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In:What makes a Figure: Rethinking figurativity
Edited by Herbert L. Colston
[Figurative Thought and Language 19] 2025
► pp. 40–64

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Chapter 2
Re-thinking embodiment in figuration

Lived experience or cognitive mechanism?

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Published online: 28 October 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ftl.19.02hor
Abstract
In cognitive linguistics, figuration serves as a paramount case of embodied cognition and thus as counter evidence to the Cartesian dualism between mind and body. Taking a closer look at the notion of experience, this chapter demonstrates that through a systemic and neuralized concept of embodiment, cognitive linguistics has actually perpetuated what it aimed to overcome. Based on this insight, I will discuss these three implications: (1) meaning-making as based on a seamless homogeneity of human thought and experience, (2) language users as passive information-processing automata and (3) embodied experience as abstracted from situated communicative contexts. I will then propose an alternative perspective, namely a re-thinking of embodiment through a phenomenological understanding of experience. On that basis, the chapter concludes by questioning the established opposition of an integral structure and its concrete manifestation.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Cartesian dualism and embodiment theory
  • 2.Metaphor, metonymy and ‘the body in the mind’
  • 3.Experience from a systemic and neuralized perspective
    • 3.1Homogeneous human thought and experience
    • 3.2Passive information processors
    • 3.3Abstracted meaning and experience
  • 4.Experience from a phenomenological and lived-body perspective
    • 4.1Situated meaning-making and experiencing
    • 4.2Enactive meaning makers
    • 4.3Dynamically emerging embodied meaning
  • 5.Conclusion: Overcoming the cartesian anxiety
  • Notes
  • References
References (71)
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