious Diversity (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014). Kevin Schilbrack, Western Carolina University, Stillwell Building 232, Cullowhee, NC 28723,
[email protected].
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1 Three central critical realist ideas in the book that in my judgment deserve wider audience are (1) the concept of emergence and the related view that reality is stratified, (2) the rejection of the epistemic fallacy so that what is knowable does not exhaust what is actual and what is actual does not exhaust what is real, and (3) the mode of reasoning that Smith calls retroduction (see Smith 2010, 97–98). The latter is, I think, the same as what the pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce calls “abduction,” and I suspect that it will be part of any post-positivist account of personhood. The idea of retroductive reasoning could draw further support by paring it with the work of David Ray Griffin on what he calls “notions
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JRE 42.1:167–179. © 2014 Journal of Religious Ethics, Inc.
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Journal of Religious Ethics
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only to advance from my own perspective as a philosopher the larger project to which Smith also seeks to contribute. The larger project of What is a Person? is to critique accounts of the person that dominated the last generation of scholarship, accounts that treat the person as imprisoned if not dissolved into language (Smith 2010, 194), and to offer an alternative from the perspective of critical realism. Smith’s critical realism seeks to defend a clearer recognition of the fact (a) that our perception and knowledge are conditioned by our historical locations does not imply (b) that we cannot refer successfully to a world that exists independent of language. Epistemic relativity does not undermine ontological realism. What is a Person? is thus part of the larger movement opposing deconstructive postmodernism in the social sciences and in the study of religion—and it does so not in the name of foundationalist modernism that seeks knowledge that is free from history but rather in the name of what we might call a “constructive postmodernism”2 that is postmodern in the sense that it gives up the quest for certainty even though it does not give up the constructive project of trying to give an account of what is real. I want to advance the project of constructive postmodernism by bringing together different realist approaches that are otherwise fractious. Specifically, in this response I want to build an alliance between the critical realism developed by Roy Bhaskar and others (for instance, Archer, Bhaskar, Collier, Lawson, and Norrie 1998) that Smith champions and connects to personalism and the embodied realism developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson and championed by Edward Slingerland (2004, 2008). Lakoff and Johnson’s embodied realism shares with Smith’s critical realism a commitment to anti-scientistic phenomenology and a rejection of empiricist restrictions on the possible furniture of the world and, as a consequence, embodied realism, like critical realism, recognizes that social realities are just as real as material ones. However, unlike critical realism, embodied realism inherits from the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and John Dewey a post-Cartesian approach to knowledge in terms of embodied practices that leads them to a model of knowing as direct or unmediated contact with the world, a view that I will argue Smith should adopt to make his critical realism more consistent. Moreover, embodied realism is an especially apt foil to critical realism because
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presupposed in practice by all human beings” (2001, 5) and with the defense of transcendental arguments by Charles Taylor (1995, 20–33). I also judge that Smith’s defense of teleological ethics could draw further support by pairing it with Franklin Gamwell’s metaphysical teleology (see Gamwell 1990), and that his defense of embodiment could find further support by pairing it with Lynn Rudder Baker’s constitution view of persons and bodies (see Baker 2000). 2 I borrow this idea from David Ray Griffin’s book series with this name. See, for example, Griffin 1988, ix–xii.
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Embodied Critical Realism 1 2
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Smith mentions it, in passing, as an example of relativism. In other words, Smith considers Lakoff and Johnson not as allies in the realist project but as failures in that project, as realism done wrong. The structure of my argument in this response is therefore simple, a poor man’s Hegelianism: I argue that embodied realism can be combined with critical realism to produce an embodied critical realism, but there is something that each must give up to make this synthesis work. Or, put less negatively, each side can learn from the other and the resultant realism will be stronger than the form each promotes on its own. This response therefore has just two parts. The first describes what I judge is Smith’s accurate criticism of the relativism of embodied realism, and the second describes what I judge is an accurate criticism that an embodied realist could give of Smith in return. Synthesizing the two then leads to a position free of those flaws.
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2. Critique of Lakoff and Johnson
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Smith asserts that Lakoff and Johnson are not realists about truth but rather relativists. He provides us with this incriminating quote from Metaphors We Live By: “Truth is always relative to understanding, which is based on a nonuniversal conceptual system” (Smith 2010, 130, quoting Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 226–27). And this quote is not cherry-picked. The claim that truth is relative to understanding is the central pillar of what Lakoff and Johnson call their “experientialist account of truth” (1980, 179). In fact, on my count, they repeat the claim that “Truth is always relative to a conceptual system” four times (1980, 159, 185, 193, 226–27). What does it mean to say that truth is relative to understanding? Lakoff and Johnson illustrate their slogan by analyzing the sentence “the fog is in front of the mountain.” They point out that taking this sentence as true depends on (1) seeing both the wispy fog and one section of a mountain range as discrete entities and then (2) projecting a “front” onto this side of the mountain (unlike, for example, the Hausa of West Africa, who would call the near side the “back”). In this way, “truth is relative to understanding, and the truth of such a sentence is relative to the normal way we understand the world by projecting orientation and entity structure onto it” (1980, 162). Lakoff and Johnson have an important insight here: we can only take to be true what we can understand of the world—and therefore what we do take to be true depends on our language and culture and historical location. A robust recognition of this epistemic dependence can also be found in critical realism, where it is called epistemic relativity. Lakoff and Johnson are right when they put their insight in terms of what people understood as true: “understanding a sentence as being true in a given
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Journal of Religious Ethics
situation requires having an understanding of the sentence and an understanding of the situation” (1980, 169). But this accurate statement about what people understand, interpret, or grasp does not imply the false idea that sentences are not true if that grasp is lacking (1980, 164). That is, Lakoff and Johnson are right that to make a claim or to understand a claim—for example, like: “E. coli swims in your intestines” or “the Cambrian explosion exponentially increased species”—depends on conceptual categories that are based on metaphors that are projections that issue from particular purposes, and since these purposes are relative, so are the projections, metaphors, and categories developed to pursue them. Our hunt for the truth is always relative to our tools. But even though making and understanding such claims is dependent on sharing certain discursive practices, the truth of the claims is not dependent on or relative to those discursive practices. That E. coli swims in your intestines or that the Cambrian explosion exponentially increased species are facts that biologists came to understand recently, but they are not facts that became true recently. Truth does not depend on understanding. I would therefore argue that the central value of Metaphors We Live By for the critical realist, and especially for the critical realist who studies religious discourse, is precisely that it provides a way to see that metaphorical claims can be true (see Lakoff and Johnson 1980, especially 172–75). Metaphors are not simply noncognitive frills or poetry, but an ineliminable aspect of knowing about the world. Lakoff and Johnson’s cognitive metaphor theory shows how closely related knowledge is to imagination. But the central problem is that Lakoff and Johnson slip back and forth between the valid epistemic point that understanding something as true depends on one’s conceptual scheme and the mistaken idea that what is true depends on one’s conceptual scheme.3 Critical realism was developed to provide precisely this epistemic/ontic distinction so that whether a given person can see that a sentence is true is relative to the capacities of the historically and culturally located person, but whether the sentence is true is not. And Smith is right that, lacking this distinction, Lakoff and Johnson’s experiential account of truth is an example of what critical realists call “the epistemic fallacy”4 and that it leads to relativism.5
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3 Paul Boghossian makes this point by distinguishing between the valid “social relativity of descriptions” and the invalid “description dependence of facts” (Boghossian 2006). 4 For example, Smith 2010, 152. Smith sometimes describes this fallacy as the mistake of identifying what is real with what can be known empirically or through observation (2010, 14) but, more accurately, the fallacy is committed not only by empiricists but by anyone one who identifies the actual with the knowable. 5 Sometimes Lakoff and Johnson have denied that they are relativists on the grounds that they acknowledge that there are cultural universals, such as primitive image schemas, motor control patterns, primary metaphors, and color concepts (2002, 251–52). But given
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Smith’s criticism of the view of truth in Lakoff and Johnson’s early work is therefore on target. But in the thirty years since Metaphors We Live By came out, Lakoff and Johnson have increasingly presented their position as a form of realism.6 As they put it in 2002, one “cannot give an adequate account of conceptual metaphor and other imaginative structures of understanding without recognizing some form of embodied realism” (2002, 245). The fullest account of this embodied realism is their Philosophy in the Flesh (1999, especially 74–132). Smith cites that book twice (2010, 64n, 323n), and both times he includes a caveat that he finds it problematic, but does not analyze the idea of embodied realism. The question for our purposes, then, is: to what extent do Lakoff and Johnson in their more recent work move beyond the experientialist account in which truth depends on understanding and which, Smith says rightly, leads to relativism? And the answer is not at all. They continue to argue that truth depends on and is relative to understanding.7 They still make the ontic category of what is true about the world depend on the epistemic category of what human beings understand, collapsing metaphysics into epistemology.8 Lakoff and Johnson both argue (separately) that their embodied realism is a version of the “internal realism” developed by Hilary Putnam in which there can be correspondence of words to objects, though only within a conceptual scheme (Lakoff 1987, 260–88; Johnson 1987, 194–212). But this is no help: like Rorty’s neopragmatism (which Johnson incongruously calls “pragmatic realism”), Putnam’s internal realism collapses justification and truth, and Putnam himself tellingly came to abandon his internal realism as relativistic (Putnam 1994). Lakoff and Johnson also claim that their approach accords with the fact that people use the word true as relative to understanding (1999, 107). But the word “truth” is used, unlike the word “understanding,” to describe statements (like: “E. coli swims in your intestines”) that are the case whether or not a person understands them. In short, to base truth on understanding in this way undermines their pursuit of realism. Moreover, because Lakoff and Johnson claim that the truth about the world is relative to one’s scheme, and that there are “alternative incompatible conceptual schemes” (Lakoff 1987, 264), reality on their account becomes fissiparous. They say, for example, that the sentence “the color
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their experientialist theory of truth, the truth that there are cultural universals is still presumably still relative to understanding and therefore dependent on their conceptual system and not true independent of that system. 6 I believe that the name of their position evolved from (1) “experientialism” (1980), to (2) “experiential realism” (1987, 268), to (3) “embodied realism” (1999, 2002). 7 In fact, “Truth Is Based on Understanding” is a subtitle in 1980 (179) and “Truth Depends on Understanding” is a subtitle in 1999 (106). 8 “In embodied realism, where truth depends on understanding, there is no . . . metaphysics-epistemology split” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 114).
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Journal of Religious Ethics
green is real” is true when we are speaking of our experience phenomenologically, but the sentence “the color green is not real” is true when we are speaking of our experience neurologically, and the choice between what is real is, they say, a dilemma. But they see a dilemma here only because they have defined truth as relative to one’s conceptual scheme. The critical realist response, stated with diamond-like clarity by Smith, is that one can completely affirm that exists, operates, and can be studied at different levels or strata—not only the neural and the phenomenological, but also the physical, chemical, biological, social (see especially Smith 2010, 34–35)—as the levels of single reality with emergent properties. Lakoff and Johnson worry that to speak of what exists as a single reality will flatten all the different ways of knowing it, and they insist that there is no “single, perspective-neutral truth . . . there is no unified metaphysics” (1999, 107, 108). But to hold that there is one world need not imply that there is a single, perspective-neutral truth. Critical realism lets us speak of one world that has multiple levels of reality, sorted by our diverse perspectives and vocabularies, without implying that there are multiple incommensurable worlds. The idea that the world is relative to our conceptual schemes makes a correspondence theory of truth problematic at best and nonsense at worst, but the idea that the world we share is stratified lets one keep it. My last question, therefore, is this: if the experiential theory of truth is problematic in the way I have been describing, how central is it the idea of embodied realism? Can it be excised? Lakoff and Johnson define their embodied realism in terms of three elements:
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1. A realist element that that they describe as the assumption that the material world exists;9 2. A direct perception element that they describe as the rejection of any mind-body gap, an important idea to which I return in the next section of the paper, and; 3. An epistemic element that they describe as the rejection of objective knowledge. (1999, 96)
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It is noteworthy that the experientialist theory of truth is not a fourth element in embodied realism. Lakoff and Johnson think that it follows
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9 This is a tepid definition of realism, and in other works Lakoff and Johnson describe the realist element in their approach in similar way, claim, for instance that realism holds that “The physical world is what it is. Cultures are what they are. People are what they are” (1980, 181) or that “there is something in the physical world besides human beings” (Johnson 1987, 202). I take it that it is because they espouse their experientialist theory of truth that they are led to describe the first, realist element in embodied realism merely as the view that there is a physical or material world and not, more robustly and more typically, as the view that true statements refer to a world that exists independently of our understanding, conceptual schemes, or our discursive practices.
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from the third one: that is, they think that if one gives up the objectivist idea that there is only one true description of the world, then one will be led to their conclusion that truth depends on and is relative to one’s understanding. But if the arguments of the previous paragraphs are valid, then to give up objectivism does not imply an experientialist theory of truth. Certainly, Smith gives up objectivism and embraces what he calls (after Polanyi) personal knowledge, but he maintains a correspondence theory of truth. The experientialist theory of truth is not supported by the rejection of objectivism. It still needs an argument that will justify it. Since I think that no such argument will be found, I recommend that those who, like me, are attracted to Lakoff and Johnson’s embodied realism, drop the experientialist theory of truth, along with its attendant relativism, and keep the three central elements of their position. That experientialist theory of truth is what needs to go if the synthesis with critical realism is to go forward. In sum, then, I judge that embodied realism and critical realism both seek to describe a world that exists independently of our understanding or our discursive practices. They also both reject empiricism, and they both argue that social realities and mathematical realities are just as real as physical realities.10 In these respects, the two are close. Nevertheless, if they are to be realists, then embodied realists need to join critical realists in distinguishing between the ontic category of truth and the epistemic category of belief. This will require them to say that their experientialist theory is not a theory of truth but rather of theory of believing true. It is about the subject’s epistemic condition and not the ontic environment.
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3. Critique of Smith
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As I said in my introduction, despite the flaw in its account of truth, embodied realism has a contribution to make to the constructive postmodern project, a contribution to a more consistent realism that, I will now argue, both critical realists in general and Smith in particular should adopt. The contribution is the second element in their embodied realism, what I called the direct perception element. The central idea of direct perception is that we should understand experience not as the internal processing of symbols that, when arranged properly, can connect the person to the external world. We should instead understand experience as the direct or unmediated interaction of an organism in its environment. On this approach, there is no gap between
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10 As Lakoff and Johnson say, social institutions are no less real than trees (1980, 181); on mathematical or conceptual realities (see 2002, 260).
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Journal of Religious Ethics
mind and body and persons are never separated or divorced from reality in the first place (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 176–77; 1999, 93, 94–98). This element is in fact the strongest reason why Lakoff and Johnson’s realism should be called “embodied.” Direct perception has the potential to be a revolutionary idea, and so I would like to put it in context. Here is a history of western philosophy in one paragraph. Classical western thinkers presented the subject matter of philosophy as reasoned inquiry into the things of the world: thus Aristotle lectured on aesthetics, ethics, and logic, but he also lectured on stars, animal reproduction, and constitutions. For Aristotle and other classical thinkers, philosophers studied reality in all of its variety, and metaphysics was simply the study of things-in-general. By contrast, the thinkers whom we now label as “modern” philosophers are those who made the subjective turn in the sense that they held that the object of philosophy is not the things of the world themselves but rather our experience of those things. With this idea, epistemology displaces metaphysics as the central task of philosophy. Now, there are many ways to reflect on the relation between the person and her experiences, but one way is to see experience as that which mediates the world to the person. Here, to use a visual metaphor, one conceives of experience as a kind of a window onto the world, as that which gives the subject access to the external world. For example, Descartes argued that what one knows best is the ideas in one’s own mind and not the things in the external word that they are meant to represent, and Kant argued that the categories of understanding make experience possible even as they make metaphysics in the classical or Aristotelian sense impossible—both with tremendous influence. For these modern philosophers, the crucial insight is that we do not know the world directly but only through the mediation of our experiences. By contrast again, the thinkers whom we now label as “postmodern” philosophers are those who make the linguistic turn in the sense that they see the subject’s experience as inevitably shaped by the concepts found in the socially and historically emergent languages of one’s discursive community. For this movement, epistemology is therefore itself displaced as the central task of philosophy and is supplanted by reflection on language. One can therefore draw this comparison: whereas modern philosophers after Kant tend to argue that subjects do not have direct access to things in themselves, because all knowledge of the world is mediated by the filters of experience, postmodern philosophers tend to argue that we do not even have direct access to experience because all knowledge of experience is mediated by the filters of language. This brand of “postmodern” thought has been called “most modern” thought in that it does not divert from but rather repeats the modern idea that the world must be mediated to us. By continuing the modern view of knowledge as mediation, postmodern thought makes
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metaphysics—that is, knowledge of the things of the world as such—if even coherent at all, now doubly unavailable.11 In this context, what embodied realism offers to constructive postmodernism is the idea that our perception of the world is direct and is not mediated by experience or language. It is important to underline that direct perception is not the claim that experience is absolute or infallible; Lakoff and Johnson reject that idea just as fully as Smith does. But it is to say that the subject is always already in the world, submerged or (to use the vocabulary of embodied cognitive scientists) “tightly coupled” as an organism in its environment, and having and needing no “go between” or bridge to reach the world (see Clark 1997, 2008; Chemero 2009). What is being proposed, to put this idea in my own words, is that we recognize that the ubiquitous claim that experience or language “mediates” the world to us is a metaphor, that it is a strange one, and that we should drop it. It is a strange idea, after all, that something “comes between” me and the world when I am chewing pizza, or smelling smoke, or listening to music, or walking into the dresser in the dark. And it is even stranger to say that what intercedes between me and the world is—of all things!—my experience.12 The metaphor of mediation creates a wedge in the world, dividing the knowable “things as they appear” from the unknowable “things in themselves.” This metaphor of mediation generates the problem that has dominated philosophy in both its modernist and postmodern forms: the problem of skepticism that asks how one can know whether any of one’s ideas successfully cross the gap between knower and world. It puts realism perpetually on the defensive and makes metaphysics into a yearning for the impossible. But for embodied realism, there is no “gap” and no “other side.” To accept this idea of unmediated perception will therefore involve a shift of metaphor: perception is not mediated, but it is still perspectival, in the sense that I experience the world from my location and with my capacities and interests, and others experience the world from theirs. But neither I nor they are insulated from the world by a window or filter or a grid formed by the categories of experience. Similarly, language is a human creation developed to sort the world into the categories that we find useful, just as a silverware sorter helps us divide knives from spoons.13 But the claim that language intercedes “between” me and the world is a metaphor, and a pernicious one.
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This paragraph is borrowed from Schilbrack 2014. The notion that experience is what provides us with “access” to reality is a strange metaphor in the same way: both the idea of “access” to the world and “mediating” the world require us to take a concept that applies to some experiences but not others—for example, my access to this room but not that one—and then to apply it to reality as a whole. 13 I owe this nice metaphor to Craig Martin. 12
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So, how open is Smith’s critical realist personalism to this embodied realist idea of direct or unmediated perception? To be sure, in What is a Person? Smith makes embodiment central to his position. As he says, “Personalism begins with the body” (2010, 332). In fact, What is a Person? provides a recovery of the role of embodied practice in our understanding of persons (2010, especially 63–64, 323–24, 327–32). And crucial to this recovery of embodied practice is a commitment to an anti-scientistic phenomenology instead of a narrow, Humean account of knowledge. I do not see any serious conflict between Smith and the phenomenology of the body of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and I judge that Smith would welcome what Thomas Csordas calls “the embodiment paradigm”, according to which the body is not only a site of cultural inscription but also the existential seat of subjectivity (Csordas 1990). Nevertheless, when Smith gets to his short excursus on truth, the concept of “mediation” begins to show up again and again (2010, 207, 208, 209, 213). And it is clear that Smith not only happens to use that word, as nearly everyone today does, but also that he conceives of experience as something that must “pass through the grids of our cognitive categories” (2010, 334). Ironically, then, Smith is right to argue that Lakoff and Johnson’s reliance on the idea of conceptual schemes leads them to relativism, but the idea of a conceptual scheme threatens to play a larger role in what he says about knowledge than it does in their unmediated approach. Rejecting the idea of conceptual schemes and adopting in its place the idea of direct or unmediated perception would ally Smith’s critical realism with several philosophers who draw on early pragmatism and the later Wittgenstein in such a way as to develop a practice-centered account of knowledge that does not involve intermediary schemes. I could give a long list here, but will limit myself to two: Donald Davidson and Robert Brandom.14 Moreover, the notion of direct or unmediated perception is a
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14 Davidson’s oft-cited conclusion to “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” is a good statement of both critical realism and direct perception. He writes that, given the “dogma” of belief in conceptual schemes, “we get conceptual relativity, and truth relative to a scheme. Without the dogma, this kind of relativity goes by the board. Of course truth of sentences remains relative to language, but that is as objective as can be. In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but re-establish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false” (1984, 198). The relevance of Davidson’s opposition to the idea of conceptual schemes to the study of religion has been laid out powerfully by Godlove 1989. For Robert Brandom, see Brandom 1994. The value of Brandom’s non-inferentialist account of truth, meaning, reference is laid out clearly by Kevin Hector, who argues against the “claim that concepts should be thought to mediate objects to us in such a way that we have no access to objects themselves” and for the view that, properly understood, “it no longer makes sense to think of [our concepts] as go-betweens . . . [since] concepts are applied non-inferentially, and so immediately, in everyday perception” (2011, 186–87, compare 153–56).
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natural fit for critical realism. Because critical realists hold that the emergence of human capacities is dependent upon the nature of the world, they should adopt a model of experience in which the world has a direct impact on the formation of our becoming persons. The model of experience introduced by modern philosophy and reinforced by postmodern philosophy holds that the world can only come to the subject as filtered through the subject’s experience or her language. But to introduce a tertium quid that mediates the world to subjects substitutes for reality what people think or say reality is. Although most critical realists have not explicitly argued for direct or unmediated perception, Margaret Archer is one who does. As she says, “the gatekeepers [of modern and postmodern philosophy] . . . confine us to mediated experiences alone” (2004, 67–68), but if we are to do justice to the impact of the world that gives rise to human persons, then we need to “allow for the possibility of unmediated experiences which are not necessarily reducible to [our conceptual categories]” (2004, 68). Citing Merleau-Ponty, she argues that this idea of unmediated experience is crucial to the role that critical realism gives to the embodied, nonlinguistic interaction with the world that she calls “the primacy of practice” (2004, 68). I therefore have an analogy that I would like to propose to Smith. In What is a Person?, he argues that realism requires some form of a correspondence theory of truth, but he wants to revamp those accounts of correspondence that misleadingly describe the correspondence of words to world in terms of “mirroring” or “isomorphism” (2010, especially 210–12, compare 162). As he explains, our thoughts are qualitatively different from objects in the world: thoughts are linguistic and conceptual and ontologically subjective, whereas objects are often material and epistemologically objective. For that reason, we can say that “Snow is white” if snow is white, but we should not say that true propositions “resemble” or “copy” or “replicate” that to which they refer. In short, he keeps the idea of correspondence between true statements and the world, which realism needs, but he rejects the metaphor of mirroring that is commonly used to explain it. In the same way, I would like to argue that we critical realists keep the distinction between epistemology and ontology that deconstructive postmodernists have sought to eliminate, but drop the metaphor of mediation. Direct perception is an element of embodied realism that critical realists can adopt, and should.
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REFERENCES
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Archer, Margaret S. 2004 “Models of Man: The Admission of Transcendence.” In Transcendence: Critical realism and God, edited by M. S. Archer, A. Collier, and D. V. Porpora, 63–81. New York: Routledge.
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Archer, Margaret, Roy Bhaskar, Andrew Collier, Tony Lawson, and Alan Norrie, eds. 1998 Critical Realism: Essential Readings. London: Routledge. Baker, Lynne Rudder 2000 Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boghossian, Paul A. 2006 Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Contructivism. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Brandom, Robert B. 1994 Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Chemero, Anthony 2009 Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Clark, Andy 1997 Being There: Putting Brain Body and World Back Together Again. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. 2008 Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Csordas, Thomas 1990 “Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology,” Ethos 18:1 (March): 5–47. Davidson, Donald 1984 Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gamwell, Franklin I. 1990 The Divine Good: Modern Moral Theory and the Necessity of God. San Francisco: HarperCollins. Godlove, Terry F., Jr. 1989 Religion, Interpretation, and Diversity of Belief: The Framework Model from Kant to Durkheim to Davidson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Griffin, David Ray, ed. 1988 The Reenchantment of Science. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press. Griffin, David Ray 2001 Reenchantment without Supernaturalism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Hector, Kevin W. 2011 Theology without Metaphysics: God, Language, and the Spirit of Recognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, Mark 1987 The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Lakoff, George 1987 Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson 1980 Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1999 Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. 2002 “Why Cognitive Linguistics Requires Embodied Realism.” Cognitive Linguistics 13:3: 245–63. Putnam, Hilary 1994 “Comments and Replies.” In Reading Putnam, edited by P. Clark and B. Hale, 242–95. Cambridge, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell. Schilbrack, Kevin 2014 Philosophy and the Study of Religions. London: Blackwell. Forthcoming. Slingerland, Edward 2004 “Conceptual Metaphor Theory as Methodology for Comparative Religion.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72.1 (March): 1–31. Slingerland, Edward 2008 What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Christian 2010 What is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, Charles 1995 Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
