M W Thayer
2 min readNov 5, 2021

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I definitely think that there are some more modern philosophers that have expounded on the thinking of Locke and Hume regarding this topic and have gone beyond their simpler explanations of how we get our ideas from sense experience. Lakoff and Johnson’s “Metaphors We Live By” gives a very compelling case for how our beliefs and ideas are grounded in metaphorical entailments derived from the sense experience, how it feels, to be this particular type of thing in this particular type of body. It has even been researched and backed up with artificial neural networks and machine learning.
I think the main conclusion that can be made from this is that even though some of our ideas (such as “dog”) can be said to be grounded in sense experience, there is a point at which I would concede that they become of a nature very different than experience, a “thing apprehended” as Adler would say. See Damasio’s idea of an “as-if body loop” (I forget which of his books it’s in, but it’s central to a lot of his work) as a neural mechanism that even animals can have. Indeed he posits that these loops would exist in “less evolved” parts of our nervous system.
Again, even if it is grounded in physical embodied cognition, that doesn’t mean it’s “determined” as we all fear that would mean. This is where the post modernist would say these ideas are where human freedom lies, because they are constructed by humans for human purposes and we can change them if they no longer work for us.
Also, see Karl Popper’s “The Open Society…” for why Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel’s philosophies are problematic precisely because we do have the freedom to create these ideas, sometimes to horrific ends.

Sorry for the long response!

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M W Thayer
M W Thayer

Written by M W Thayer

Yet another white dude with yet another opinion. Is that opinion founded in Wisdom? I don't know, you tell me.

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