tailieunhanh - The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Part 130

The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Part 130. In the past decade, Cognitive Linguistics has developed into one of the most dynamic and attractive frameworks within theoretical and descriptive linguistics The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics is a major new reference that presents a comprehensive overview of the main theoretical concepts and descriptive/theoretical models of Cognitive Linguistics, and covers its various subfields, theoretical as well as applied. | 1260 PETER HARDER the true nature of reality. Whether a conceptualization is adequate is not determined by its grounding in fact if we know what job the conceptualization is doing it is simply irrelevant exactly how that conceptualization is grounded or neurally wired from the philosophical perspective . Something else is at stake here. This in fact might be seen as a challenge from philosophy to Cognitive Linguistics. In order to understand more and more complex issues philosophy pursues strategies of abstraction that move their concepts further and further away from bodily grounding neutralizing differences between alternative ways of experiencing and conceptualizing. The question of validity in the case of abstraction translates into the issue of whether we manage to carve nature at the joints that is whether the abstract concepts we set up are genuinely applicable to the domain we are trying to understand. Even in the case of mathematics which is not inherently about anything the same issue exists. To see how mathematical abstractions emerge from the human perspective see Lakoff and Nunez 2000 means to understand mathematics in an important way that has been overlooked before and makes the concepts accessible from a new angle. But what makes these mathematical concepts what they are is still the way they fit into the whole web of mathematics. Even if you can see where they come from you also need to see what follows from them in order to be able to claim that you understand them. This difference is not a matter of disagreement between Cognitive Linguistics and philosophy but is due to the basic difference of perspective that I outlined at the beginning of this chapter. Philosophy understands itself as the metadiscipline entrusted with the job of keeping order which includes standing as guardians of the basic tools of science such as rational inquiry. Cognitive linguists could simply decide that they do not want to compete with philosophy in this domain since it