experiential gestalt

"Grady showed that complex metaphors arise from primary metaphors that are directly grounded in the everyday experience that links our sensory-motor experience to the domain of our subjective judgments." (#60 4152)

"There are primary metaphors for time, causation, events, morality, emotions, and other domains that are central to human thought. Such metaphors also provide a superstructure for our systems of complex metaphorical thought and language." (#60 4184)

"Primary metaphor is a term named by Joseph Grady for the basic connection that exist between subjective or abstract experiences such as good and concrete experiences such as up. These two concepts usually correlate in experience, and form the primary metaphor good is up. Likewise there is a correlation between seeing and knowing forming the primary metaphor seeing is knowing. Two such primary metaphors are used when understanding an expression such as glass ceiling." - Wikipedia

"Even a concept as basic as CAUSATION is not purely emergent or purely metaphorical. Rather, it appears to have a directly emergent core that is elaborated metaphorically." (#60 1245)

"MAKING is an instance of a directly emergent concept, namely, DIRECT MANIPULATION, which is further elaborated by the metaphor THE OBJECT COMES OUT OF THE SUBSTANCE." (#60 1315)

"Simple instances of making an object (e.g., a paper airplane, a snowball, a sand castle) are all special cases of direct causation." (#60 1301)

"Another way we can conceptualize making is by elaborating on direct manipulation, using another metaphor: THE SUBSTANCE GOES INTO THE OBJECT." (#60 1317)

"In birth, an object (the baby) comes out of a container (the mother). At the same time, the mother's substance (her flesh and blood) are in the baby (the container object). The experience of birth (and also agricultural growth) provides a grounding for the general concept of CREATION, which has as its core the concept of MAKING a physical object but which extends to abstract entities as well." (#60 1332)

"many aspects of our experience cannot be clearly delineated in terms of the naturally emergent dimensions of our experience. This is typically the case for human emotions, abstract concepts, mental activity, time, work, human institutions, social practices, etc., and even for physical objects that have no inherent boundaries or orientations. Though most of these can be experienced directly, none of them can be fully comprehended on their own terms. Instead, we must understand them in terms of other entities and experiences, typically other kinds of entities and experiences." (#60 3020)

"You sense that you are in an argument when you find your own position under attack or when you feel a need to attack the other person's position. It becomes a full-fledged argument when both of you devote most of your conversational energy to trying to discredit the other person's position while maintaining your own. The argument remains a conversation, although the element of polite cooperation in maintaining the conversational structure may be strained if the argument becomes heated." (#60 1407)

"Understanding a conversation as being an argument involves being able to superimpose the multidimensional structure of part of the concept WAR upon the corresponding structure CONVERSATION. Such multidimensional structures characterize experiential gestalts, which are ways of organizing experiences into structured wholes." (#60 1458)

"In the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor, the gestalt for CONVERSATION is structured further by means of correspondences with selected elements of the gestalt for war." (#60 1461)

"We would like to suggest instead that causation is best understood as an experiential gestalt. A proper understanding of causation requires that it be viewed as a cluster of other components. But the cluster forms a gestalt—a whole that we human beings find more basic than the parts." (#60 1253)

"Piaget has hypothesized that infants first learn about causation by realizing that they can directly manipulate objects around them—pull off their blankets, throw their bottles, drop toys. There is, in fact, a stage in which infants seem to "practice" these manipulations, e.g., they repeatedly drop their spoons. Such direct manipulations, even on the part of infants, involve certain shared features that characterize the notion of direct causation that is so integral a part of our constant everyday functioning in our environment—as when we flip light switches, button our shirts, open doors, etc. Though each of these actions is different, the overwhelming proportion of them share features of what we may call a "prototypical" or "paradigmatic" case of direct causation." (#60 1256)

"These shared features include: The agent has as a goal some change of state in the patient. The change of state is physical. The agent has a "plan" for carrying out this goal. The plan requires the agent's use of a motor program. The agent is in control of that motor program. The agent is primarily responsible for carrying out the plan. The agent is the energy source (i.e., the agent is directing his energies toward the patient), and the patient is the energy goal (i.e., the change in the patient is due to an external source of energy). The agent touches the patient either with his body or an instrument (i.e., there is a spatiotemporal overlap between what the agent does and the change in the patient). The agent successfully carries out the plan. The change in the patient is perceptible. The agent monitors the change in the patient through sensory perception. There is a single specific agent and a single specific patient." (#60 1261)

"(In physical causation the agent and patient are events, a physical law takes the place of plan, goal, and motor activity, and all of the peculiarly human aspects are factored out.)" (#60 1285)

"Our successful functioning in the world involves the application of the concept of causation to ever new domains of activity—through intention, planning, drawing inferences, etc. The concept is stable because we continue to function successfully in terms of it." (#60 1290)

"Though the concept of causation as we have characterized it is basic to human activity, it is not a "primitive" in the usual building-block sense, that is, it is not unanalyz-able and undecomposable. Since it is defined in terms of a prototype that is characterized by a recurrent complex of properties, our concept of causation is at once holistic, analyzable into those properties, and capable of a wide range of variation. The terms into which the causation prototype is analyzed (e.g., control, motor program, volition, etc.) are probably also characterized by prototype and capable of further analysis. This permits us to have concepts that are at once basic, holistic, and indefinitely analyzable." (#60 1294)

"there is another special case of CAUSATION which we conceptualize in terms of the EMERGENCE metaphor. This is the case where a mental or emotional state is viewed as causing an act or event" (#60 1348)

"Here the STATE (desperation, loneliness, etc.) is viewed as a container, and the act or event is viewed as an object that emerges from the container. The CAUSATION is viewed as the EMERGENCE of the EVENT from the STATE" (#60 1354)

"Even the basic concepts of causation used in the physical and social sciences are primarily constituted by a system of nearly two dozen distinct metaphors, each with its own causal logic (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, chapter 11). Thus, causation can be conceptualized in terms of forced motion to a new location (as in, "Scientific developments have propelled us into the Digital Age"), the giving and taking of objects ("These vitamins will give you energy"), links ("Cancer has been linked to pesticide use"), motion along a path ("China is on the road to democracy, having taken the path of capitalism"), and so on. This discovery was particularly startling, even to us, because it challenged the widespread view that there is a single kind of causation with a single causal logic structuring the world." (#60 4076)

"We are proposing that the concepts that occur in metaphorical definitions are those that correspond to natural kinds of experience." (#60 2056)

"the following would be examples of concepts for natural kinds of experience in our culture: LOVE, TIME, IDEAS, UNDERSTANDING, ARGUMENTS, LABOR, HAPPINESS, HEALTH, CONTROL, STATUS, MORALITY, etc. These are concepts that require metaphorical definition, since they are not clearly enough delineated in their own terms to satisfy the purposes of our day-to-day functioning." (#60 2057)

"we would suggest that concepts that are used in metaphorical definitions to define other concepts also correspond to natural kinds of experience. Examples are PHYSICAL ORIENTATIONS, OBJECTS, SUBSTANCES, SEEING, JOURNEYS, WAR, MADNESS, FOOD, BUILDINGS, etc." (#60 2060)

"The concept LOVE, for example, is structured mostly in metaphorical terms: LOVE IS A JOURNEY, LOVE IS A PATIENT, LOVE IS A PHYSICAL FORCE, LOVE IS MADNESS, LOVE IS WAR, etc." (#60 1530)

"The concept of love has a core that is minimally structured by the subcategorization love is an emotion and by links to other emotions, e.g., liking. This is typical of emotional concepts, which are not clearly delineated in our experience in any direct fashion and therefore must be comprehended primarily indirectly, via metaphor." (#60 1531)

"Some of these entailments are metaphorical (e.g., "Love is an aesthetic experience"); others are not (e.g., "Love involves shared responsibility"). Each of these entailments may itself have further entailments. The result is a large and coherent network of entailments, which may, on the whole, either fit or not fit our experiences of love. When the network does fit, the experiences form a coherent whole as instances of the metaphor. What we experience with such a metaphor is a kind of reverberation down through the network of entailments that awakens and connects our memories of our past love experiences and serves as a possible guide for future ones." (#60 2457)

"there is more to coherence than structuring in terms of multidimensional gestalts. When a concept is structured by more than one metaphor, the different metaphorical structurings usually fit together in a coherent fashion." (#60 1534)

"The difference between coherence and consistency is crucial. Each metaphor focuses on one aspect of the concept ARGUMENT: in this, each serves a single purpose. Moreover, each metaphor allows us to understand one aspect of the concept in terms of a more clearly delineated concept, e.g., JOURNEY OR CONTAINER. The reason we need two metaphors is because there is no one metaphor that will do the job—there is no one metaphor that will allow us to get a handle simultaneously on both the direction of the argument and the content of the argument. These two purposes cannot both be served at once by a single metaphor. And where the purposes won't mix, the metaphors won't mix. Thus we get instances of impermissible mixed metaphors resulting from the impossibility of a single clearly delineated metaphor that satisfies both purposes at once. For example, we can speak of the direction of the argument and of the content of the argument but not of the direction of the content of the argument nor of the content of the direction of the argument." (#60 1687)

"A shared metaphorical entailment can establish a cross-metaphorical correspondence. For example, the shared entailment AS WE MAKE AN ARGUMENT, MORE OF A SURFACE IS CREATED establishes a correspondence between the amount of ground covered in the argument (which is in the JOURNEY metaphor) and the amount of content in the argument (which is in the CONTAINER metaphor)." (#60 1711)

"Where there is an overlapping of purposes, there is an overlapping of metaphors and hence a coherence between them. Permissible mixed metaphors fall into this overlap." (#60 1717)

"experiential gestalts are multidimensional structured wholes. Their dimensions, in turn, are defined in terms of directly emergent concepts. That is, the various dimensions (participants, parts, stages, etc.) are categories that emerge naturally from our experience." (#60 1465)

"We have already seen that causation is a directly emergent concept, and the other dimensions in terms of which we categorize our experience have a fairly obvious experiential basis: Participants, Parts, Stages, Linear sequence, Purpose" (#60 1467)

"We have so far characterized coherence in terms of experiential gestalts, which have various dimensions that emerge naturally from experience. Some gestalts are relatively simple (CONVERSATION) and some are extremely elaborate (WAR)." (#60 1527)

"Experiential gestalts: Our object and substance categories are gestalts that have at least the following dimensions: perceptual, motor activity, part/whole, functional, purposive. Our categories of direct actions, activities, events, and experiences are gestalts that have at least the following dimensions: participants, parts, motor activities, perceptions, stages, linear sequences (of parts), causal relations, purpose (goals/plans for actions and end states for events). These constitute the natural dimensions of our direct experience. Not all of them will play a role in every kind of direct experience, but, in general, most of them will play some role or other." (#60 2997)

"The metaphorical concepts TIME IS MONEY, TIME IS A RESOURCE, and TIME IS A VALUABLE COMMODITY form a single system based on subcategorization, since in our society money is a limited resource and limited resources are valuable commodities. These subcategorization relationships characterize entailment relationships between the metaphors. TIME IS MONEY entails that TIME IS A LIMITED RESOURCE, which entails that TIME IS A VALUABLE COMMODITY." (#60 209)