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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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 »

A Tongue Returning to a Broken Tooth

April 2nd, 2008 Fred McVittie

(Transcribed from HERE)

In some of these videos and in some of the bits of writing in the blog which kind of parallels these videos I keep finding myself coming back to the same ideas over and over again. Sometimes within the space of a few days but sometimes over a period of weeks or even months I find myself coming back to something. and looking back over the writing of the blog particularly it’s very evident that some of the ideas that I’ve been struggling with in the early pieces of writing, or that I’ve had a very, sort of, fleeting relationship with have come back in much more solid form, or much more fully expressed form. When I think about that part of me thinks that it is like a tongue going back to a broken tooth, that’s one of the images that I have of what’s happening there. A kind of fascination with ……….. a necessity to lick it into shape or explore it internally to have a really close examination of it, but not an examination, it’s paradoxical that the blog is public and the examination seems to be taking place much more privately where the tongue explores rather than where a more distanced type of exploration might take place. I’m just wondering what happens when I do change those (entries), when those postings or these videos change over time there is, I do return to something in a different form, they change, what is happening there? I think part of what’s happening is there’s a kind of physical shaping, the hands of my thinking are going out there and ‘tweaking’ stuff, nailing bits together and cutting off the bits that are unnecessary, twisting it back, shaping it, and in some cases eventually launching it almost like a shipbuilding exercise. Certainly some of the early ideas to do with, for example, liquidity metaphors, which fascinate me,eventually are processesed and nailed together, shaped and ultimately launched as a kind of object, a kind of ship, and that’s now available as a published paper, academic paper, so it’s a kind of objective (not flotsam or jetsam) a kind of objective …. stuff, piece of objective… vessel or vehicle of some sort which is off there floating toward the horizon all by itself now, out of my control. So it’s shaped with my hands, the hands of my conceptualisation, and ultimatetely launched. So part of this process seems to be about that, seems to be about revisiting, for the purposes of shaping and finishing and ultimately launching, but part of it also seems to be about this broken tooth idea which is more to do with an internal caressing of the broken, almost a tasting of the broken (and here I’m reminded of the tongue’s other use in shaping the sounds of words)a kind of semiotic engagement with the broken, a linguistic, pre-linguistic engagement with broken ideas. keep returning to that broken idea to try to wrap a word around it. That seems to be what’s going on, at least partially what’s going on when I’m finding myself returning to these same ideas; recycling, repurposing, and rebuilding. Licking and tasting and launching.

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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 »