Experientialism
Experientialism is a philosophical view which states that there is no "purely rational" detached God's-eye view of the world which is external to human thought. It was first developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By. Experientialism is especially a response to the objectivist tradition of transcendental truth most prominently formulated by Immanuel Kant which still requires a commitment to what Lakoff and Johnson call "basic realism". Most importantly, this involves acknowledging the existence of a mind-independent external world and the possibility of stable knowledge of that external world.[1] In Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, Lakoff expands on the foundations of experientialism with research into the nature of categories.
References
- Lakoff, George (1987). Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. pp. 158. ISBN 0-226-46804-6.
Further reading
- George Lakoff and Mark Turner (1989). More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. University of Chicago Press.
- George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1999). Philosophy In The Flesh: the Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books.
- George Lakoff and Rafael Núñez (2000). Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-03771-2.
- Verena Haser (2005). Metaphor, Metonymy, and Experientialist Philosophy: Challenging Cognitive Semantics. Walter de Gruyter. books.google.com