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Feldman 194
Metaphor
Abstract and cultural concepts: There is always a rich interaction between culture, conceptual systems, and the language used to talk about them. As we have seen, it is relatively unusual to have important conceptual differences encoded in grammar; most concepts are coded by vocabulary.
The grammar of languages changes rather slowly, but all languages can easily incorporate new words for things, actions, properties, and so on. In earlier chapters, we suggested how an embodied mind could learn words for immediate experience. Earlier in this chapter, this capacity was extended to encompass learning of superordinate categories over such direct experience.
But all of this covers only what we have been calling primary conceptual schemas. How do people learn the concepts and language covering rich array of cultural frames? In particular, what does the embodied neural theory of language have to say about learning and using the language of cultural discourse?
The answer is metaphor. Metaphor in general refers to understanding one domain in terms of another. The NTL approach suggests that all of our cultural frames derive their meanings from metaphorical mappings to the embodied experience represented in primary conceptual schemas. The next few chapters elaborate on the related ideas of meaning as metaphor and simulation.
But before getting into the full development, it is worth looking at the metaphorical structure of one particular conceptual domain - our ways of thinking and talking about language and thought itself. This is more than just a random example; much of the language used throughout this book is inevitably based on conventional metaphors for thought and language.
195 Conceptual models of communicating and thinking: Michael Reddy in 1977 and George Lakoff in 1978 discovered one of the most basic concepts in cognitive science, changing how we think about the mind. Reddy, in his classic paper on the conduit metaphor suggested that the concept of communicating is best seen as a metaphorical. Reddy‘s original description of the conduit metaphor is a good example of how conceptual systems derive their meaning from embodied schemas. The mapping looks like this:
Ideas are objects
Phrases are containers (for idea-objects)
Communicating is sending (idea-objects in phrase-containers)
In this conceptual system, communicators put our idea-objects into a phrase-containers and attempt to „get the idea across“ to their interlocutor. Communication is successful of the interlocutor „gets“ what they say. The metaphor has further details. Idea-objects don't fit into arbitrary word-containers; there are right and wrong words for an idea, and it is up to the speaker to put his or her ideas in the right words. In most cases, "the meaning is in the words“. But when a speaker communicates insincerely, the words may be hollow or empty. A speakers trying not to communicate directly can „hide her meaning“.
Reddy lists some 140 such common, everyday expressions for this one conceptual metaphor.
Eve Sweetser observed that the conduit metaphor is a special case of a much more general and elaborate metaphor system - the mind-as-body system. The general mapping is as follows:
The mind is a body
Thinking is physical functioning
Ideas are entities (relative to which the body functions)
This general metaphor has four special cases of physical functioning: manipulating objects, perceiving, moving, and eating.
The conduit metaphor is a special case of thinking as manipulating objects. This metaphor includes the conception of understanding as a grasping, teaching as providing students with ideas and include such expressions as „tossing ideas around“, „playing with ideas“ and shaping a theory.
Under the mapping Thinking is perceiving, we have examples such as knowing is seeing, coming to know is observing, understanding is seeing clearly, communicating is showing, and so on. This metaphor is used in expressions like „shedding light on the subject“, „being enlightened“, „pointing out a fact“, „a clear presentation“.
Another mapping is Thinking is moving, in which one can „lead someone step by step through an argument“, „follow an argument“ or „get lost“, „talk in circles“, „go directly tot he point“, „reach a conclusion“ or „zoom through a lecture“.
A nice one is Thinking is eating, in which ideas are food, communicating is feeding, accepting is swallowing, understanding is digesting, and so on.
These examples are all clearly metaphorical. They are systematic. They involve applying the reasoning of the embodied (source) domains to the abstract (target) domain.
They define a large proportion of our modes of comprehension of what ideas, thought, understanding, and communication are. Try having a conversation about thinking, communicating, and understanding for 10 minutes without using any of these metaphor's or any of the reasoning that arises from their use. You probably won't notice unless you pay close attention, but you will be using some of these metaphors.
Three other important metaphors for idea is the following:
Thought is language.
Thought is mathematical calculation.
The mind is a machine.
Cognitive scientists have studied many additional examples of complex conceptual systems, some of which are described in the next chapter. Diverse cultures, professions, and age groups, conceptualise a domain in different ways, and this has a profound influence on how people act. But the evidence suggests that all abstract conceptualisations share one character - they are mappings from embodied experience.
199 Metaphor and Meaning: In the last chapter we saw some of the incredible richness of human conceptual systems and the language used to describe them. Is there any way to explain how children learn a vast range of interlinked concepts that constitute their culture? The answer is both extremely simple and quite profound. There is now very strong evidence that essentially all of our cultural, abstract, and theoretical concepts derive their meanings by mapping, through metaphor, to the embodied experiential concepts we explored in earlier chapters.
In a general way, the embodied basis for abstract meanings can be seen as inevitable. A child starts life with certain basic abilities and builds on these through experience. Everything the child learns must be based on what she or he already understands. We know that prior conceptual knowledge has a strong influence even on what people will notice in a given situation. Someone who understands baseball will observe many subtleties of the game that the novice would not. All cultural knowledge must therefore arise from embodied experience.
But the data support a much more specific theory relating abstract concepts to experience. Elaborate systems of structural mappings link all domains of knowledge to the primitive schemas. Much of the reasoning we use in thinking about complex and abstract subjects derives from our basic embodied knowledge of actions, goals, forces, and so on. We can learn to memorise disembodied facts such as „Silesia produces flax“ without knowing anything about Silesia or flax, but it is unnatural.
200 Primary Metaphor: A general theory elaborated by Joseph Grady in 1996 suggests that the metaphor system is grounded in the body in terms of „primary metaphors“. In each primary metaphor, such as affection is warmth, an experience brings together a subjective judgement (here, affection) and a sensorimotor occurrence (temperature). For this metaphor, such an experience might be cuddling by a parent. Such correlations often show up in language, in which affection is described in terms of warmth. Here's a sample of the primary metaphor is Grady studied:
Affection is warmth
Subjective Affection
Sensori-motor Temperature
Example They greeted me warmly
Experience Feeling warm while being held on them affectionately
Intimacy is closeness
Subjective experience Intimacy
Sensory-motor experience Being physically close
Example We have been close for years, but we are beginning to drift apart
Experience Being physically close to people you are intimate with
Important is big
Happy is up
Bad is stinky
More is up
Help is support
These primary metaphor is allow one to express a private internal (subjective) experience in terms of a publicly available event; this is one crucial feature of metaphorical language. I will follow the standard terminology and call the sensorimotor activity the source domain and the subjective experience the target domain of the metaphor. Largely universal, primary metaphor is provide a grounding for much of the metaphor system.
From our neural perspective, primary metaphor is can be seen as a normal consequence of associative learning. Recall from earlier chapters one of the central facts about the brain: neurons that fire together, wire together.
This was shown to be the key to details brain development and is also the basis for both Hebbian and recruitment learning.
202 When subjective and sensorimotor experiences are brought together in an episode, both domains are coactive. This, according to association learning theory, causes the strengthening of connections between the neural circuits supporting the different modalities. The new, strengthened connections physically constitute the metaphorical mapping. It is important that the modalities remain distinct (it is still possible to experience one without the other) for example, warmth without affection.
203 Primary metaphors appear to be learned mainly to help the child understand and express language about subjective experience. But they also provide a mechanism for conceptualising and discussing the full range of cultural and abstract concepts needed in human society. The metaphor mechanism also interacts with our capacity for organising experience into the frames discussed in Chapter 11. Metaphor is usually a map between conceptual frames (e.g. journey and career) rather than just relating to isolated words.
A child's early experiences involve various entities that play fundamental semantic roles such as agent, goal, source, and time. There is evidence that basic grammatical forms are based on the structure of these primary experiences. Structural elements such as „agent“ also mapped by metaphor from various target domains to the domain of direct experience. For example, in the case of „spinning your wheels“, the metaphorical agent all this maps to the driver of the car.
Metaphor is selective mappings: many things that we know about cars (steering wheels, fuel, speed limits) have no role in the Spinning your wheels metaphor although they are used in other metaphor is involving the car journey frame. Much of cognitive link the stick is as concerned with exactly how this works.
213 Understanding as Simulation
Feldman
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