Experientialism

Experientialism is the philosophical theory that experience is the source of knowledge. It was originally formulated by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson and its first widely known formulation is to be found in the book Metaphors We Live By.

In Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, Lakoff has expanded on the foundation of experientialism by his research into the nature of categories.

Basic realism

This philosophy is especially a response to the objectivist tradition of transcendental truth most prominently formulate by Immanuel Kant. Although experientialism states that there is no "purely rational" detached God's-eye view of the world which is external to human thought, it still admits that there exists what Lakoff and Johnson call basic realism. Most importantly this involves a commitment to the existence of a real world external to human beings and the possibility of stable knowledge of the external world.

See also

• Cognitive linguistics
• Conceptual metaphor
• Embodied philosophy
• Extended mind
• Framing (social sciences)
• Invariance principle
• Language and thought
• Metaphor
• Metonymy

References

• George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980). Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press.
• George Lakoff (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-46804-6.
• 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