Flexible foundations of abstract thought: A review and a theory [chapter]

Julio Santiago, Antonio Román, Marc Ouellet, Thomas W. Schubert, Anne Maass
2011 Spatial Dimensions of Social Thought  
Draft, please, do not cite Since the proposal of conceptual metaphors as the representational means for grounding abstract concepts in concrete sensorio-motor experiences, experimental research about this issue is on the rise. The present paper identifies the problem of flexibility as one of the key questions that remains to receive a satisfactory answer, and proposes a psychologically plausible model that offers such an answer. The model is grounded on basic spatial cognition principles,
more » ... g memory representations and attentional processes. This framework integrates prior results and licenses several new predictions. Direct test of some of these predictions is provided by two recent studies from our lab. Finally, we discuss the implications of this framework for the issues of the manifestation of conceptual metaphors in behaviour, the acquisition of conceptual metaphors, their cross-cultural variation, and the Symbol Grounding Problem. When observing a person talking about an abstract idea, say, a psychology professor describing a particular theory, we can often see that her hands depict in the air the concepts she is mentioning as if they were solid, concrete objects (McNeill, 1992) . She might, for example, move her hand upwards as if holding a ball-like object. Simultaneous speech make clear that these solid objects are used to refer to the same concept that is being mentioned. For example, the ball is "presented" to the audience as the speech introduces the name of the theory. Even more interestingly, the solid ball also seems to participate in reasoning involving the concept, as when the theory is compared to a rival theory, held as another ball in the other hand. The professor might then stare to one imaginary ball, then to the other, and compare their weights while she explains why one theory outperforms the other in its fit to available data. Why are all these concrete concepts called upon when talking about abstract meaning? Are concrete experiences of moving and interacting with the physical world an integral part of abstract meaning? Or are they a more or less optional component that can be called on demand depending on the requirements of the situation (say, for improving understanding in the addressee or performing certain reasoning tasks)? This question is the Symbol Grounding Problem (Harnad, 1990) , and it constitutes a central topic in cognitive science (Zinken, 2008): how are concepts grounded in the external world? How is the internal representational machinery of the mind brought to bear on the objects and events that surround the individual? Within this general frame, many authors agree that the grounding of abstract concepts constitutes the hardest part. How can we think about things we have never experienced? How can the concepts of DEMOCRACY, FUTURE, or CONCEPT be entertained, let alone their references resolved? The notion of embodiment has been offered as a possible solution to this problem. In what follows we first outline the version of embodiment that will be scrutinized in this paper, based on the idea of conceptual metaphors, what we will call the Solid Foundations View. We then identify the problem of cognitive flexibility as one of the most challenging questions for the Solid Foundations View, and undertake a literature review of research from several different traditions which can be related mostly to primary conceptual metaphors. We will keep the review focused on tasks in-FLEXIBLE FOUNDATIONS OF ABSTRACT THOUGHT volving literal or highly conventional language, including numbers, or without a linguistic component. Related research on figurative language processing will be mentioned only in passing. Contrary to expectations from this view, available evidence shows a surprising degree of flexibility in conceptual metaphoric mappings, and points to a number of mediating factors. Cognitive flexibility opens questions regarding how specific mappings are selected and used in particular occasions. The main goal of the present paper is to offer an answer to these questions that grants cognitive flexibility a central theoretical role, instead of treating it as a nuisance. A main consequence of this approach will be to bring working memory to the explanatory forefront, leaving semantic long term memory in the background, just the opposite situation to what is currently the norm in the embodiment literature. We show how the theory can integrate prior results, points to several factors that mediate the flexibility in the manifestation of conceptual projections, and generates several new predictions. We then draw on our own research to provide support for the theory. Finally, we end with a discussion of the implications of the theory for the issues of the acquisition of conceptual metaphors, their cross-linguistic and cross-cultural variations, and the Symbol Grounding Problem. The Solid Foundations View of Abstract Concepts The Solid Foundations View of abstract concepts has its origins in Conceptual Metaphor theory, which emerged within cognitive linguistics with a stronger focus on representation than on processing (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980 , 1999 Gibbs & O'Brien, 1990; Johnson, 1987) . In this view, concrete conceptual domains, which arise by direct experience in interaction with the world, are characterized by their image schematic structure (see also Mandler, 1992) . Image schemas are perceptuo-motor gestalts such as SOURCE-PATH-GOAL, which arise from repeated situations in which movement from a source point to an end point is observed, experienced or imposed onto something. Other proposed image schemas include CENTER-SURROUND, CONTAINMENT, or BALANCE (Johnson, 1987). Image schemas provide relational structure to concrete conceptual domains. All other concepts are hypothesized to be structured through metaphoric mappings from these concrete domains. Such mappings arise also because of experienced correlations between the processing of the concrete and the abstract domains. As an example, the domain of time (at least in one of the meanings of the polysemous term "time", see Evans, 2004) is proposed to borrow extensively from the domain of space, such that time is understood as the PATH along which the observer moves from one SOURCE location in the back (the past) towards another GOAL location in front (the future). This primary metaphor has been termed TIME IS MOTION, and arises from repeated correlations between the experience of motion and the passing of time. Some other proposed primary metaphors are MORE IS UP, HAPPY IS UP, or KNOWING IS SEEING (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999), which are embodied in experienced correlations between 2 Figure 1.-The Solid Foundations View of abstract concepts (photograph by wallyq, some rights reserved). FLEXIBLE FOUNDATIONS OF ABSTRACT THOUGHT height and amount of substance, between body posture and emotion (positive or negative), and between the act of seeing and the experience of knowing. More complex concepts are in turn built up metaphorically through combinations of metaphors, such as, e.g., LOVE IS A JOURNEY or THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS. Embodiment is thus something akin to the foundations of a building. Under this view, the human conceptual apparatus may look like the Empire State Building (Figure 1) , a rock-solid structure where upper (more abstract) floors are supported by lower (more concrete) floors, which ground the whole structure firmly on the experiential terrain. The progressive bottom-up support is both intended as a metaphor for the adult conceptual system and for its ontogenetic development (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980 , 1999 Mandler, 1992) . This is the central tenet of the theoretical family that we refer to as the Solid Foundations View. Conceptual Metaphor Theory constitutes its strongest formulation. In this view, all meaning is embodied in the sense that it all refers more or less directly to basic image schemas, which are abstracted in turn from perceptuo-motor experiences. There is a strict directionality implied here: more abstract domains borrow structure from more concrete domains, but concrete domains do not borrow from abstract domains. We will refer to this assumption as the Strict Directionality Hypothesis heretofore. It should be noted that, under this formulation of the hypothesis, it implies both an ontogenetic asymmetry (more abstract concepts develop from more concrete concepts) and a representational asymmetry (more abstract concepts are represented in terms of more concrete concepts). The power of metaphoric mappings for substantiating abstract thought lies in their ability to guide inferences and construct new meaning. To stay with the example of time, our bodily experience of passing time affords very few inferences by itself. Once time is mapped onto spatial motion, the imported structure allow a much richer set of inferences, i.e., one can ask what event is farther away in the future or in the past, whether it is possible for events to travel in circles and occur again in cyclic fashion, and so on. Hence, metaphoric structure helps reasoning and problem solving. Finally, conceptual metaphors allow extending meaning along novel lines which are consistent with the established mapping, as when we wonder whether we will be marching, stumbling or sliding into the future. The original linguistic evidence stemmed from the analysis of patterns of idiomatic use in language. Lakoff & Johnson (1980) observed that conventional expressions can be grouped together in families which suggest a common underlying metaphoric structure. For example, sentences like "we are years ahead of them", "that was a long time back", or "he is advancing quickly towards a great future", all share the underlying TIME IS MOTION metaphor. This systematicity was unexpected from the standard semantic analysis of idioms, which sees them as frozen complex lexical items whose meaning must be listed as a whole in the mental lexicon (Cruse, 1986) . Even more convincing was the fact that these hypothetical conceptual metaphors would allow idiomatic meanings to be extended in novel ways (as in the phrase "a remnant from a misty past") without compromising their comprehensibility. They also noted that it is very often the case that people speak about an abstract concept in terms of a more concrete one, but rarely they do it in the opposite way. The analysis of polisemy provided another important source of support for these original insights. In the standard analysis, polisemy is captured by listing different senses of a word, as if they were just homonyms (e.g., Katz & Fodor, 1963; Cruse, 1986) . However, meaning extensions of polisemous words often follow the lines established by conceptual metaphors (see, e.g., Tyler & Evans, 2001) . These lines seem to be also important organizing principles for semantic change over time (Sweetser, 1990) . Gesture also provides many examples of abstract concepts being instantiated as concrete examples of image schem-3 FLEXIBLE FOUNDATIONS OF ABSTRACT THOUGHT as, both in spontaneous gestures made along spoken language (McNeill, 1992; McNeill & Duncan, 2000; Núñez & Sweetser, 2006) and as stored lexical items in signed languages (Taub, 2000 (Taub, , 2001 . However, given its observational nature, these kinds of evidence, although intuitively compelling, cannot be taken as definitive evidence for the psychological reality of conceptual metaphors (Murphy, 1996 (Murphy, , 1997 . So far, the only argument for the proposed causes of linguistic patterning (regularities of thought) relies on theoretical parsimony. Parsimony, though, is only a heuristic strategy in science. In order to establish a causal relation between thought and language, it is necessary to use experimental methods. However, the Conceptual Metaphor View is not stated as a processing model, and as such, it cannot make predictions on performance in behavioural tasks of the kind used in psychological experiments. Therefore, a psychological version of it was devised by Boroditsky (2000) , the Metaphoric Structuring View. The Metaphoric Structuring View adopts the central idea of the progressive building of more abstract (less clearly delineated) conceptual domains on the foundations of more concrete (clearly delineated) domains. From there it follows the expectation of interactions between the online processing of concrete and abstract concepts. Boroditsky (2000) also accepts the Hypothesis of Strict Directionality from concrete to abstract domains, and uses it to predict the shape of that interaction. She distinguishes two versions of Metaphoric Structuring. The Strong Version assumes that the source concrete domain is automatically activated by aspects of the situation, and it is then used to structure the abstract domain, so framing its understanding and reasoning about. The Weak Version maintains that, after repeated use, the relational structure of the source domain may be stored at the abstract domain, allowing the processing of the latter without having to activate the former. Under the Weak Version, once a conceptual metaphor is well established, no further influences of the processing of the abstract domain are expected on the processing of the concrete domain. Processing the concrete domain should influence concurrent performance based on the abstract domain, but the opposite should not hold. Boroditsky (2000) observed asymmetrical priming effects, which have since been replicated in several studies (e.g., Casasanto & Boroditsky, 2008; see discussion below) and thus rejected the Strong Version. Although agreeing on the basic structuring of the conceptual system, it is important to note that Boroditsky (2000, and in later writings) does not sustain the ontogenetic view posed by Johnson (1980, 1999). Under her view, the determinant factor for the development of metaphoric mappings is language, and not experiencial correlations between the processing of the concrete and abstract domains. The metaphorical expressions present in language motivate the generation of analogies and guide the mapping of structure across concrete and abstract domains. Therefore, although the Weak Metaphoric Structuring Version is mainly related to the online processing of abstract concepts, it comes associated to an ontogenetic view of its own that places language at the origin of conceptual metaphors. A final, intermediate version has been recently put forward by Casasanto (2008; Casasanto & Boroditsky, 2008; Casasanto, in press), which we will call the Integrated Metaphoric Structuring View. It accepts the tenets of the Weak Metaphoric Structuring View, but suggests that both experiential correlations and linguistic metaphors play a role in the development of conceptual mappings. Perceptuo-motor experiences provide the ground for universal conceptual metaphors and language enters the picture later to strengthen some mappings and weaken others. So far, only one clear dissociation between these two sources of conceptual mappings has been reported (Casasanto, in press): whereas righthanders associate positive emotional valence with right space and negative valence with lefit space, in agreement with both linguistic-cultural conventions and bodily experiences, left-handers show the opposite association. The mapping in left-handers must arise, therefore, only from perceptuo-motor experience, against the tide of language and culture. Fig-4 FLEXIBLE FOUNDATIONS OF ABSTRACT THOUGHT
doi:10.1515/9783110254310.39 fatcat:vppsolxzujef5i5mxxvz2o7rdu