More on Mirror Neurons

April 26th, 2006 Fred McVittie

This abstract was given to me at dinner last night (hand written!) and the presentation is apparently some time today. I will try to get to it and report back.

It has been shown that the areas of the brain which are activated when we carry out an action, say ‘grasping’, are also activated when we imagine the activity. This is sometimes referred to as a ’simulation’. Furthermore, these same areas are activated when we read about or witness someone else carrying out the action of ‘grasping’. This simulation, or mirroring of the action seems to be a key component in understanding the action or the meaning of the word (Feldman & Narayanan 2004), and the process is occasionally referred to as the action of ‘mirror neurons’.

The significance of these findings for metaphor studies is that these same areas of the brain are also activated when we read about or hear an utterance which makes metaphorical use of the term ‘to grasp’, for example; ‘to grasp and idea’; ‘to grasp an opportunity’. This implies that the metaphorical mapping of concrete, body-based concepts onto abstract concepts is not only a function of the minds cognitive processes, but is also taking place at a neural level. The patterns of neuronal firings which occur during metaphor usage are, in effect, the neural correlates of concepts.

Feldman, J. and S. Narayanan (2004). “Embodied Meaning in a Neural Theory of Language.” Brain and Language(89): 385.

Posted in Conference Abstract, Feldman, J. and Narayanan, S., Grasp, Metaphor, Mirror neurons, Neuroscience, Story | No Comments »

Education, Metaphors, and Mirror Neurons

August 19th, 2006 Fred McVittie

It has been shown that the areas of the brain which are activated when we carry out an action, say grasping, are also activated when we imagine the activity. This is sometimes referred to as a simulation. Furthermore, these same areas are activated when we read about or witness someone else carrying out the action of grasping. This simulation, or mirroring of the action seems to be a key component in understanding the action or the meaning of the word (Feldman and Narayanan 2004), and the process is occasionally referred to as the action of ‘mirror neurons’.

The significance of these findings for metaphor studies is that these same areas of the brain are also activated when we read about or hear an utterance which makes metaphorical use of the term ‘to grasp’, for example; to grasp and idea; to grasp an opportunity. This implies that the metaphorical mapping of concrete, body-based concepts onto abstract concepts is not only a function of the minds cognitive processes, but is also taking place at a neural level. The patterns of neuronal firings which occur during metaphor usage are, in effect, the neural correlates of concepts.

The implication of these findings for educators and students will be discussed, particularly in relation to the teaching and learning of abstract or metaphysical concepts.

Posted in Grasp, Metaphor, Mirror neurons, Neuroscience | No Comments »

Embodied Meaning in a Neural Theory of Language.

September 12th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Feldman, J. and S. Narayanan (2004). “Embodied Meaning in a Neural Theory of Language.” Brain and Language(89): 385.

This paper puts forward a theory of cognitive meaning in which terms such as ‘grasp’ are understood through an activation of the same neural circuitry that would be employed in actually carrying out the action of grasping. These are the so-called ‘mirror neurons’ identified by Ramachandran and others. Narayanan and Feldman go on to suggest how these same circuits are used in the understanding of these same terms used metaphorically, as when we ‘grasp’ and idea etc. It is further suggested that this same system is in place with other modes of communication and comprehension, particularly the use of gesture.

Posted in Embodiment, Grasp, Language, Metaphor, Neuroscience | No Comments »

The Prehensile Mind

October 19th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Alfred North Whitehead makes extensive use of the construction of knowledge using tactile metaphors in his notion of ‘prehension’;

“Whitehead said that the actualities of which the world is composed are related to each other by means of prehensions—indeed, the actualities are their prehensions. To “prehend” is to “grasp” or to take account of other actualities. Prehending is not limited to human beings: as nonhuman forms of experience exist, so do nonhuman forms of prehension. Every actual entity, including nonhuman ones, is related to the world by means of prehensions. The particular way in which each actual entity prehends the world, the how of its “grasping,” Whitehead called the “subjective form” of the prehension, by which he meant its affective tone. Thus, a prehension is a “feeling of feeling.””
http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/Hartshorne/Viney/3.html

As a monkey has a prehensile tail which it uses to grasp distant objects and bring them into contact with its self, so we have a prehensile mind that performs a similar trick with the conceptual experiences of our world.

Posted in Grasp, Knowledge, Touch, Whitehead, Alfred N. | No Comments »

Solaris to Earth (over)

May 28th, 2007 Fred McVittie

It has been estimated that between 75 and 90% of spoken and written language in not literal and concrete, referring to primary experiences with the material substances of the world, but is ‘metaphorical’. It is further believed that this use of metaphor in language reflects a similar widespread use of metaphor in thought, and that most of the cognition we engage in, both conscious and non-conscious, is non-literal. Metaphor allows us to think about aspects of lived experience which would otherwise be unavailable to the senses and therefore unthinkable. These include entities and forces which are simply beyond the reach of the senses because they are too small, too fast, too large, too distant etc. but also includes the many abstract concepts that have been created by human culture and cognition including ‘justice’, ‘truth’, ‘romantic love’ etc. Even such apparently literal and concrete phenomena such as our understanding of numbers has been shown not to be direct (at least above very small numbers), but grounded in metaphor. This dominance of both conscious and non-conscious cognition by metaphor is so great that an entity, person, animal, or artificial intelligence which was only able to process information directly and had no means of embodying abstractions through metaphor would barely qualify as the possessor of a mind at all. It is almost true to say that our modern concept of mind itself is as a kind of metaphor machine.

Our relation to the metaphorising processes which constitute cognition and the formation of mind range from unquestioning acceptance to more self-conscious awareness that we are not thinking or speaking literally. When we speak about atoms we feel that the language is concrete (except to a physicist who knows the truth about atoms), whereas when we speak about God we are not quite so sure if we are talking literally or metaphorically. An uncertainty that will also vary depending on our religious preferences.

Given the ubiquitous concerns with abstractions that seems to characterise the being of human, it is fair to say that most of our phenomenology, and most personal thought and interpersonal discourse is metaphorical. For the most part we live cognitively in a world which is not directly available to the senses, which is beyond human bodily experience. Instead we live in a world of shifting metaphors in which abstract ideas mould themselves into shapes of objects, spaces, and forces that we can see with our minds eye, touch with the mental feelings, move through with the body in our minds. These transient thought forms dissolve and combine, blending and elaborating into complex architectures of thought as our attempts to grasp the ungraspable lead us to constantly build and rebuild these mental structures using the blueprints of embodied experience.

This shifting internal landscape of embodied metaphor, call it ‘imagination’, is the ground for what we experience daily as normal waking consciousness. Behind the clear and constant solidity of waking awareness there is this ongoing dream populated by shape-shifters and transformers. Our consciousness lives on Earth, our imagination lives on Solaris.

Posted in Cognition, Consciousness, Embodiment, Grasp, Imagination, Lem, Stanislaw, Metaphor | No Comments »

The Affordance of Theory

July 12th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Sometimes ideas are difficult to grasp. At other times they might go right over my head or be simply too hard, too thorny, too slippery, or too big to get my head around. These choices of terms that we use to describe the experience of difficulty we face when confronted by such ideas is suggested of a particular kind of relationship, or rather lack of relationship, between these ideas and ourselves.

The philosopher J.J. Gibson (1977, 1979) proposed a theory of perception (and by extension, cognition) in which the repertory of basic elements that we draw upon when visual engaging with the world is not the abstract logical world of geometrical shapes and forms but the potential for physical action that objects and spaces presented. When we see a table, for example, we do not see a set of connected rectangular solids which we mentally assemble and subsequently recognise as a piece of furniture that we might then choose to lay for dinner. Rather, Gibson would claim, we percieve primarily a ’supportable surface’ which only later might we decompose into its logical constituent parts. He termed these primary perceptual qualities ‘affordances’ and the objects and spaces to which we relate ‘affordance structures’. Clearly, the affordance of an object is dependent largely on the form of the living body and on the needs, habits, and preferences of the entity possessing that body. An object which is recognisable as a ’supportable surface’ by one entity, and might therefore be subsequently thought of as a table, might not afford the possibility of that kind of use by a differently-bodied entity, and cannot be recognised in the same way. (Some artworks play with these affordance differences to generate specific effects, for example, the work of Claus Oldenberg.)

Recognition therefore, at its most basic level, is a function of seeing the use of an object or space, and is an embodied, felt sense. If we return to the difficulty associated with trying to grasp ideas which are too hard, or trying to get our head around theories which are too deep etc. one possible interpretation for what is going on in those moments is that the difficulty is one not of intelligence or concentration but of perception. In order to recognise an object in real space one needs to imagine physicaly engaging with it, one needs to imagine this protrusion as a handle and this surface as supportable. Similarly, in the theoretical, metaphorical space of ideas, one needs to be able to imaginatively perceive the affordances of those ideas. One needs to be able to imagine holding firmly to a conveniently placed axiom as one steps across a syllogistic divide; narrowly avoiding a paradox by stepping back and containing the contradictory terms within a greater explanatory framework. It should be remembered that abstract thinking of the type that makes up all theoretical ideas, is always ultimately made up of embodied metaphor, because embodied metaphor is the language of cognition. So if complex ideas are to be grasped, stood under, held, or deconstructed, then we need to treat them as Gibsonian affordance structures.

James J. Gibson (1977), The Theory of Affordances. In Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing, Eds. Robert Shaw and John Bransford, ISBN 0-470-99014-7

James J. Gibson (1979), The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, ISBN 0-89859-959-8

Posted in Affordance, Gibson, James J., Grasp, Perception, Theory | No Comments »

Soul of an Atheist - Grasping the Big Picture

November 14th, 2007 Fred McVittie

If I was to sum up the aim of this writing in one sentence, I would say that it was about grasping the big picture. The picture we want, or I would say need, to grasp is very large indeed, and can only be seen from some elevated position high above the plane of usual human grasping, and we should recognise the ambition of our aim at the outset. Imagine a picture of everything. Got that? If you have then you can close the book now and join your friends on Mount Olympus, or Heaven, or wherever it is you Gods hang out. For the rest of us who are still mortal any attempt to grasp the big picture seems like a hopelessly hubristic endeavor. We are the barely conscious products of chemical reactions taking place in a film of moisture on a ball of rock. How in God’s names could we hope to understand things we can’t even see, or touch, or even think about properly? How could we hope to grasp the big picture if can’t even put a sentence together accurately, for goodness sake? Grasp the big picture? Surely we don’t ‘grasp’ a picture, we ’see’ it. When we ’see’ something we look at it from a safe distance and let the light of our objective knowledge bounce off it into our brains. ‘Grasping’, on the other hand, suggests taking hold of something, pulling it close to us, maybe pressing is against our bodies and feeling its contours merging with our own. There is something of love in this grasp, and of understanding, and compassion, and the intimate sharing of a single sense of being. Grasping the Big Picture? Surely this is nonsense? But this is exactly how it should be. No one sense is what we must use to contemplate the immensity and the complexity of Everything. The big picture is too big to hold with our eyes alone, and if we are to take it in then we must become synaesthetes and allow the familiar segregated play of our senses to spill over into each other, to cross the lines on the playground that usually keep them apart, allowing us to feel with our eyes and see with our hands.

We may say that this is impossible, and only those with some bizarre quirk of neurology are capable of such grasping. But if only we could remember back, and maybe we can, we would remember when this was first nature to us, before the second nature of common sense turned us into an I, and a You, and a He or She, or into an It.

Posted in Cosmology, Grasp, Knowledge, Love, Sense, Synaesthesia, Up | No Comments »

Darkness at Noon - Objectivity and Undeniability

November 23rd, 2007 Fred McVittie

A common metaphor for the acquisition of knowledge is that of ’seeing’. When we want to refer to such gaining of knowledge we might explicitly say ‘I see’, meaning that we have such an understanding. As noted elsewhere, this visual metaphor for knowing also confers object-like status on the knowledge itself and we intuitively begin to treat it as if it were some kind of object that can be ‘grasped’, ‘acquired’, and ‘transferred’, or might be ‘hard’, ‘robust’, or less positively ’slippery’.

The visual metaphor for knowing also has a number of significant entailments which figure within the structure of the metaphor but which may be less obvious. Firstly there is the requirement that these ‘objects’ of knowledge exist in some kind of conceptual ’space’, usually external to the body (obviously, or we would not be able to ’see’ them), and secondly that this space be illuminated. This latter point is evidenced in our references to being ‘in the dark’; we use this and similar phrases when we want to indicate that we know that certain facts (knowledge objects) are ‘out there’ but we cannot see them.

Some types of knowing are conceptualised without the use of the visual metaphor, and in these cases some other sensory mode is usually referred to. So for example, when we want to indicate that we understand what a person is saying but do not want to simply agree with their viewpoint (sic) we might say ‘I hear what you’re saying’. By using an auditory rather than a visual metaphor we have acknowledged the existence of the facts the other person is claiming sight of but have not awarded those facts the full objective status that would be implied by saying that we also ’saw’ what they meant. We are acknowledging the existence of their words, but holding back on accepting the truth claims that those words make. To this extent we might say that (metaphorical) seeing is believing, whilst (metaphorical) hearing has something of the status of rumour; a good indication of what the other person thinks they know, but no guarantee of authority.

Other metaphorical senses used as labels for knowing have similar partial status; ‘felt’ knowledge is usual personal and tacit, and the defining feature of that form of knowing we call ‘taste’ is that it is not ‘out there’ in interpersonal space at all but is inside the body, inside the mouth. Strangely, these up close and personal (or even internal, interoceptive) forms of knowing, whilst they may not have the interpersonal and social authority of ’seen’ facts often have a feeling of personal authority which exceeds the objective. Whilst we may rationally understand that ‘feelings aren’t facts’ as the AA mantra goes, at the same time there is an undeniability of this type of felt knowledge which is often lacking in the objective. Many of us will have had the sense that, whilst all the (objective) facts about a certain phenomenon say one thing, our guts say something else, and that ‘gut feeling’ has a authoritative quality which is hard to overcome.

Obviously these acts of knowing that draw on non-visual metaphors have different, and usually lower social status than the objective knowledge of the seen. In any official context, or in any claim for the authority mentioned above, it is visual, ‘objective’ knowledge which holds sway. For this reason it is not surprising that when we wish to imply that our ideas should be treated as authoritative we tend to use visual metaphors to frame those ideas. Any politician who argued that his opponents ideas were invalid because they were ‘not to his taste’ would get short shrift from those who argued that the truth of such ideas ‘could easily be seen’.

Occasionally the visual metaphor is used to articulate a belief about the status of knowledge which is not easily shared, or which has ambiguous status, and this is most clearly revealed in the language around enlightenment and spiritual experiences. Typically, a person experiencing some kind of epiphany or divine revelation would claim that this experience constitutes the gaining of knowledge or insight, usually a particularly significant or transformative insight which seems to have something to say about the external world. To this extent it requires an objective explanation. Also, such experiences tend to have a quality of undeniability about them; it is rare for a person having such an experience to doubt the reality of it, in the way one might doubt the reality of a contestable fact. To this extent such experiences also demand an explanatory form which indicates the felt certainty of that knowledge. For these reasons, any desire to communicate this experience and share the knowledge thus gained would require that this communication use sensory metaphors which convey the most authority, which as already noted tend to be visual metaphors with all the entailments of space and light that go along with them. (This paragraph has already mobilised some of these metaphors as exemplified in words like ‘enlightenment’ and ‘insight’). They would also require the use of metaphors which convey the ‘felt’ sense of the experience, with all of the self-evident undeniability of the closely-held belief, (again the idea of a belief being ‘closely held’ indicates the mobilisation of an appropriate metaphor, and the unavoidability of using such metaphors in writing and thinking about these concepts). The requirements of a form of expression and conceptualisation appropriate to these experiences inevitably lead to paradox; one must find a way of thinking and speaking which simultaneously evokes the metaphorically exterior space in which objects of knowledge gain their interpersonal authority, a space which is illuminated and translucent, but one must also suggest the darkness and contact of the internal space which give an undeniably sense of phenomenological truth. This necessary paradox may help to explain why some authors, when trying to articulate the enlightenment state (or cognate conditions) use apparently oxymoronic terms such as ‘the dazzling dark’, or possibly in the case of alien abduction, a strange set of (probably confabulated) experiences in which similar symptoms to enlightenment are featured, the light emitted by the aliens or the ships has been described as ‘white, but dark white’.

Posted in Belief, Darkness, Feeling, Grasp, Hearing, Knowledge, Light, Metaphor, Objectivity, Seeing, Sense, Space, Taste | No Comments »

Here is Knowing.

January 18th, 2008 Fred McVittie

You are standing at the centre of a space and at the centre of a pool of light. The light is all around you and may even be inside of you. You may even be the source of that light. Because of the light and the space you are able to ’see’ objects which are within that pool of light, although they cannot be too far away. Beyond a certain distance they grow indistinct, shadowy, and vague. At some remove, within a certain proscribed range, these objects are clearly visible, not only to yourself, but also to others who are near you in this illuminated space.

Should this object pose any kind of threat, because of the distance and the space between yourself and this object of sight you are in no immediate danger. The sight of it may suggest a threat in the future or may be a precursor for some other kind of reaction but this sight alone cannot harm you. No-one ever died from just looking at something. Similarly, the object cannot profit you just by its being simply visible. At that distance you cannot eat it, drink it, have sex with it, shelter under it, wrap yourself in it to keep warm, or use it as tool of any kind. It’s existence may be interesting or informative but it can not be life-preserving. There is therefore no urgency about the object; no life or death decision rests on its precise identification or the appropriateness of its naming. The object is perennially ‘over there’ in the communal space beyond the touch of a hand and the press of skin.

This is not a static space however. Objects can move and we ourselves can also move and as we do so the proximity we might have to objects changes. And with those changes in relative location come other changes in relationship, in salience, and in sensory availability. As we approach the object it moves from being removed to being within our grasp, and we might make use of this availability and place our hands around the object. Here it is man-handled and its affordances are measured against our grip, a larger object may give its weight to our hands and arms and be difficult to embrace and even harder to move. It is now up close and personal, and we would be advised to pay closer and more personal attention to its properties and its motives. It may fall and crush us; it may poison us on contact; we may be eaten alive or pushed over the edge of a cliff. This is the distance at which accidents happen and that which we can touch is not something we can be blase about. If we can touch it then it may touch us, possibly in ways which are unwelcome and life-threatening. Alternatively it may respond to the touch of our outstretched fingers with the softness of a lover’s cheek, thrilling us to the core and drawing us closer. It may, at this distance, release perfume at our touch; the tang of orange and the heavy scent of musk, and again we would be foolish to ignore these tender pleadings. Instead of being dangerous there is the promise of rapture. Whether attractive or repulsive, the source of pain or delight, at the range of touch these objects become significant in a way which is ours and ours alone. No onlooker is offered these promises and threats; there is no sharing of this proximal and intimate space and only by standing on these shoes, at this exact spot in the centre of space and light, and only by being this close to the object can this exact experience be obtained. The salience of the moment is mine and mine alone.

Inside the orbit of our arms the object is not only within our grasp but also beyond our last defence. Any opportunity we may have had to ward of this entity is gone; the blow of an enemy, the unwanted sexual advances of an undesirable fellow human, the slings and arrows of fortune both outrageous and exhilarating, and impact with the body is certain. The space between the object and ourselves is now completely elided and there is only the darkness of direct contact. It is here, at the level of the skin, that all of the drama of human being takes place. Any entity which cannot protect its boundaries from invasion and intrusion is dead in the water. Any being which resists merging with the objects of nourishment and reproduction is similarly stultified. All life is here, and this surface, this superficial envelope should be a major focus of attention and care. What touches, what goes in, what comes out, is a matter of life and death and is not the subject of inconsequential, interpersonal, rarified, distanced debate. In fact there can be no debate; no matter where you stand and however well lit you are you cannot feel these blows and penetrations. They are mine and only mine.

Some of this contact, this pressing, is strong and shakes my balance, moving me away and relocating the centre of myself, my space, my light. Other contacts are more to the point and puncture the skin with surgical precision. Still others both consume and are consumed, passing behind the boundary and making contact with inner spaces and inner sense. Once inside I can feel these objects, if I can feel them at all, only with my gut and the with my heart. They may have a taste which is salty or sweet, and they may weigh heavily inside me. These entities have become entirely secret and no other person can truly know of their existence at all. Even I myself may lose touch with them in the space inside. They are not clearly bounded and seem to merge with the internals of my own body so that I no longer can be sure where I end and they begin. In fact I may start to wonder if I am in total no more than a collection of interior objects, forgotten and assimilated, like the fruit I ate last month which is now transformed into skin cells, but which nevertheless feels like my skin, and the milk I drank as a child long ago became bone and is now far away in the shells of sea creatures; my bones, my self. Internal space, dazzlingly dark

Posted in Grasp, Light, Proximity, Space | No Comments »

Here is One Hand: Knowledge 2.0

March 22nd, 2008 Fred McVittie

“If you do know that ‘here is one hand’ we’ll grant you all the rest.”

One of the most common way in which artefacts of knowledge are organised and are distinguished one from another is through their designation as either Objective or Subjective. This distinction is accompanied by a range of value judgments and use-specific assumptions which serve to reinforce these categories as distinct and, for the most part, unproblematic. Whilst there is no overt or obvious difference in the intrinsic value of one or other of these types of knowing, it is fundamental within the empirical sciences that only Objective knowledge is permissible, largely because of the inherent difficulties of finding effective ways to mobilise knowledge located only in the Subject. This systematic tendency to acknowledge Objectivity and ignore Subjectivity is also found outside of the hard sciences and, despite some understandable but misguided resistance, forms the foundations for procedures of knowledge authentication in the arts and humanities.

One way of comprehending this distinction is through an analysis of the language games which are used in the explication of these two, apparently distinct, knowledge forms. Within the discourses of each form different metaphors, metonyms, and image schema structure the relevant concepts and there is a coherent and consistent pattern is which metaphors and schema are used. Objective knowledge makes extensive use of metaphors related to the act of seeing, including the entailments of visual awareness such as the presence of light, the placement of the object of knowledge in an external space etc. Subjective knowledge, on the other hand, is much more likely to make use of metaphors related to taste or smell. Again, the entailments associated with this latter metaphorical understanding support the conceptualisation associated with subjectivity; interiority, unilateral experiencing, ‘closeness’ to the core self of the experiencer.

It can be argued that between these two extremes of seeing and tasting, and the binary division in knowledge which they suggest, is a zone of possible metaphorical engagement based on the haptic sense; the reaching, touching, stroking, and caressing of the human hand. Knowledge constructed around the metaphor of the hand allows the object of such knowledge to be either grasped or rebuffed. Haptic knowing allows for both the claiming and possession of information (forsaking all others) that subjects require, but also the open-handedness and baton-passing that marks the public-spirited scientist. It might further be suggested that the technological circumstances for such tactile empiricism is already with us in the form of Web 2.0, the collection of database-driven, interactive, user-generated web environments characterised by MySpace, Facebook, Blogger, Amazon, and Wikipedia. The knowledge present on such sites is always in flux and ranges from personal reflection and comment to the most rigorously researched outcomes of the scientific method. The key feature of this network of knowledge, though, is the open access means of its creation and management. Whilst the ‘official’ status of a site such as Wikipedia in conventional academic circles may be questionable, there is no arguing that the information available is proudly and sensuously ‘hands-on’, crafted and moulded by the combined efforts of the end-users. Such sites are paradigmatic examples of haptic knowledge, and will provide instantiations of how we might come to know in ways which bypass both the eye and the tongue.

Posted in Blog, Grasp, Knowledge, Sense, thesis | No Comments »

Perkins’ Disappearing Object

April 9th, 2008 Fred McVittie

When David Perkins identifies three different types of knowing; what he refers to as ‘possessive, ‘performative’, and ‘pro-active’, what he is effectively doing is mapping different types of knowledge across an expanse of metaphorical, phenomenal space. His ‘possessive’ knowledge is that which appears to have something of the quality of a object, placed at some distance but clearly within the line of sight. Like other ‘visual’ objects it can be ’seen’ simultaneously by a number of different observers and has something of the permanence, fixity, and unchanging nature of prototypical objects in lived experience. In this schema the ideal object of possessive knowledge may be the empirical fact, established through deduction, built on firm foundations of scientific research, and unwavering in its resistance to the attacks of falsification. It is a noun in the sentences of meaningful discourse.

Performative knowledge does not have this object status but, as the term implies, rather adopts the position of an action, and that position is always changing. Here is knowledge, or perhaps ‘knowing’, which engages as physical action, which has a changing profile over the course of time, and which moves nomadically through space. Performative knowledge functions as a verb, or as many verbs, and its role is to pick, to pack, to grasp, to fold, to tear, to chop, to walk, to talk, to write, to run, and to never set itself into stone and never to stand still. Its space of operation is not out in the open where it can be skewered in the triangulating gaze of multiple I’s, but at the limin between body and world. It lives in the interstices between the muscles of the arm and the bark of the tree, and it is also in the swing of the axe. It is motile, ductile, flowing, flowering, and possibly shimmering but it is never caught motionless between the pages of a book.

Proactive knowledge is closer yet. As Perkins says, it is ultimately dispositional, and has none of the qualities of an object or of an action. This is the knowledge or the knowing which is inseperable from ‘being’ and therefore is the subject of the sentence. Proactive knowledge swings the axe.

Posted in Grasp, Knowledge, Object, Objectivity | No Comments »

Cross-modal sensory mapping.

April 13th, 2008 Fred McVittie

The analysis of texts which use sensory mode based metaphors, i.e. that refer to ‘touch’, ‘taste’, ’see’, in a non-literal way, shows that there are a number of consistent patterns within this usage, including patterns of relations between the sensory modes. For example, Shen & Cohen (1989) demonstrate that within poetic texts there is a predictable and coherent use of what they refer to as ’synaesthetic’ metaphors, in which the properties of one sensory modality is mapped onto the other. They give the example of phrases such as ’sweet silence’, and point out that in phrases such as this the modality which they refer to as ‘lower’, i.e. closer to the body, in these cases the sense of taste or touch, is mapped onto the ‘higher’ or less proximal sense. Also, the ‘higher’ sense which forms the target of this metaphor is usually less accessible, less easy to ‘grasp’. So, in the case of ’sweet silence’, the higher and more ethereal auditory quality of silence is referred to using the more delineated, accessible, and proximal sense of taste. Although it is not stated in this article, it is hard to miss the metaphor of elevation which is also being deployed in order to give form to our understanding. Not only are the metaphorical senses ordered across the dimension of proximity and distance, (with the access that such proximity entails), and not only are they distinguished in terms of substantiality, with some being easy to grasp whilst others are harder to get a handle on, but they are also arrayed vertically, with some metaphorical sensory modes appearing more elevated than others. Tasting and touching happen locally and at ground level, sight gives us a wider, but less tangible view, and audition (including listening to the sound of silence) extends that view backward and forward and into the future and the past. Shen and Cohen do not make mention of the part played by olfaction in this schema, but it is likely that given the ubiquity of phrases such as ’strong smell’, or ’sharp odor’ demonstrate that it also figures within the overall structure. In these two possible examples the olfactory experience, which has the characteristics of ephemerality and extension which make access difficult, is understood in terms of the tactile, base-level, and proximal senses of strength and sharpness.

Shen, Y. and M. Cohen (1998). “How come silence is sweet but sweetness is not silent: a cognitive account of directionality in poetic synaesthesia.” Language and Literature 7(2): 123-140.

Posted in Cognition, Grasp, Hearing, Knowledge, Metaphor, Proximity, Seeing, Sense, Silence, Smell, Space, Synaesthesia, Taste | 2 Comments »