Out of the Cave

From a philosopher and a neuropsychologist, a radical rethinking of certain traditional views about human cognition and behavior.

Plato's Allegory of the Cave trapped us in the illusion that mind is separate from body and from the natural and physical world. Knowledge had to be eternal and absolute. Recent scientific advances, however, show that our bodies shape mind, thought, and language in a deep and pervasive way. In Out of the Cave, Mark Johnson and Don Tucker--a philosopher and a neuropsychologist--propose a radical rethinking of certain traditional views about human cognition and behavior. They argue for a theory of knowing as embodied, embedded, enactive, and emotionally based. Knowing is an ongoing process--shaped by our deepest biological and cultural values.

Johnson and Tucker describe a natural philosophy of mind that is emerging through the convergence of biology, psychology, computer science, and philosophy, and they explain recent research showing that all of our higher-level cognitive activities are rooted in our bodies through processes of perception, motive control of action, and feeling. This developing natural philosophy of mind offers a psychological, philosophical, and neuroscientific account that is at once scientifically valid and subjectively meaningful--allowing us to know both ourselves and the world.Preface and Acknowledgments
1 Toward a Natural Philosophy of Mind
2 The Philosophical Quest for Ultimate Knowledge
3 The Intertwining of Self and Knowledge
4 A Pragmatist Naturalistic Framework for Embodied Mind and Knowing
5 The Challenge of a Meaningful Science of Mind: The Quest for an Objective Human Science
6 Embodied Meaning and Thought
7 The Mind's Anatomy
8 How Information is Captured by Neural Networks
9 The Motive Control of Experience
10 What Is a Concept? The Influence of Motive Control on the Formation of Concepts and Personality
11 Abstraction, Self-Awareness, and the Subjective Basis of Knowledge
12 Outline for a Contemporary Natural Philosophy of Mind and Knowing
References
Index“A coherent multidisciplinary and universal theory that can answer the questions about how we think and how we know. Out of the Cave blends neuroscientific research and pragmatic philosophical aspects in an attempt to answer the question of the objective and subjective character of knowledge and thought.”
—Dorit Lemberger, Senior Lecturer, Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies, Bar-Ilan University

“No other work combines this approach through the history of philosophy, linkages with the development of psychology, and, in addition, attention to the developmental threads and breakthroughs that have come with improvements in ways we can now study the brain at work.”
—Shirley Brice Heath, Professor Emerita, Stanford UniversityMark L. Johnson is Professor of Philosophy and Philip H. Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Emeritus, at the University of Oregon. He is most recently the author of Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason as well as The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought and other books. Don M. Tucker is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Neuroinformatics Center at the University of Oregon. Inventor of the geodesic sensor net, he is CEO and Senior Scientist at Brain Electrophysiology Laboratory Company.