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Spurlock comments on Living Metaphorically - Less Wrong
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It seems to be a prediction of this idea that the metaphors you listed should be found even in extremely disconnected cultural settings: find a jungle tribe uncontaminated by western civilization, and you should expect their word for "destination" to also mean "goal", and so forth. Is this the case?
Which brings me to my next point... where's my mountain of footnotes/citations???
Not quite. Different cultures can make slightly different metaphors. For example, there is at least one tribe that uses the metaphor of time as being a space in front of and behind the speaker, but while we think of the past as behind us and the future being in front of us, they think of the past in front of them (because they can "see" it) and the future behind them (because they can't see it).
I'm experimenting with a new style. I cite only three 'review' sources from the literature: or rather, I link directly to them in the text instead of writing references for them. Hundreds of studies are available if one checks those sources. This kind of post takes much less time to write, but may be less useful or impressive or something.
Less impressive, but about as useful.
I believe this is true for nearly all pre-industrial societies, including pre-industrial (or at least pre-enlightenment) western culture. The two meanings of the word "before", which can mean either in front of (spatially) or behind (temporally), are a remnant of the older metaphor.
Sorry if this is a n00b question, but are there any quantitative studies that catalogue such metaphors, and their prevalence among multiple cultures ? The reason I ask is because (as far as I can tell, which admittedly isn't very far) claims such as "all people think X", or "all people think of Y when they consider X" have a poor track record. As soon as the claim comes out, a bunch of people contribute counterexamples, and the claim is downgraded to "most people in a very specific demographic think X".
FYI I think like them - does it mean I am not part of us? :)
I regularly have disputes over these classical sequences of apish ancestors transforming into men because I place the more recent behind and following the less recent, while the dominant view is to have the modern man lead his ancestors ranked behind him most-recent-first.
I believe all quotes were from the book at the beginning, but it still doesn't feel like a lukeprog post without at least a page of citations at the end.
I half expect that the article is unfinished or that only the first part of it was posted. It did end somewhat abruptly.
It doesn't seem to me that the OP predicts identical metaphorical categorization across all cultures/languages, but in either case you don't in fact find it. Actually, see Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things for a detailed exploration of metaphorical categorization in a relatively "uncontaminated" linguistic environment.
Thanks for the recommendation.
I didn't mean "identical" so much as "very similar". The vast majority of human cultures have experiences like "parents are big and important", "heavy lifting is burdensome", "bed is comfy, tree is shady" and the like. Since the underlying machinery doing the "necessary" categorizing is shared, it seems that these metaphors not being largely similar across cultures is indicative of culture itself playing a strong role in how we choose/use metaphors.
I suppose it's a minor win for the theory so long as all cultures use some metaphors for abstract concepts (as opposed to specialized terms/jargon), but the post seems to argue for them stemming from universal sensorimotor experiences, so if these experiences are truly at the heart of the phenomenon, I would expect to see a lot of cross-cultural similarity.
Culture itself most assuredly plays a strong role in how we choose/use metaphors.
Looking for universal metaphors might be interesting. I'm reasonably confident that "warm = nurturing" across a wide range of cultures, for example, or "path = plan"; I am less (but still significantly) confident about "big" = "important", even less confident about "more = up", etc.
If we broaden the thesis to include non-identical metaphors, my confidence increases wildly. For example, I'm extremely confident that every human culture has some metaphor for "plan" that involves a process for getting from an initial to a final state.