Evaluating Embodied, Imaginative and Metamophorial Reason
A strictly abstract and disembodied reason would definitely not make the kind of wave in today’s world as it did in periods preceding ours. In a world such as ours where the recognition of the human experience is gaining ground by the hour, an all-out abstract reason is bound to make a bad press. It is not surprising, then, that proponents of embodied thought are not alone in their clarion call for a reexamination of a few of our traditional claims. Studies demonstrate how the avowed relationship of correspondence between symbols and categories in the external world hardly characterizes meaning. Researchers show that the mathematical properties of the classical theory violet the necessary requirement of meaning, in that changes in the parts of the meaning of a sentence do not effect a change in the meaning of the entire sentence. In this way, the classical account of meaning fails as a theory of meaning, since it violates what it already admits is an indispensable requirement of meaning. At the core of its troubles is the finding that there is no intrinsic correspondence between objects and their symbols.
