Definition of Embodied Truth

[pooperman]

From Philosophy in the Flesh, The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought by Lakoff and Johnson:

"A person takes a sentence as 'true' of a situation if what he or she understands the sentence as expressing accords with what he or she understands the situation to be."I love this definition. Notice the fundamental parts of this

Comments

[jeffrock]

I read a post of yours recently where you said: "Intuition is stagnant and static. Imagination is productive and dynamic."

I think it's worth noting that the latter is utterly dependent on the former. Without intuition as a guide, imagination would be blind and not very useful.

[pooperman]

I don't disagree with this--intuition has a role to play. A cooperation with imagination, if you will.

Imagination would strike it lucky from time to time, but we do rely on somewhat stable (though not, of necessity, permanent) definitions and rules to make sense of things. I would say that intuition without imagination begets stagnancy and dogmatism.

Perhaps stagnant was too strong a word--but I do still believe that unchecked static structures grow stagnant in a world of flux.

[jeffrock]

I would say that intuition without imagination begets stagnancy and dogmatism.

How?

[jeffrock]

I guess another reason i'm puzzling about your position here is that it seems to me that intuition and imagination aren't really even the same sort of thing-- intuition is a faculty of knowing whereas imagination is one of fancy-- and thus there doesn't seem to be a standard by which the two can be compared. Imagination might be useful when writing a d&d novel or something, but when it comes to gaining knowledge it seems to me that its role is entirely secondary to that of intuition (our imagination can give us all manner of pretty and wonderful things, but it is powerless to tell us whether or not something is true). That's all just my opinion however.