Reflection
After the closing of this version of the blog I wrote a document on the project, and the drafts of this writing can be found here, (Word format). In this writing I give an account of the status of knowledge within the blog, placing it within a theoretical framework drawing primarily upon concepts associated with embodied cognition, conceptual metaphor, and image schema. The argument I advance is that different forms of knowing are conceptualised and distinguished from one another using different entailments of an overarching metaphor which relates knowledge to the phenomenological experience of being-in-space. Particular attention is given in this document to the significance of the horizontal dimension within the schema, in which the concrete experience of distance and proximity is used as a metaphor for different types of knowing, broadly understood as the objective/subjective spectrum. This horizontal dimension, conceived of as distance from the body, is further connected the different sensory modes that become available at different spatial removes. Particular attention is paid to metaphors associated with the sense of touch, and the middle distance that touch operates at, together with the touching of the earth that makes up the related metaphor of walking.
Final document (PDF File)
Other entailments of the overall schema relating knowledge to being-in-space are referred to within the blog itself, using a less ‘objective’ style of discourse than that used within the reflective document.