The purpose of this study is to postulate the possibility of interdisciplinary exploration in Paul Ricoeur’s explanation and understanding, extend the discussion in the viewpoint of imagination embodied experientialism to show Ricoeur’s theory is re ...
The purpose of this study is to postulate the possibility of interdisciplinary exploration in Paul Ricoeur’s explanation and understanding, extend the discussion in the viewpoint of imagination embodied experientialism to show Ricoeur’s theory is reorganized in a compatible way to new empirical knowledge, and get rid of fear for naturalism eventually with that.
To integrate explanation with understanding, Ricoeur insists on intervention of the body. Ricoeur’s opinion does essentially contribute to breaking down the dichotomy of scientific reductionism (objectivism) and nihilistic relativism resulted from latticized arguments about explanation and understanding. Ricoeur’s inference of centrality of the body postulates that in a certain level, generally, our body should be a deterministic and completely physical mechanism, and it preoccupies the fact that in another level, it should be nonmaterial and undeterministic, so this nullifies reductionism/relativism effectively.
Among the imagination theories of experientialism, image schemata and metaphoric mapping inclusively explain the possibility of integrating explanation and understanding of empirical grounds that take place in the semantic level in humans. The perspective of embodied imagination seeks the origin and structure of explanation and understanding from the organic activities of embodied creations interacting with changeful environment. The key of this imagination theory is that the structure of our imagination directly originates from physical experience basically, and since it is something imaginative, any explanation at the position of objectivism that is reductionistically and arithmetically characterized about explanation and understanding may be inappropriate. Also, at the same time, the semantic structure extended metaphorically cannot be reduced to any fixed concept or proposition through arithmetic manipulation. Therefore, imagination theory does provide more complex and inclusive explanation about mutual connectivity between two different dimensions that are explanation and understanding of human cognition. In other words, through image schemata, it turns to the body as the public and intersubjective ground of explanatory cognition, and on the other hand, with metaphoric mapping, it is possible to explain the supposition of relative variations in understanding.
This supposition may play crucial roles in complementing and describing the emergence of the body Ricoeur postulates for explanation and understanding. Here, this researcher raises an objection to the dichotomy of explanation and understanding, and using the naturalistic hypothesis of Ricoeur who presents productive, interdisciplinary necessity through the body existing in nature as the main text, this author intends to examine how experientialism explains and elucidates it, which is the contents, methods, and range of this study. As a result, this researcher has realized that such explanation and understanding fail to deal with humans’ embodied viewpoint in detail and it results in a lot of unclear opinions related to it. This tells us that the major tasks of inquiries in explanation and understanding today are to be set around this matter. These days, it is gradually becoming clearer that the division of explanation and understanding is no longer valid regarding interdisciplinary inquiries. This corresponds to the fact that in a utilitarian sense, the two are being demanded to pursue a path to naturalistic explanation on the empirical ground.