Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Good Ideas 357Can I have any reading behind the dinner?Today we'll be packing because tomorrow there won't be enough space topack.Friday is covering Saturday and Sunday so I can't have Saturday andSunday if I don't go through Friday.My dolly is scrunched from someone . . . but not from me.They had to stop from a red light.The children could not have inherited the metaphors from earlier speakers;the equation of space with abstract ideas has come naturally to them.Space and force are so basic to language that they are hardlymetaphors at all, at least not in the sense of the literary devices used inpoetry and prose. There is no way to talk about possession, circumstance,and time in ordinary conversation without using words likegoing, keeping, and being at. And the words don't trigger the sense ofincongruity that drives a genuine literary metaphor. We all know whenwe are faced with a figure of speech. As Jackendoff points out, it's naturalto say, "Of course, the world isn't really a stage, but if it were, youmight say that infancy is the first act." But it would be bizarre to say,"Of course, meetings aren't really points in motion, but if they were,you might say that this one went from 3:00 to 4:00." Models of spaceand force don't act like figures of speech intended to convey newinsights; they seem closer to the medium of thought itself. I suspectthat parts of our mental equipment for time, animate beings, minds,and social relations were copied and modified in the course of our evolutionfrom the module for intuitive physics that we partly share withchimpanzees.Metaphors can be built out of metaphors, and we continue to borrowfrom concrete thoughts when we stretch our ideas and words to encompassnew domains. Somewhere between the basic constructions forspace and time in English and the glories of Shakespeare there is a vastinventory of everyday metaphors that express the bulk of our experience.George Lakoff and the linguist Mark Johnson have assembled a list ofthe "metaphors we live by"—mental equations that embrace dozens ofexpressions:ARGUMENT IS WAR:Your claims are indefensible.He attacked every weak point in my argument.