# Reply to rakova - Lakoff **Abstract:** ly. And, in such an account, the body is implicated every step of the way. We believe that Rakova’s misrepresentations of our view of embodied realism, and, indeed, of our account of conceptual metaphor and other imaginative structures, are the result of the philosophical frames she brings to the study of language, apparently from Anglo-American philosophy. Let us illustrate this directly by addressing the first major criticism she levels against embodied realism, which she mistakenly equates with what she calls ‘‘extreme empiricism’’ (p. 237). We do not, and never have, espoused any form of empiricism at all, extreme or otherwise. Classical empiricism is a philosophical position, which claims that we are born with a tabula rasa—a blank slate: no knowledge is innate, and all knowledge (including all knowledge of concepts and reasoning) is acquired via the senses. Empiricism is opposed to rationalism, which argues that all human reason (and hence, human conceptual structure) is innate. If you accept this empiricist–rationalist dichotomy, here’s what follows: if you believe that any concepts or any forms of human reason can be learned, you must be an empiricist, and if you believe that basic forms of abstract reason are the result of a learning process, then you must be what Rakova calls an ‘‘extreme empiricist’’. Modern neuroscience has thrown out the innate–learned, nature– nurture, and rationalist–empiricist dichotomies. There is no way to sort out exactly what is ‘‘inborn’’ **Authors:** [[MARK JOHNSON and GEORGE LAKOFF]]