Mind: Meet Metaphor (PSN2016)
Channel: A. Jelec
Date: 2016-08-02

Humanity has entered the age of information. Terms like data-crunching, big data, data mining have risen in popularity, as the status of the humanities has waned. Interest in language and literature has been relegated to the status of unscientific pursuit, leading universities all over the globe to cut funding for it. And yet, all over the world people are as involved in discussing national identity, social justice and spirituality as they ever were. 

The passage above employs twenty-three different abstract concepts. Researchers are still uncertain as to how these concepts work. And although neurolinguistics studies have helped us identify the neural correlates of concreteness [1], it is still up for discussion as to how abstract concept are created and used. Interestingly, one of the more convincing explanations comes from cognitive linguistics, a branch of humanities that embraces both data- and insight- driven research. Conceptual Metaphor Theory [2,3] showed that physical experience serves as a reference point for understanding abstract phenomena. This is why it is possible to say that someone has fallen in love, as if love was a large container; or that a patient has overcome cancer, as if it were an obstacle on the road. This study shows that metaphor is not only present in language but in gesture as well – including the gesture of children blind from birth [4,5] - leading us to believe that human abstract thinking is much more grounded in physical reality than was once dreamt of in our philosophy. 

[1] Pexman, P. M., Hargreaves, I. S., Edwards, J. D., Henry, L. C., & Goodyear, B. G. (2007). Neural correlates of concreteness in semantic categorization. - PubMed - NCBI. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19(8), 1407–1419. http://doi.org/10.1162/jocn.2007.19.8.1407
[2] The metaphorical structure of the human conceptual system. (1980). The metaphorical structure of the human conceptual system, 4(2), 195–208.
[3] Evaluating Conceptual Metaphor Theory. (2011). Evaluating Conceptual Metaphor Theory, 48(8), 529–562. http://doi.org/10.1080/0163853X.2011.606103
[4] Are Abstract Concepts Like Dinosaur Feathers? Conceptual Metaphor Theory and the conceptualisation strategies in gesture of blind and visually impaired children. (2014). Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM.
[5] Thoughts on the table: Gesture as a tool for thinking in blind and visually impaired children. (2014). Thoughts on the table: Gesture as a tool for thinking in blind and visually impaired children, 1, 73–88. http://doi.org/10.1515/yplm-2015-0004