KNOWLEDGE EVOLUTION

Provided by Cognitive Sciences ePrint Archive

Cognitive Semantics: An Extension of the Cartesian Legacy¹

Samir Karmakar

The basic intention of this article is to show how the cognitive semantics inherits
its ancestry from the Cartesian foundation. The emergence of the cognitive
semantics is envisaged here as an integral part of the knowledge evolution, in
terms of shifts, which ultimately determines the future direction of our
epistemological quest. Basically two questions have been emphasized here: (a)
how (and what amount of) common sense metaphysics can be incorporated
within the existing system of knowledge; and (b) is there any substratum where
the mind-body dualism can be boiled down?

0. Introduction

Study of semantics has faced a major challenge, due to the shifts, which has been
initiated by the evolution of knowledge. In this article, we will try to develop a line of
thought to conceptualize this shift (fig. 3), since it not only effects the semantics, but a
similar kind of transmutation can also be found in other branches of rational enquiry.²
Essentially, this shift can be envisaged as an obvious way to incorporate more and more
contextual information to achieve a greater degree of explanatory adequacy. The shift
can be defined in terms of the following points:

(i) a shift towards the common sense metaphysics;

(ii) a shift towards the physicalism from psychological understanding via
phenomenological interlude; and

(iii) a shift towards the exploration of the ‘nature-absolute’ from ‘nature-relative’.

One obvious consequence of this shift is the need of the ontological up-rise, felt by
the system of knowledge. This shift will ultimately help us to understand the embodiment
hypothesis (Lakoff 1999); not as against the Cartesian dualism, but as an extension of the
Cartesian core, because the hidden assumption is that the evolution of knowledge is
cumulative in nature. Therefore, Cartesian metaphysics becomes an obvious way to start
with.

Primarily, we would like to take a brief account of the Cartesian proposal, and how it
is being succeeded by the following trends. The development of semantics under the
supervision of the philosophers, in the following period, has been stressed, to show the
inevitability of the metaphysical necessity of ontology, being felt by the knowledge
evolution. In this section, we will try to substantiate the claim that knowledge evolution is
cumulative one, and how the existing system has been augmented with the incorporation
of the metaphysical understanding about the world. Later, in our concluding session, we
would be in the position to show, how the study of semantics, because of the successive
augmentation of the Cartesian foundation, provides a fertile ground for cognitive
semantics, as a self-evident / self-consistent system. What would remain implicit, in this
article, is a shift towards the holistic approach, because of being contextually rich, more
and more, with each successive augmentation to the Cartesian core.

1   2   3   4   >>

More intriguing information