Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind

And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.

The MORE IS UP metaphorical model constitutes conceptual scaffolding for, say, discussions about economics—price rises, depressions, downturns, etc. It is not believed. No one thinks MORE really is UP; it is just used in understanding. But there are people who really believe that TIME IS A RESOURCE, and who live by it: they budget their time, try not to waste their time, etc. As we saw above, there is a movement to conventionally extend the RESOURCE (or MONEY) metaphor for TIME, so that the concept of STOLEN TIME will become believed and lived by and not merely pondered, as it is now. Metaphorical concepts can also be lived by without being believed. For example, no one believes that SEEING really is a form of TOUCHING, in which there is a limblike gaze that goes out from the eyes and seeing occurs when the gaze touches something. There used to be a scientific theory of “eye-beams” that was of this sort and was widely believed, but not anymore. Yet we still use such a metaphor to comprehend vision, and that us is reflected in expressions like I can’t take my eyes off of her. Her eyes picked out every detail of the pattern. Their eyes met. And so on.

Our every day folk theory of the world is an objectivist folk theory. We create cognitive models of the world, and we have a natural tendency to attribute real existence to the categories in those cognitive models. This is especially true of conventional metaphorical models. Take, for example, our cognitive model in which time is understood metaphorically as a moneylike resource. Thus, time can be saved, lost, spend, budgeted, used profitably, wasted, etc. This is not a universal way of conceptualizing time, but it is very pervasive in American culture, so much so that many people lose sight of its metaphorical character and take it as part of an objective characterization of what time “really is.”

A particularly important fact about the collection of metaphors used to understand lust in our culture is that their source domains overlap considerably with the source domains of metaphors for anger. As we saw above, anger in America is understood in terms of HEAT, FIRE, WILD ANIMALS and INSANITY as well as reaction to an external force. Just as one can have smoldering sexuality, one can have smoldering anger. One can be consumed with desire and consumed with anger.

Take the sense in which I talk of a cricket bat and a cricket ball and a cricket umpire. The reason that all are called by the same name is perhaps that each has its part—its own special part—to play in the activity called cricketing: it is no good to say that cricket means simply ‘used in cricket’: for we cannot explain what we mean by ‘cricket’ except by explaining the special parts played in cricketing by the bat, ball, etc.[citation removed]

Austin here is discussing a holistic structure—a gestalt—governing our understanding of activities like cricket. Such activities are structured by what we call a cognitive model, an overall structure which is more than merely a composite of its parts. A modifier like cricket in cricket bat, cricket ball, cricket umpire, and so on does not pick out any common property or similarly shared by bats, balls, and umpires. It refers to the structured activity as a whole and the nouns that cricket can modify form a category, but not a category based on shared properties. Rather it is a category based on the structure of the activity of cricket and on those things that are part of the activity. The entities characterized by the cognitive model of cricket are those that are in the category. What defines the category is our structured understanding of the activity.

The objectivist paradigm also induces what is known as the literal-figurative distinction. A literal meaning is one that is capable of fitting reality, that is, of being objectively true or false. Figurative expressions are defined as those that do not have meanings that can directly fit the world in this way. If metaphors and metonymies have any meaning at all, they must have some other, related literal meaning. Thus, metaphor and metonymy are not subjects for objectivist semantics at all. The only viable alternative is to view them as part of pragmatics—the study of a speaker’s meaning. Moreover, it follows from the objectivist definition of definition itself that metaphor and metonymy cannot be part of definitions. They cannot even be part of concepts, since concepts must involve a direct correspondence to entities and categories in the real world (or a possible world). These are not empirical results. They are simply further consequences of the objectivist paradigm.

When an appropriate Idealized Cognitive Model is provided by context, a compound can be made up spontaneously. Pamela Downing provides the classic example of apple juice seat, an expression actually used by a hostess to an overnight guest coming down to breakfast. There were four place settings at the table, three with glasses of orange juice and one with a glass of apple juice. She said Please sit in the apple juice seat, and the new compound made perfect sense given what was understood about the setting.