How Science got it Body Back

July 29th, 2006 Fred McVittie Posted in Cognitive Linguistics, Embodiment, History, Kline, Morris, Mathematics, Science |

As has been described by Kline (1980), Davies (2005), and others, the history of scientifically verified truth took a particular turn around the 16th century. The mathematization of science in which validation processes from experimental hypotheses and procedures moved from being ’self-evident’ (i.e. evidenced by the sense of the embodied self), to being validated axiomatically using the language of mathematics. The authority of this mathematical truth is owing to its being underwritten by a transcendent logic, untainted by human frailty. Maths is/was considered a purely abstract structure of thought, separate from the messy subjectivity of the body, and therefore not only exact, but also disembodied. The 20th century, however, through the work of Godel and others, saw this transcendent logic and coherence of mathematics exposed as fundamentally untrue, which discovery resulted in a ‘loss of certainty’ (Kline: 1980) in maths and a corresponding loss of certainty in the sciences which rest rest on this mythic transcendent coherent logic. This could be interpreted as a crisis for maths and science, as these activities are revealed as ultimately groundless; not based on eternal transcendental, possibly God-given laws, but at best on heuristics which are merely ‘useful’ and ‘effective’. However, recent developments in cognitive linguistics and the development of theories of ‘embodied cognition’ offer a different interpretation. These emerging disciplines suggest that our ability to conceptualise and work with even the most abstract ideas of mathematics or science is throught the use of embodied metaphors, and that even the equations of pure maths, when analysed using the tools of cognitive linguistics, reveal the use of concepts and ideas which are mapped metaphorically from simple actions and responses of the somatosensory body, (Lakoff and Nunez 2000). This implies that ultimately, what logic and coherence maths may possess which allows it to be used to validate science, is due to the logic and coherence of the metaphors used to conceptualise that maths. These metaphors, while they may inevitably be partial, contradictory, and incompatible one with another, are themselves built from the experiential realism of embodiment. The ground of thought is not in the sky, but in ourselves, and the loss of certainty in maths is the regaining of the body in science

Davies, B. (2005). “Whither Mathematics?” Notices of the AMS 52(11): 1350 - 1356.

Kline, M. (1980). Mathematics: The Decline of Certainty. New York, Oxford University Press.