CapitalistImperialistPig

Arun links to an interesting article by A. K. Ramanujan entitled "Is there an Indian Way of Thinking?" It's a subtle article, and I hesitate to try to summarize, but he emphasizes the idea that compared to Western thinking, Indian thinking is more contextual, Western more context free. I don't claim to understand exactly what this means, but some of the examples suggest that this is a difference between saying something like "the governor, speaking to the maid in the bedroom said ..." (contextual) and the context free "the governor said ..." The author also suggests that the Indian mode is more comfortable with simultaneously holding two apparently mutually contradictory views of the same phenomenon - giving as an example, his father, an astronomer, also doing astrology. There is much more, but I recommend the article. At any rate, I was reminded of the discussion of the role of metaphor in cognition by Lakoff and Johnson. They argue that, ...

If a metaphor is a mapping from one conceptual domain to another, what are its properties?  In mathematics, the most interesting mappings are those in which preserve some structure, for example algebraic or differential structure.  Lakoff and Johnson haven't discussed this sort of mathematical notion - yet in the book anyway - but I suspect similar notions underlie our use of metaphor. Conceptual understanding is clearly a critical element of thought, and not surprisingly, it is tightly wrapped with metaphor.  One metaphor is seeing is understanding.  We often use the verbs interchangeably.  Here we are mapping the conceptual domain into the physical sense of sight.  Some properties of sight are faithfully replicated in the metaphor: seeing clearly, for example, means being able to distinguish and identify the parts of an image, and conceptual understanding is strongly analogous.  Other related visual metaphors abound - a "foggy memory" for example. ...

Lakoff and Johnson have a bone to pick with the traditional view of metaphor, much of which they attribute to Aristotle. Here is how they describe that traditional view: 1. Metaphor is a matter of words, not thought. Metaphor occurs when a word is applied not to what it normally designates, but to something else. 2. Metaphorical language is not part of ordinary conventional language. Instead, it is novel and typically arises in poetry, rhetorical attempts at persuasion, and scientific discovery. 3. Metaphorical language is deviant. In metaphor, words are not used in their proper senses. 4. Conventional metaphorical expressions in ordinary everyday language are "dead metaphors," that is, expressions that once were metaphorical, but have become frozen into literal expressions. 5. Metaphors express similarities. That is, there are preexisting similarities between what words normally designate and what they designate when they are used metaphorically. This is not an ac...

... or are you just simile to somebody I used to know? A major theme of Lakoff and Johnson's Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Philosophy is the notion that abstract thought is metaphorical and that the metaphors are grounded in the neural circuity of our sensory motor systems. Thus we may tackle the subject of metaphysics, see its key ideas, or have them go over our head. The apparatus of deductive thought is itself encapsulated in metaphor. Premises are starting points, deductions are a journey, and conclusions are a destination that follows from them. According to the authors, the core metaphors are grounded in simultaneous activations: Part 1: Johnson's theory of conflation in the course of learning. For young children, subjective (nonsensorimotor) experiences and judgments, on the one hand, and sensorimotor experiences, on the other, are so regularly conflated-undifferentiated in experience-that for a time children do not disting...