A theory of construction of norm and meaning: Osawa's theory of body

Abstract

Our intellectual world requires not only knowledge of natural sciences but also human sciences (Sugiman 2006). The two areas of inquiry differ from each other in meta-theory. Natural sciences embrace a philosophy of logical positivism (empiricism) in which an outer or objective world is assumed to exist independently from an inner or subjective world. That division, of inner and outer worlds, does not correspond to a physical boundary between inner and outer sides of a skin. For example, the stomach, part of the outer world in the human body, might be experienced as painful by an inner world if the wrong food is eaten. An inner world, i.e., a world of mental process, is assumed to be somewhere within, definitely not outside, the skin. This common image of a person is called the mind-in-a-body paradigm (Sugiman 1999). © 2008 Springer.