Feelings aren’t Facts

October 21st, 2006 Fred McVittie

We come to know and understand abstract concepts through the metaphorical application of non-abstract embodied concepts. These concepts, which are entirely familiar and concrete, and include such things as physical objects, journeys, containers, etc., are organised ‘naturally’ into different sensory modes; those which are apprehended visually, aurally, kinaesthetically, gustatory, olfactorily, and as tactile experience. Therefore our understanding of abstract concepts is likely to be similarly organised into different metaphorical sensory modes. There is certainly an apparent order to the way we use language to articulate different types of abstract concepts; those which we regard as objective (e.g. justice, truth, etc) tend to be described using visual metaphors, whereas those which are thought of as subjective (love, hate, etc) are often spoken of using metaphors of touch. Abstract concepts which are objectified through the use of visual metaphor are awarded the status usually attributed to objects; permanence, boundedness, etc, whereas those which are not objectified in this way but are understood using tactile metaphors are regarded as ‘feelings’, and as everyone knows, feelings aren’t facts.

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Knowing and Sensing

October 23rd, 2006 Fred McVittie

Our experience of the world is mediated and organised through the senses, and the various sensory modes give us different information about the world, as well as implying different relationships between ourselves and the source of the sensory information. Events which stimulate the visual sense, i.e. things that we see, are obviously outside of our body, possibly even a considerable distance from our body, and therefore may or may not have a direct ‘impact’ on our wellbeing. Visualised objects are also (usually) also visible to other people, existing in interpersonal shared space, which means that objects apprehended visually are likely to have similar significance for all viewers (seeing a tiger is likely to cause anyone in visible range to run away). Objects and events which are apprehended through the sense of touch, on the other hand (sic) do, by definition, have a direct impact on the body doing the touching, they are in extreme proximity to that body, and are likely to have a greater significance for the person touched than for someone else who is not in contact with the object, (touching a flame causes a significantly different response than seeing one). This suggests that there is a structured and organised variation in experience depending upon which sense is primarily used to access that experience.

Given that we draw substantially on embodied experience to organise and structure our knowledge of the world which is abstract (i.e. non-concrete) through the use of conceptual metaphor it is likely that abstract concepts will also be organised according to the various sensory modes. Indeed we do find this distinction, with entities which we regard as ‘objective’ being referred to using visual metaphor, thus placing them in a shared conceptual space where they appear similar to all (metaphorical) viewers, whilst those entities we regard as ’subjective’ are often referred to using tactile metaphors. Such subjective entities are held metaphorically against the body where they are ‘felt’, an individual experience with an acknowledged difference in impact for the ‘feeler’ than for the objective ‘viewer’.

The metaphorical application of the senses of smell and taste appear to be less widespread than that of sight and touch, although there does seem to be a relatively consistent mapping from the sense of taste to an aesthetic response to experience, as when we might say that some idea is ‘distasteful’. There may also be some consistency in the mapping of the sense of smell onto concepts which have moral implications, as for example when we say that an abstract idea ’stinks’. Since there is considerable crossover in the concrete experiences of smell and taste it is likely that this crossover will also appear in their metaphorical use of these senses to describe abstract concepts.

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Knowing is Sensing: Aural and Olfactory Modes of Knowing

February 24th, 2008 Fred McVittie

Sight and touch make an appearance on the sense which is coterminous with the origins of those sights and touchings. The object and the sight of that object are simultaneous. See a tree on the horizon, hold a rock in your hand, the rock and the feel of that rock are inseparable. The sight of a tree on the horizon does not signal the impending presence of a tree at some point in the future. The tree that we see is present at the moment of our seeing it. Similarly, the feel of a rock in one’s hand is not an indication that we may be in the presence of a rock at some undisclosed time, or have been in its presence in the past. The rock is here, now. The tree is there, now.

This immanence afforded by sight and touch is not shared by other sensory modes, particularly hearing and olfaction. Typically we hear the impending emergence of an entity prior to its physical manifestation. The crashing in the trees precedes the arrival of the bear into the clearing where we have pitched out tent. The sound may also persist after its departure as we hear its retreat. The ‘beingness’ of the bear which is indicated by the sounds we hear is smudged across a patch of time which extends some way in the future and the past. The scent of a bear, if we had the olfactory abilities of a dog, would show an even greater smearing of being. The lingering scent would not only spread the bear across space but across days of time. The bear would, in this sense, extend into the past, parts of itself clinging to trees and tentpoles and torn canvas and broken crockery, and the long trail of paw-shaped patches of ground that lead through the forest to the here and now of the visible touchable bear.

Applying this logic to the use of sensory modes as metaphors for knowledge there is a logical difference between phenomena which are sensed aurally or through smell than that which is accessed through sight and touch. Whereas seeing and touching refer to the now, hearing and smell also refer to the then of past and future. This difference in the way sensory modes operate should show up in the specifics of their application to the metaphor. It is well established that we use the concepts of felt and seen knowledge to specify that which is evidentially immanent; we say ‘I see what you mean’ and the time of that seeing is assumed to be immediate. We say ‘I feel bad about this’ and again the bad feeling is assumed to be taking place in the moment. When we use words which connect to olfactory or sound metaphors there is not the same self-evident immediacy. If we say ’something smells funny about this plan’ we are not making a claim that something is clearly (sic) amiss that anybody should be able to ’see’. Rather we are claiming some kind of intuitive knowledge about the status of the plan; we are indicating that we have sensed something about it which, although not presently obvious, will make itself obvious later, as the bear crashing through the woods eventually appears in the clearing. We cannot point to the source of our knowing such that it might appear in the senses of others because it is not visualisable in this way. We might say that we ‘just got wind of it’, or it is just ’something in the air’. Olfactory and auditory metaphors tend therefore, to be applied to knowledge which is outside of the subjective/objective dimension and is displaced in time. This is the sort of knowledge which is prescient, which speaks of premonitions, intuition, and ghosts from the past.

Posted in Embodiment, Hearing, Metaphor, Presence, Rock, Sense, Smell | 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 »