Realism: Evolution-Based

[coberst]

Realism: Metaphysical, Representational, Symbol-Based, and Evolution-Based

What is real and how can we know it?

Aristotle gave us classical metaphysical realism. Aristotle concluded that we can know reality because our mind grasped directly the essences of things in the world.

Descartes gave us representational realism. Ideas in the mind were representational of things in the world. Ideas correspond to things in the world.

Analytic Philosophy gave us symbol-based realism. I will not even try to say what this means because I do not know and it appears to me that there are multiple variations on this concept.

Cognitive science has given us evolution-based realism. This is also called embodied-realism because it has abandoned the mind/body dichotomy that characterizes other forms of realism and is convinced that natural selection is the process by which the human species has developed.

There are two major world views of cognitive scientists; Artificial Intelligence and embodied-realism. AI is a symbol based realism and embodied-realism is an evolution-based realism.

The ‘bible’ for embodied-realism is “Philosophy in the Flesh by Lakoff and Johnson. The paradigm of this cognitive science is ‘conceptual metaphor’. The fundamental findings from which all principles flow are:

• The mind is inherently embodied.

• Thought is mostly unconscious.

• Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

The ‘bible’ states that “What we take to be true [real] in a situation depends on our embodied understanding of the situation, which is in turn shaped by all these factors.

It seems to me that all of Western traditional philosophy and thus almost everyone’s comprehension is based upon classical metaphysical reality or some aspect of that philosophy. If so, I would expect all of these forces to find error in this Book. That does not mean that there is not error but only time will tell. Darwin is still being attacked as misguided constantly by many if not most citizens in the US.