Freedom is an Abstract Idea
I love chocolates, I love freedom, I love mom, I love my dog, I love April in Paris, etc. When we abstract (disassociate from any instance) we remove the contingent (unpredictable). When I abstract all of this lovin I am left with that which is ‘necessary and sufficient’ I am left with an emotion. When I attach this abstract idea of ‘love’ to these other entities I have a specific instance of an abstract idea.
Is the emotion attached to each one of these abstract ideas exactly the same? I suspect no one knows or can know.
When I am ready to die for or to kill for ‘patriotism’--love of country—I guess I should better understand what this business of abstract ideas is all about.
No doubt there are many different conceptions of this expression ‘abstract idea’ but I have found one that works for me and it appears to be well founded, justified by empirical evidence, and endorsed by reputable cognitive scientists. I shall use the metaphor ‘abstract idea is chemical compound’. A metaphor has a number of meanings and one important meaning is ‘simile’.
In chemistry we have atoms joined together to make molecules and molecules joined together to make compounds.
“Metaphor allows conventional mental imagery from sensorimotor domains to be used for domains of subjective experience.”
An infant is born and when embraced for the first time by its mother the infant experiences the sensation of warmth. In succeeding experiences the warmth is felt along with other sensations.
Empirical data verifies that there often happens a conflation (blending) of this sensation experience together with the development of a subjective (abstract) concept we can call affection. With each similar experience the infant fortifies both the sensation experience and the affection experience and a little later this conflation aspect ends and the child has these two concepts in different mental spaces. This conflation leads us to readily recognize the metaphor ‘affection is warmth’.
Cognitive science uses metaphor in the standard usage as we are all accustomed to but it also uses a new concept that you are unfamiliar with unless you have been reading this book. This new concept is called ‘conceptual metaphor’. Conceptual metaphor is the heart of this new cognitive science and represents what will be in my opinion the first paradigm of cognitive science.
In my example I speak of two separate mental spaces one being the experience of being held and the other is the subjective experience of affection. The theory behind the ‘conceptual metaphor’ is that the structure of the sense experience can and is often automatically without conscious intention mapped into a new mental space.
The experience structure can be mapped into a new mental space and thereby becomes part of the structure of that new mental space. In this fashion these conceptual metaphors can act somewhat like atoms that join together to make a molecule.