January 20, 2003

Metaphorishness

American Open Technology Consortium It's a battle of understandings. And understandings are framed by conceptual metaphors. We use them all the time without being the least bit aware of it. We talk about time in terms of money (save, waste, spend, gain, lose) and life in terms of travel (arrive, depart, speed up, slow down, get stuck), without realizing that we're speaking about one thing in terms of something quite different. As the cognitive linguists will tell you, this is not a bad thing. In fact, it's very much the way our minds work.

But if we want to change minds, we need to pay attention to exactly these kinds of details.

This is a great quote. It's in the context of a copyright article, but it holds true for several other concepts as well, and I want to think about it a lot. Posted by Curt at January 20, 2003 06:33 PM