The arts and humanities need to remember this: they don't have to feel inferior to science, and try to model themselves on the. And as Aristotle emphasised, there are different kinds of reasoning, different kinds of knowledge, and different modes of understanding appropriate to different areas of life. There is kind of reasoning, and an extent of reasoning, that is in many circumstances not only irrational, but actually one of the signs of madness. The left hemisphere is not in touch with reality but with its representation of reality, which turns out to be a remarkably self-enclosed, self-referring system of tokens. It followsthat limiting the possible meaning of languageby rendering it explicit also lmits the possible meaning that could be found in the world It is metaphors that carry us across (that is what the word ‘metaphor’ means) the implied gap between language and the world, and make what would otherwise be a hermetically sealed system of signs capable of meaning something in terms of embodied experience. Much elegant research demonstrates that we are essentially blind to what we do not think For me it would require couple of re-reads to savour and assimilate. This is a must read for all of those who are intrigued by the complex muscle called brain. I particularly liked the one which elaborates the true meaning of a metaphor. Picking the best, which itself ran into some 300 words from a small book of about 10,000 words, is a measure of the extent to which this cerebral work can engross the reader.
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