Words, images, color combinations all evoke schemas

Words have meaning for us only within a context that is meaningful. At some time in my life plants have become meaningful to me and thus the word “bloom” evokes that meaning; likewise “traveler” with journey and “ashes” with fire.

“Because words can evoke schemas, and metaphors map schemas into other schemas, words can prompt a metaphorical understanding.”

Poets use metaphor to convey meaning. Cognitive scientists study metaphor to comprehend the hidden aspects of the human mind. To understand poetic metaphor one must understand conventional metaphor. To study metaphor is to discover that “one has a worldview, that one’s imagination is constrained, and that metaphor plays an enormous role in shaping one’s everyday understand of everyday events.”

As creatures we perceive our self as a container having an interior and exterior with a boundary between. We experience our bodies as structured wholes with identifiable parts. We move about in space to achieve our needs and desires; sometimes our path is obstructed by objects that we try to eliminate or move around.

“Each of these quite basic interactions with the world is generalizable, and each is in fact generalized across a series of other domains. Each of these generalizations is a recurring structure or repeatable pattern by which we are able to understand the world as a unified place that we can make a sense of.”

Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality—Emily Dickinson

Without metaphors for death we could not comprehend this poem easily. Why do we know so many metaphors for death? Winter and other authors inform me that we have metaphors because without them we could not comprehend our world.


Quotes from “A Clearing in the Forest: Law, Life, and Mind” by Steven L. Winter

All 'metaphors' are second-hand versions of Reality. We do not understand Reality very well, and so 'metaphors' grow out of our superstitions and assumptions. We have evolved only to exist within a confined area of what is Real, and thus have a confined ‘view’. The wider we spread ourselves, the wider our view of Reality will be, and the more we will need to understand it to survive within it.

All descriptions are 'metaphors', removals from the actual first-hand experience of living in the moment.



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I must apologize for an error. Instead of "conventional metaphor" I should have written "conceptual metaphor".

Poetic metaphor is a linguistic metaphor and conceptual metaphor is a primary experience that becomes a conceptual metaphor by an unconscious mapping of the concept from one mental location to another mental location.


The novice tennis player develops the same success that the infant achieves as it begins the process of learning how to walk. This process is commonly thought of as muscle memory. New born humans and novice tennis players must start with fundamental movements that are repeated many times until such movements can be carried out without conscious effort.

The artist learns the same kind of lesson. The painter develops inference patterns that allow the accomplished painter to use that developed craft for creating images in which much of the activity is carried forward without conscious effort thereby leaving the conscious mind completely available for the creative activity of true artistry.

SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) has discovered what might be metaphorically styled as MMM ‘Metaphor is Muscle Memory’. This linguistic metaphor is not to be comprehended to mean that linguistic metaphor is exactly like muscle memory but that conceptual metaphor carries the same kind of similarity.

We might imagine a string of MMMs interconnected with perceptions to form a complete set of inference patterns that guide muscle movement when the tennis player carries out a serve and volley point. A similar set might be imagined that leads an artist through the construction of a landscape painting.

SGCS has discovered that this interconnection of real time perceptions coupled with metaphors of passed experiences leads us through all of our thinking actions. One might comprehend all thinking as being an interconnection of conceptual metaphors developed through past experiences.

SGCS, as delineated in “Philosophy in the Flesh” by Lakoff and Johnson, presents a new paradigm for cognitive science. This new paradigm might be called the “conceptual metaphor” paradigm. The theory is that experiences form into concepts and some of these concepts are called “primary metaphors”. These ‘primary metaphors’ are often unconsciously mapped from the originating mental space onto another mental space that is a subjective concept, i.e. abstract concept.

Physical experiences of all kinds lead to conceptual metaphors from which perhaps hundreds of ‘primary metaphors’, which are neural structures resulting from sensorimotor experiences, are created. These primary metaphors provide the ‘seed bed’ for the judgments and subjective experiences in life. “Conceptual metaphor is pervasive in both thought and language.” It is hard to think of a common subjective experience that is not conventionally conceptualized in terms of metaphor.

Metaphors can kill and metaphors can heal. Metaphor can be a neural structure that provides a conscious means for comprehending an unknown and metaphor can be a neural structure that is unconsciously mapped (to be located) from one mental space onto another mental space. There is empirical evidence to justify the hypothesis that the brain will, in many circumstances, copy the neural structure from one mental space onto another mental space.

Linguistic metaphors are learning aids. We constantly communicate our meaning by using linguistic metaphors; we use something already known to communicate the meaning of something unknown. Many metaphors, labeled as primary metaphors by cognitive science, are widespread throughout many languages. These widespread metaphors are not innate; they are learned. “There appear to be at least several hundred such widespread, and perhaps universal, metaphors.”

Primary metaphors have this widespread characteristic because they are products of our common biology. Primary metaphors are embodied; they result from human experience, they “are part of the cognitive unconscious.”

Metaphor is a standard means we have of understanding an unknown by association with a known. When we analyze the metaphor ‘bad is stinky’ we will find that we are making a subjective judgment wherein the olfactory sensation becomes the source of the judgment. ‘This movie stinks’ is a subjective judgment and it is made in this manner because a sensorimotor experience is the structure for making this judgment.

CS is claiming that the neural structure of sensorimotor experience is mapped onto the mental space for another experience that is not sensorimotor but subjective and that this neural mapping becomes part of the subjective concept. The sensorimotor experience serves the role of an axiom for the subjective experience.

Physical experiences of all kinds lead to conceptual metaphors from which perhaps hundreds of ‘primary metaphors’, which are neural structures resulting from sensorimotor experiences, are created. These primary metaphors provide the ‘seed bed’ for the judgments and subjective experiences in life. “Conceptual metaphor is pervasive in both thought and language. It is hard to think of a common subjective experience that is not conventionally conceptualized in terms of metaphor.”

The neural network created by the sensorimotor function when an infant is embraced becomes a segment of the neural network when that infant creates the subjective experience of affection. Thus—affection is warmth.

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 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 hypothesizes that conceptual metaphors resulting from conflation emerges in two stages: during the conflation stage two distinct but coactive domains are established that remain separate for only a short while at which time they lose their coactive characteristic and become differentiated into metaphorical source and target.

I find that this ‘conceptual metaphor’ paradigm is a great means for comprehending the human condition. But, like me, you will have to study the matter for a long time before you will be able to make a judgment as to its value. This book “Philosophy in the Flesh” by Lakoff and Johnson, from which I derived these ideas and quotes, is filled with ideas that are new to the reader and thus studying it will require a good bit of perseverance.

Have you ever, before reading this post, thought that the brain unconsciously copies the neural structure from one mental space onto another mental space? Those who find this idea compelling will discover, in this new cognitive science paradigm, a completely new way of thinking about philosophy and human nature.

We also live 'now', in the moment, and when we come across something new we have no way of dealing with it if we rely only on metaphors of past experience. So, the above is incorrect, as we do not encompass ALL thinking from metaphorical past experience. We rely on past metaphorical concept rather too heavily, and it clouds our first-hand experience of 'now', which is where and when we need to be paying attention in order to learn new things.

This idea may be new to the reader and thus studying it will require a good bit of perseverance.




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Gorgeous, we have to stop meeting like this.

I just erased about five paragraphs about what I think metaphors are. Metaphors use personal experiences to say more with fewer words.

I remember when my father first saw my three day old son. He picked him up, held him at arms length and they looked at each other for a few seconds. There will be about 160 years between the beginning of my fathers life and the end of my sons. The picture I have in my mind of them looking at each other is a metaphor of all of that time.

Gorgeous, you mentioned living in the moment. That may be the best idea Ive ever heard. I think that's one of Buddhisms main points. There was a book long time ago, a patchouli-smelling, long-haired hippie book, called Be Here Now. Talk about metaphors.

BE.
HERE.
NOW.

Can it get any simpler then that? I bet one of the wiser minds on this forum can come up with a formula for those three words.


(spelling. chedk)
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