An Interactionist Approach to Cognition: Informal Overview

Abstract

We saw in the last chapter that there is a paradox implicit in the interaction view of cognition. The paradox is in assigning reality the role of constraining our conceptual organizations, but denying it a mind-independent, preconceptual ontology and structure. (If reality is given a preconceptual ontology and structure, then this becomes the ‘universal’ knowledge structure, an idea that is expressly rejected by the interaction view.) We also saw that the theories of Goodman, Piaget and Lakoff & Johnson, each of whom approached interactionism by a different route, fail to resolve this paradox explicitly, though some of them come quite close to doing so. You might also recall, from Chapter 3, that resolving this paradox is necessary to give a satisfactory account of similarity-creating metaphors, and to address an analogous paradox raised by the phenomenon of creation of similarity.