Mark Johnson's The Meaning of the Body offers a fairly comprehensive discussion of the extent to which embodiment grounds meaning. Johnson's target in this book includes much more than semantic, i.e. linguistic, meaning. Instead Johnson uses the term "meaning" in "its broadest and most profound sense;" Johnson takes meaning to include "images, sensorimotor schemas, feelings, qualities, and emotions that constitute our meaningful encounter with the world." (xi) The real strength of this book is the extent to which it attempts to combine these disparate elements into a unified account.

The book is divided into three separate sections, each with a distinct thesis. In the first third of the book, Johnson attempts to establish his broad notion of meaning. Part of this project, of course, requires demonstrating the insufficiency of traditional analytic theories of meaning. In a series of chapters, Johnson demonstrates the extent to which a theory of meaning based solely on semantics misses other aspects of meaning, including but not limited to meaning in bodily movement and the extent to which we experience meaning in more than just language.

The core of Johnson's book is the second section which attempts to use this new conception of meaning to challenge scientific and philosophical projects. Johnson begins again by attacking the traditional bias in cognitive science and analytic philosophy: the representational theory of mind. Instead Johnson maintains that meaning must be the result of organism-environment couplings, a functionalist notion which outstrips the orthodox tradition in cognitive science. The rest of the section offers a thorough look at how Johnson's broad sense of meaning as embodied can be, and in fact is, supported by recent work (much of it by Johnson himself) in psychology/cognitive science.

The second section is an impressive and bold undertaking. One of the strongest claims Johnson makes is that "philosophical theories are not systems of foundational literal truths about reality, but rather elaborations of particular complex, intertwining sets of metaphors that support inferences and forms of reasoning." (200) All abstract concepts, on Johnson's view, are the result of more basic embodied meanings.

But if this is true, on Johnson's view, then philosophy itself is nothing other than the use of concepts to trade in better and worse metaphors. One might go a step further and maintain that the same must hold for science as well, which after all must employ many of the same concepts as philosophical discourse. Johnson doesn't explore this conclusion, but the reader should bear in mind how far-reaching Johnson's conclusions really are. Moreover, Johnson does not thoroughly consider the extent to which this may problematize the account (he gives a nod on 205). If Johnson is not in the business of making descriptive claims about reality, i.e. if he himself is only trading in metaphor, why should we prefer his account over another? Moreover, how can a discipline like philosophy endorse the descriptive claim that the discourse itself is only metaphorical? I ultimately don't think that this issue undercuts Johnson's thesis, but I think that it needs to be explored to understand precisely what Johnson's project amounts to.

Another concern I had with the second section of the book concerns the publicity of meaning. Johnson is more than happy to assert that culture impacts meaning, but if meaning is embodied, some story needs to be told about how social processes affect the body's ability to create meaning in the broad sense. Again, I don't doubt that Johnson could tell a story to explain the relationship between these constituents of meaning for the individual, but it remains an open question which needs to be explored to strengthen the book's core thesis.

The concluding section of the book considers the extent to which art communicates meaning. Fitting his form for the other sections, Johnson first criticizes theories of aesthetics which have analogized art with language, indicating again the extent to which a semantic theory of meaning fails to capture much of what is meaningful. His analysis of visual art and music with respect to his theory of metaphor is extremely insightful and sure to be an important addition to a scientifically informed discussion of aesthetics. If the discussion of aesthetics is lacking, it is only because it leaves out so many other artistic media, e.g. dance and architecture, to focus on textual media (literature and poetry) and music. Johnson surely has something to say with respect to other forms of art, and I would be very interested in hearing it.

Mark Johnson's The Meaning of the Body is a courageous and ultimately successful book. Not only does Johnson attack a number of problematic core assumptions in analytic philosophy of mind and cognitive science, but he moves beyond them to offer an insightful theory of how we can still talk meaningfully about meaning. For any philosopher interested in philosophy of mind, language, or aesthetics, this book has a number of important lessons about how these disciplines are in need of revision. For the more general scientific audience, Johnson offers a thorough collection of research on embodiment and meaning that should prove useful to researchers in a variety of disciplines.

© 2009 Lucas Keefer

Lucas Keefer is currently a graduate student studying philosophy and psychology at Georgia State University. His primary interests include social psychology, phenomenology, and philosophy of mind. He can be reached at lucas.keefer@gmail.com

Keywords: philosophy of the body