``who's the fella who did all the work on how metaphors shape the way we think?'' asks bitch.
`Lakoff and Johnson?' says Ian
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Geese, folks, haven't we been here before? Just about everyone who ever thought or wrote had something to say on this.
Just to bring up some of my old time favorites, let's see, the mythological mind (Piaget, Levi-Strauss), attempted to map out the abstract schema of how we use representation to think and then tried to turn that into a syntactical-like system called Structuralism. But it was far too formal, ridged, and absuredly abstract. They also implied that these formalisms were part of the hardwired structure of the individual developing mind. Although Chomsky and the structuralists were adversaries, I am not sure why exactly. Perhaps it was the French position that all of these sorts of structures were not entirely genetic, but more of an invention or craft, core cultural development using the available biologically (genetic, material, deterministic, evolutionary) formed systems. You gotta put Gould in there somewhere.
Much better was Cassirer's three volumn mediation on Symbolic Forms which covered the basic idea with an exhaustive examination in western philosophy (neo-Kantian), culture, language, and the arts.
Oh, well... Fuck it. We've got our war, our nazis police state, our fuhrer, our dying planet, and bunch of other more important stuff to worry about. Hey, but wasn't it great to just think on these completely irrelevant matters? Sort of a nostalgia trip.
Oh, but I can't leave it go. One of the most profound hints that Cassirer left was the idea that mathematics deals with the abstract syntax of representation through the theory of groups. But he died in 1946, before he could pursue this thought. It takes a lot of very unmathematical (as well as very abstract mathematical) thinking to see that the various algebraic heirarchies (metamathematics of algebras) sets, semi-groups, groups, rings, fields are systems in a tiered hierarchy in which the elements and their operators become increasingly complex. From a simple Cartesian pairing of elements in sets (coordinates of a two dimensional plane), which follows simple operations like union, to the more complicated system of association, if A -> B, B -> C, then A -> C, or the associative rule (associative groups), each additional operation (or rule of combination) adds a degree of complexity, in which the available syntax is enriched and made more articulate (speaking in metaphorical terms). One finally arrives at a general theory of morphisms, or homeomorphic groups(?), or in even more abstract language homeomorphic topological groups.
In some crude sense, all this verbage is just a way of saying that many of the shapes and their motions in space that compose the way we think about the world, have a logical order and structure about them that inform and expand (define?) both our perception and understanding of the physical world.
I would actually reverse the causal order and say that the physical world (temporal apriori) has informed us of its homeomorphic topology through its contact and intimate relationsip with our co-evolving kinesthetic complex---called the brain or mind.
So getting back to metaphor, the important point is not the poetics of the metaphor, but its operational characteristics (structuralism) that links up our perception with the way we think.
So, now we get back to the problem in linguistics that the languages of the world all have slightly to greatly divergent systems for forming these metaphors and analogies that are somehow deeply linked to the underlying linguistic formal structures of the language. We do not understood exactly how, but while the physical world remains a constant, the way we dissect it is not constant and not determinant. We improvise through our linguistic structures how to understand the world---and there in lays a kind of mysterious relevativism. Yes, I do believe we think differently, depending on our cultural-linguistic complex within which we were raised.
Oh, well, so much for a trip down memory lane. Gee wasn't it great for just a moment? Some fleeting respite from the mire?
CG