Embodied Truth

Mark Johnson

The nature of truth is an empirical issue. As such, it requires us to examine the nature of conceptualization, reasoning, and language from the perspective of empirical studies in the cognitive sciences. Recent research in this field suggests that truth is tied to the nature of our embodied understanding and that it also depends on the imaginative structure of our thought. In particular, what we take as true about abstract domains depends on deep metaphorical concepts. An analysis of some of the chief metaphors that structure our principal concepts of causation shows the need for an embodied, metaphorical, pluralistic view of truth.