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Ontological Metaphors
Entity and Substance Metaphors
Spatial orientations like up-down, front-back, on-off, center-periphery, and near-far provide an extraordinarily rich basis for understanding concepts in orientational terms. But one can do only so much with orientation. Our experience of physical objects and substances provides a further basis for understandingone that goes beyond mere orientation. Understanding our experiences in terms of objects and substances allows us to pick out parts of our experience and treat them as discrete entities or substances of a uniform kind. Once we can identify our experiences as entities or substances, we can refer to them, categorize them, group them, and quantify themand, by this means, reason about them.
\When things are not clearly discrete or bounded, we still I categorize them as such, e.g., mountains, street corners, hedges, etc. Such ways of viewing physical phenomena are ; needed to satisfy certain purposes that we have: locating ; mountains, meeting at street corners, trimming hedges. ; Human purposes typically require us to impose artificial boundaries that make physical phenomena discrete just as we are: entities bounded by a surface.
Just as the basic experiences of human spatial orientations give rise to orientational metaphors, so our experiences with physical objects (especially our own bodies) provide the basis for an extraordinarily wide variety of ontological metaphors, that is, ways of viewing events, activities, emotions, ideas, etc., as entities and substances. Ontological metaphors serve various purposes, and the
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various kinds of metaphors there are reflect the kinds of purposes served. Take the experience of rising prices, which can be metaphorically viewed as an entity via the noun inflation. This gives us a way of referring to the experience:
INFLATION IS AN ENTITY
Inflation is lowering our standard of living.
If there's much more inflation, we'll never survive.
We need to combat inflation.
Inflation is harking us into a corner.
Inflation is taking its toll at the checkout counter and the gas pump.
Buying land is the best way of dealing with inflation.
Inflation makes me sick.
In these cases, viewing inflation as an entity allows us to refer to it, quantify it, identify a particular aspect of it, see it as a cause, act with respect to it, and perhaps even believe that we understand it. Ontological metaphors like this are necessary for even attempting to deal rationally with our experiences.
The range of ontological metaphors that we use for such purposes is enormous. The following list gives some idea of the kinds of purposes, along with representative examples of ontological metaphors that serve them.
Referring
My/ear of insects is driving my wife crazy. That was a beautiful catch. We are working toward peace.
The middle class is a powerful silent force in American politics.
The honor of our country is at stake in this war.
Quantifying
It will take a lot of patience to finish this book.
There is so much hatred in the world.
DuPont has a lot of political power in Delaware.
You've got too much hostility in you.
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Pete Rose has a lot of hustle anil baseball know-how.
Identifying Aspects
The ugly side of his personality comes out under pressure.
The brutality of war dehumanizes us all.
I can't keep up with the pace of modern life.
His emotional health has deteriorated recently.
We never got to feel the thrill of victory in Vietnam.
Identifying Causes
The pressure of his responsibilities caused his breakdown.
He did it out of anger.
Our influence in the world has declined because of our lack of moral fiber.
Internal dissension cost them the pennant.
Setting Goals and Motivating Actions
He went to New York to seek fame and fortune.
Here's what you have to do to insure financial security.
I'm changing my way of life so that I can find true happiness.
The FBI will act quickly in the face of a threat to national security.
She saw getting married as the solution to her problems.
As in the case of orientational metaphors, most of these expressions are not noticed as being metaphorical. One reason for this is that ontological metaphors, like orientational metaphors, serve a very limited range of purposes--- referring, quantifying, etc. Merely viewing a nonphysical thing as an entity or substance does not allow us to comprehend very much about it. But ontological metaphors may be further elaborated. Here are two examples of how the ontological metaphor the mind is an entity is elaborated in our culture.
THE MIND IS A MACHINE
We're still trying to grind out the solution to this equation.
My mind just isn't operating today.
Boy, the wheels are turning now!
I'm a little rusty today.
We've been working on this problem all day and now we're running out of steam.
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MIND IS A BRITTLE OBJECT
Her ego is very fragile.
You have to handle him with care since his wife's death.
He broke under cross-examination.
She is easily crushed.
The experience shuttered him.
I'm going to pieces.
His mind snapped.
These metaphors specify different kinds of objects. They give us different metaphorical models for what the mind is and thereby allow us to focus on different aspects of mental experience. The machine metaphor gives us a conception of the mind as having an on-off state, a level of efficiency, a productive capacity, an internal mechanism, a source of energy, and an operating condition. The brittle object metaphor is not nearly as rich. It allows us to talk only about psychological strength. However, there is a range of mental experience that can be conceived of in terms of either metaphor. The examples we have in mind are these:
He broke down. (the mind is a machine)
He cracked up. (the mind is a brittle object)
But these two metaphors do not focus on exactly the same aspect of mental experience. When a machine breaks down, it simply ceases to function. When a brittle object shatters, its pieces go flying, with possibly dangerous consequences. Thus, for example, when someone goes crazy and becomes wild or violent, it would be appropriate to say "He cracked up." On the other hand, if someone becomes lethargic and unable to function for psychological reasons, we would be more likely to say "He broke down."
Ontological metaphors like these are so natural and so pervasive in our thought that they are usually taken as self-evident, direct descriptions of mental phenomena. The fact that they are metaphorical never occurs to most of us. We take statements like "He cracked under pressure" as being directly true or false. This expression was in fact used by
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various journalists to explain why Dan White brought his gun to the San Francisco City Hall and shot and killed Mayor George Moscone. Explanations of this sort seem perfectly natural to most of us. The reason is that metaphors like the mind is a brittle object are an integral part of the model of the mind that we have in this culture; it is the model most of us think and operate in terms of.
Land Areas
We are physical beings, bounded and set off from the rest of the world by the surface of our skins, and we experience the rest of the world as outside us. Each of us is a container, with a bounding surface and an in-out orientation. We project our own in-out orientation onto other physical objects that are bounded by surfaces. Thus we also view them as containers with an inside and an outside. Rooms and houses are obvious containers. Moving from room to room is moving from one container to another, that is, moving out of one room and into another. We even give solid objects this orientation, as when we break a rock open to see what's inside it. We impose this orientation on our natural environment as well. A clearing in the woods is seen as having a bounding surface, and we can view ourselves as being in the clearing or out of the clearing, in the woods or out of the woods. A clearing in the woods has something we can perceive as a natural boundarythe fuzzy area where the trees more or less stop and the clearing more or less begins. But even where there is no natural physical boundary that can be viewed as defining a container, we impose boundaries---marking off territory so that it has an inside and a bounding surface---whether a wall, a fence, or an abstract line or plane. There are few human instincts more basic than territoriality. And such defining of a territory, putting a boundary around it, is an act of quantification.
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Bounded objects, whether human beings, rocks, or land areas, have sizes. This allows them to be quantified in terms of the amount of substance they contain. Kansas, for example, is a bounded area a containerwhich is why we can say, "There's a lot of land in Kansas."
Substances can themselves be viewed as containers. Take a tub of water, for example. When you get into the tub, you get into the water. Both the tub and the water are viewed as containers, but of different sorts. The tub is a container object, while the water is a container substance.
We conceptualize our visual field as a container and conceptualize what we see as being inside it. Even the term "visual field" suggests this. The metaphor is a natural one that emerges from the fact that, when you look at some territory (land, floor space, etc.), your field of vision defines a boundary of the territory, namely, the part that you can see. Given that a bounded physical space is a container and that our field of vision correlates with that bounded physical space, the metaphorical concept visual fields are containers emerges naturally. Thus we can say:
The ship is coming into view.
I have him in sight.
I can't see him---the tree is in the way.
He's out of sight now.
That's in the center of my field of vision.
There's nothing in sight.
I can't get all of the ships in sight at once.
Events, Actions, Activities, and States
We use ontological metaphors to comprehend events, actions, activities, and states. Events and actions are conceptualized metaphorically as objects, activities as substances, states as containers. A race, for example, is an event, which is viewed as a discrete entity. The race exists
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in space and time, and it has well-defined boundaries. Hence we view it as a container object, having in it participants (which are objects), events like the start and finish (which are metaphorical objects), and the activity of running (which is a metaphorical substance). Thus we can say of a race:
Are you in the race on Sunday? (race as container object)
Are you going to the race? (race as object)
Did you see the race? (race as object)
The finish of the race was really exciting, (finish as event object within
container object)
There was a lot of good running in the race. (running as a SUBSTANCE in a
CONTAINER)
I couldn't do much sprinting until the end. (sprinting as SUBSTANCE)
Halfway into the race, I ran out of energy, (race as container OBJECT)
He's out of the race now. (race as container object)
Activities in general are viewed metaphorically as substances and therefore as containers:
In washing the window, I splashed water all over the floor.
How did Jerry get out of washing the windows?
Outside of washing the windows, what else did you do?
How much window-washing did you do?
How did you get into window-washing as a profession?
He's immersed in washing the windows right now.
Thus, activities are viewed as containers for the actions and other activities that make them up. They are also viewed as containers for the energy and materials required for them and for their by-products, which may be viewed as in then or as emerging from them:
I put a lot of energy into washing the windows.
I get a lot of satisfaction out of washing windows.
There is a lot of satisfaction in washing windows.
Various kinds of states may also be conceptualized a containers. Thus we have examples like these:
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He's in love.
We're out of trouble now.
He's coming out of the coma.
I'm slowly getting into shape.
He entered a state of euphoria.
He fell into a depression.
He finally emerged from the catatonic state he had been in since the end of finals week.