People in power get to construct reality

President Carter declared that the energy crisis is the “moral equivalent of war” in 1977. This declaration immediately imposed a network of entailments (to impose, involve, or imply as a necessary accompaniment or result). These entailments were such things as “enemy”, “threat to national security”, requiring “setting targets”, “reorganizing priorities”, organizing “strategies”, accepting “sacrifice”, “obeying the Commander in Chief”, etc.

New metaphors, like old tried and true metaphors, can have the power to define reality; thus the conclusion that power can determine reality.

Metaphors create reality through a network of entailments that are coherent and commanding. Metaphors high light some things and push others under the rug. Our acceptance of a metaphor forces us to focus attention only on the aspects of our experience that it illuminates thereby by causing us to view its entailments as being true.

Concerns of truth do arise regarding new metaphors but of most importance are our perceptions and inferences following the metaphor and the actions sanctioned by it.

“In all aspects of life…we define our reality in terms of metaphors and then proceed to act on the basis of the metaphor. We draw inference, set goals, make commitments, and execute plans, all on the basis of how we in part structure our experience, consciously and unconsciously, by means of metaphor.”

Can you give examples of how metaphors have directed action in your life?

Quotes from “Metaphors We Live By” by Lakoff and Johnson

I liked this one.

Sometimes it feels like 'they' just made up "Threats to national security" in 2001.

Whoever frames the debate wins.

Isn't this the same exact thread you made a few days ago about metaphors being everything and builds up all of our thought processes and decisions as human beings? I did enjoy that thread a lot, although it was vvvv long, and a bit over my head. I do agree with you a lot however. It is strange how I can have so many "intellectual" views on the world and how it should be run, yet I have seen less than 1% of it.

Oh and obviously people will take advantage of this. It's in our blood. If only we could get rid of that stupid survival of the fittest gene.

The novice tennis player develops the same success that the infant achieves as it begins the process of learning how to walk. This process is commonly thought of as muscle memory. New born humans and novice tennis players must start with fundamental movements that are repeated many times until such movements can be carried out without conscious effort.

The artist learns the same kind of lesson. The painter develops inference patterns that allow the accomplished painter to use that developed craft for creating images in which much of the activity is carried forward without conscious effort thereby leaving the conscious mind completely available for the creative activity of true artistry.

SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) has discovered what might be metaphorically styled as MMM ‘Metaphor is Muscle Memory’. This linguistic metaphor is not to be comprehended to mean that linguistic metaphor is exactly like muscle memory but that conceptual metaphor carries the same kind of similarity.

We might imagine a string of MMMs interconnected with perceptions to form a complete set of inference patterns that guide muscle movement when the tennis player carries out a serve and volley point. A similar set might be imagined that leads an artist through the construction of a landscape painting.

SGCS has discovered that this interconnection of real time perceptions coupled with metaphors of passed experiences leads us through all of our thinking actions. One might comprehend all thinking as being an interconnection of conceptual metaphors developed through past experiences.

SGCS, as delineated in “Philosophy in the Flesh” by Lakoff and Johnson, presents a new paradigm for cognitive science. This new paradigm might be called the “conceptual metaphor” paradigm. The theory is that experiences form into concepts and some of these concepts are called “primary metaphors”. These ‘primary metaphors’ are often unconsciously mapped from the originating mental space onto another mental space that is a subjective concept, i.e. abstract concept.

Physical experiences of all kinds lead to conceptual metaphors from which perhaps hundreds of ‘primary metaphors’, which are neural structures resulting from sensorimotor experiences, are created. These primary metaphors provide the ‘seed bed’ for the judgments and subjective experiences in life. “Conceptual metaphor is pervasive in both thought and language.” It is hard to think of a common subjective experience that is not conventionally conceptualized in terms of metaphor.

Metaphors can kill and metaphors can heal. Metaphor can be a neural structure that provides a conscious means for comprehending an unknown and metaphor can be a neural structure that is unconsciously mapped (to be located) from one mental space onto another mental space. There is empirical evidence to justify the hypothesis that the brain will, in many circumstances, copy the neural structure from one mental space onto another mental space.

Linguistic metaphors are learning aids. We constantly communicate our meaning by using linguistic metaphors; we use something already known to communicate the meaning of something unknown. Many metaphors, labeled as primary metaphors by cognitive science, are widespread throughout many languages. These widespread metaphors are not innate; they are learned. “There appear to be at least several hundred such widespread, and perhaps universal, metaphors.”

Primary metaphors have this widespread characteristic because they are products of our common biology. Primary metaphors are embodied; they result from human experience, they “are part of the cognitive unconscious.”

Metaphor is a standard means we have of understanding an unknown by association with a known. When we analyze the metaphor ‘bad is stinky’ we will find that we are making a subjective judgment wherein the olfactory sensation becomes the source of the judgment. ‘This movie stinks’ is a subjective judgment and it is made in this manner because a sensorimotor experience is the structure for making this judgment.

CS is claiming that the neural structure of sensorimotor experience is mapped onto the mental space for another experience that is not sensorimotor but subjective and that this neural mapping becomes part of the subjective concept. The sensorimotor experience serves the role of an axiom for the subjective experience.

Physical experiences of all kinds lead to conceptual metaphors from which perhaps hundreds of ‘primary metaphors’, which are neural structures resulting from sensorimotor experiences, are created. These primary metaphors provide the ‘seed bed’ for the judgments and subjective experiences in life. “Conceptual metaphor is pervasive in both thought and language. It is hard to think of a common subjective experience that is not conventionally conceptualized in terms of metaphor.”

The neural network created by the sensorimotor function when an infant is embraced becomes a segment of the neural network when that infant creates the subjective experience of affection. Thus—affection is warmth.

An infant is born and when embraced for the first time by its mother the infant experiences the sensation of warmth. In succeeding experiences the warmth is felt along with other sensations.

Empirical data verifies that there often happens a conflation of this sensation experience together with the development of a subjective (abstract) concept we can call affection. With each similar experience the infant fortifies both the sensation experience and the affection experience and a little later this conflation aspect ends and the child has these two concepts in different mental spaces.

These ideas made me think of mirror neurons. You know that feeling in your crotch, when you observe someone else being kicked in the nuts? Mirror neurons are a useful tool for language aquisition by mimicking and for feeling empathy.

Empathy and language are bounded by our sensory input and our body. Since all we observe from our environment comes from sensory input, these senses are a meaningful filter. It is plausible that since all observations are filtered this way, that those filters influence classification of those observations. Being cold or being lonely seems to excite very similar neurons in my head and produce similar feelings. This is not imo taking the metaphor as a standard, but really the sensaphor.

You are sometimes forced to use metaphors to explain your feelings to another person. Language might be universal, it is also highly personal and subjective. Understanding the unknown by asociation with a 'known' sounds good. But remember that 'known' is only 'known' by the person creating the metaphor. If the persons communicating both have different subjective impressions of things, the understanding the unknown by associating it with the known, becomes a veiled ignotum per ignotius (or: To explain a thing not understood by one still less understood)

imo