Neuroscience proves that constructivism is wrong – the world is defined through our experiences not our representations.

In order to take us from neurophysiology to questions of international relations, let us next consider the question of meaning. Meaning is a topic that cognitive theorists have discussed at great length and their conclusions are quite different from those that constructivists have reached. Consider, for example, how imagination works. To imagine something is to conjure something up in our minds that is not physically present to our senses. We do this all the time of course, yet imagination is a remarkable process that operates with the help of what cognitive theorists Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner refer to as ‘conceptual blends’ (Fauconnier and Turner 2003: 39–67, 1996; cf. Blair 2009: 92–103). In a conceptual blend, the meanings constructed in two or more input-spaces are projected onto an additional, third space, where new meanings arise that were not originally present in the inputs. The blended space exist in a subjunctive mode, as it were; it points to the existence of a possible world that is organised according to the combined logics of other, real or possible worlds. Conceptual blends are ‘as if’ simulations that we run in our minds, and the ability to run various scenarios ‘in the blend’ means that we can avoid going through time-consuming, or dangerous, processes of trial and error (Fauconnier and Turner 2003: 217). It is easy to see why animals that know how to engage in such simulations have been favoured by evolution. Take ‘the case of the missing chair’ (Fauconnier and Turner 1998: 146–49; cf. Cook 2006: 85–86). Curiously, but also self-evidently, there can be no nothing in the world since there is at least one of everything. For that reason, all absences are conceived of in a subjunctive mood. This is the case, for example, with missing chairs: the missing chair is a thing in the blend that, viewed from the outside, is a nonthing. It can be pointed to and takes up physical space. It inherits its physical characteristics of being a gap from the ‘actual’ input, in which there is not a chair in the corresponding position. (Fauconnier and Turner 2003: 241) This is precisely the reason why many cultures, including the classical Greek and Roman, operated with number systems that did not include a zero. The zero was eventually invented in India as one input space — the world of numbers — came to be blended with another input space — the subjunctive world of absences. Strictly speaking, the number zero exists only in this blended conceptual space. This is also, let us suggest, how we imagine ourselves. There is clearly no point in looking for ourselves ‘inside ourselves’ since this only begs the questions of what we are looking for and where we are to look (Zahavi 2008: 99–146). Neither will we find ourselves inside our brains — the ‘seat of the soul’ is not, as Descartes once believed, located in the pineal gland. Instead, we exist only in the conceptual blends in which various input spaces come to be combined. We are imaginary, a useful assumption conceived of in a subjunctive mode, and as such we are no different from everything else that human beings make up. If this is worrying to us, we should remember that we are both as real and as imaginary as the number zero, or as a missing chair.10 Which images we apply to ourselves depends ultimately on how our bodies interact with the world. As cognitive theorists explain, meaning is a far broader and much richer notion than constructivists acknowledge. The world is made meaningful not as a result of explicit interpretations but through our direct bodily experiences of it; meaning is something felt, something perceived, the qualia through which we experience life (Johnson 2008: 25). ‘An embodied view of meaning’, Mark Johnson argues, looks for the origins and structures of meaning in the organic activities of embodied creatures in interaction with their changing environments. It sees meaning and all our higher functioning as growing out of and shaped by our abilities to perceive things, manipulate things, move our bodies in space, and evaluate our situation. (ibid.: 11) The world is, consequently, just as meaningful, albeit in a different fashion, to animals — be it dogs or gastropods — who engage in no explicit interpretations of their own, and it is meaningful to new-borns too who have no words with which to describe it. The point is not that a body is required for cognition to take place — everyone agrees with that — but rather that the way our bodies interact with their environments gives rise to the meanings we come up with (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 37; Thompson 2010: 54–57). To perceive and to conceive are closely related activities. Starting from these basic embodied experiences, we gradually go on to construct conceptual systems of increasing complexity and scope. A key mechanism here is metaphor, and as cognitive theorists explain, all basic metaphors are based on bodily experiences (Lakoff and Johnson 2003: 19–21; Johnson 2008: 135–54). It is because of our body’s knowledge of what it means to pile things on top of one another that ‘more’ is taken to be ‘up’, or because we pour liquids into containers that our ‘hearts’ can be ‘filled with joy’ (Johnson 2008: 195). Everything else that we interpret is grounded in embodied metaphors. Consider, for example, the metaphors so heavily relied on by scholars of international relations.(Marks 2001: 358–64; cf. Ringmar 2006: 66–71). We understand the notion of ‘balances of power’ since we have an embodied knowledge of what balancing means and various metaphorical ways of conceiving of power, and we understand the notion of a ‘security dilemma’ since we have an embodied knowledge of both dilemmas and security. Meaning, conceived in this experiential, embodied fashion, implies a very different ontology than that invoked by constructivists. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson call it ‘embodied realism’. ‘Our concepts’, they explain, cannot be a direct reflection of external, objective, mind-free reality because our sensorimotor system plays a crucial role in shaping them. On the other hand, it is the involvement of the sensorimotor system in the conceptual system that keeps the conceptual system very much in touch with the world. (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 44) Constructivists show up too late, as it were, when meaning has already happened. Meaning is not, as cultural constructivists would have it, contained in a shared, intersubjective system which is inherited from previous generations and into which each new generation is socialised. Neither is meaning, as structural constructivists argue, a function of the way the world is represented in language or in a language analogue. Instead, the reality of the world is confirmed through our direct bodily interaction with it (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 17–18). But the real is, at the same time, not intrinsically ‘hard’ and not even ‘material’, and it does not, as cultural constructivists claim, constitute a world of ‘brute physical facts’. The real is the real as we experience it, but since experiences vary between species, other animals experience reality quite differently (cf. Gibson 1986: 128; Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 25, 104–06). This is not to deny that people also make sense together, in explicit and fully verbalised ways, and it is not to deny that power plays an important role in the constitution of social life (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 102–04). A unified account of the human must incorporate both the physiological and the social. An analysis of metaphor illustrates this combination of processes. Clearly, many metaphors are specific to a particular culture. In Thailand, ‘she walks like an elephant’ is an expression of highest praise, and in Scotland ‘my love’ can be compared to ‘a red, red, rose’. However, neither metaphor makes much sense in societies not familiar with elephants or roses. Embodied realism acknowledges these facts, but insists that embodied meaning is the more fundamental process and that all conceptual structures, no matter how elaborate and culturally specific, start from the body’s interaction with the world. After all, the most basic metaphors do not vary over time or from one society to the next (Brown 1991). Meanings are universal to the extent that human bodies, in their fundamental physiological constitution, all are alike and to the extent that we interact with the world in the same fashion.