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Fri 19 Oct, 2007 03:00 pm
Metaphorically thinking
We commonly think of metaphor as something like analogy. We are trying to explain something to someone and we say this something new is very much like this other something you are familiar with.
This is one form of metaphor but there is another metaphor that is automatic and unconscious. The child playing with objects has an experience of collecting objects in a pile. This experience results in a neurological network that we might identify as grouping. This neurological structure that contains some sort of logic related to this activity serves as a primary metaphor.
The child has various experiences resulting from playing with objects. These experiences result in mental spaces with neural structures that contain the logic resulting from the experience. When the child then begins to count perhaps on her fingers these mental spaces containing the experiences automatically map to a new mental space and become the logic and inference patterns to make it possible for the child to count because counting contains similar operations.
Primary metaphors are the contents of mental spaces developed in experience and the contents then pass to another mental space to become the bases for a new concept. The contents of space A is mapped to space B to then be the foundation for the new concept at space B. This mapping is automatic and unconscious. Reasoning about the vertical motion in the spatial domain is mapped onto reasoning about the quantity domain. This is a one-way movement; reasoning about quantity is not mapped onto spatial domain reasoning. The direction of inference indicates which the source is and which the target domain is.
civilization is an abstract concept, isn't it?
how about paper money? both exist primarily as fiction, and we act them out like a play. how about "worth" with regards to the exchange of one commodity for another? four bags of corn is worth a chicken- that's pretty abstract.
physics is obviously more abstract than people think. a joule of heat and a joule of mechanical force are not much different.
words are abstractions, and they're abstract. people know me by my name, my name is me, but i'm not my name.
letters are abstract, here are three of them: o, t, w. they can form the word "two" which is a number, which is also abstract- or "tow" which is an action, not a number. we live surrounded by abstraction, and use the word "concrete" - a metaphor! to suggest how material is "worth" more than "mere" ideas. that's why humans are so interesting, they live in perpetual worship of ideosyncrasy.
tinygiraffe wrote:civilization is an abstract concept, isn't it?
how about paper money? both exist primarily as fiction, and we act them out like a play. how about "worth" with regards to the exchange of one commodity for another? four bags of corn is worth a chicken- that's pretty abstract.
physics is obviously more abstract than people think. a joule of heat and a joule of mechanical force are not much different.
words are abstractions, and they're abstract. people know me by my name, my name is me, but i'm not my name.
letters are abstract, here are three of them: o, t, w. they can form the word "two" which is a number, which is also abstract- or "tow" which is an action, not a number. we live surrounded by abstraction, and use the word "concrete" - a metaphor! to suggest how material is "worth" more than "mere" ideas. that's why humans are so interesting, they live in perpetual worship of ideosyncrasy.
Yes I agree. We humans live, die, and kill by metaphor. We comprehend our lives in metaphor.
As I see it we live in a metaphorical world. All things, properties and events are encoded symbolically, placed within "classes" containing what we consider to be formally similar--if not identical--things, properties and events. It's how we "make sense" of--our experience of--"the world" (itself a grand metaphor).
JLNobody wrote:As I see it we live in a metaphorical world. All things, properties and events are encoded symbolically, placed within "classes" containing what we consider to be formally similar--if not identical--things, properties and events. It's how we "make sense" of--our experience of--"the world" (itself a grand metaphor).
But do you know what I mean by conceptual metaphor? That is the revolutionary aspect of this new paradigm for cognitive science.
The revolutionary hypothesis proposed in this book "Philosophy in the Flesh" is beyond anything that we have thought about before. This theory is backed by much empirical evidence developed by groups of linguists, cognitive scientists, neurobiological scientists, and others. These sciences have been putting this together since the early 70s.
The heart of this theory is that the brain maps (copies and pasts) from one conceptual structure onto another. Thus when we know that affection is a warm and fuzzy feeling it is because the conceptual structure that makes it possible for us to draw logical inferences about a concept has been copied from one structure and placed into another conceptual structure. The brain is automatically doing an inside the brain metaphor for us.
Vaguer still.
Or am I getting more senile by the day?
JLNobody wrote:Vaguer still.
Or am I getting more senile by the day?
It is a very unique concept. I suspect no one can comprehend it unless they spend some time studying the matter. It took me months. It is not complex it is just so completely unique. It however gives me a satisfaction of comprehension that philosophy has never been able to do. It poses a hypothesis that makes so much sense when a person knocks down their barriers to what is new. Humans are neophobic.
My problem is that I have been very lazy lately.
JLNobody wrote:My problem is that I have been very lazy lately.
I suspect your curiosity and caring will overcome that short term problem. That sort of feeling hits me everyday about 4pm, fortunately by 4am all is back in order. I am a morning person as you can see.
Wow! 4 p.m. is the time of day when I MOST useless. Around 6 I return to a more energetic existence.
Regarding our metaphorical lives. Culture--the means by which we behave as--and convert our children from little animals into--human beings--is itself a symbolic system, a kind of metaphorical soup in which we swim our total lives. Our lives--i.e., our meaningful lives--are SO cultural/symbolic/metaphorical that it's very hard to examine them. Indeed we study our cultures by means of cultural understandings and symbols (e.g., language). We are locked into that which we want to objectify for study.
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