Welcome to Psychology
576D
Grading Criteria
On Monday of each week, a general topic (1-11) will be covered
(readings will be posted in advance) and a number of questions will be
available on the class website at the end of this class.
Each student will be assigned 1 question to explore. On Thursday of
the same week, students will submit a brief, one-page discussion of
their question (12 point font, doubt spacing) as well as a ten-minute oral
presentation held in class.
There are 10 such exercises. Each written exercise is worth 5% and the
accompanying oral presentation worth 2%, for a total of 70% of the
final grade.
A final essay (counting for 30% of the final grade) is due on the last of
class, dealing with one of a set of issues raised during classroom
discussions. These issues will be made available on our class website.
The final paper is to be no more than five, double-spaced pages (12
point font).
MEANING IS GROUNDED IN SENSORIMOTOR REPRESENTATIONS.
MARCO TETTAMANTI ET AL
I KICK THE BALL
I GRASP A KNIFE
I BITE THE APPLE
CONTROL CONDITION: ABSTRACT SENTENCES LIKE
I APPRECIATE SINCERITY.
WHAT ABOUT ABSTRACT WORDS?
George Lakoff-- the mind is "embodied". Human
cognition, including the most abstract reasoning,
depends on and makes use of such concrete and
"low-level" facilities as the sensorimotor system
and the emotions.
THE MEANING OF AN ABSTRACT WORD LIKE “ARGUMENT”
“Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we
both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in
nature.”
METAPHOR -- AN ARGUMENT IS LIKE WAR OR FIGHTING.
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•
•
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He won the argument.
Your claims are indefensible.
He shot down all my arguments.
His criticisms were right on target.
If you use that strategy, he'll wipe you out.
According to Lakoff, the development of thought has been the process of developing
better metaphors.
Skeletal concepts like “go”, “place” and
“agonist” maintain connections to physical
reasoning….Yet as they take part in
moment-to-moment thinking, they are
abstract symbols, and need not drag with
them images of hunks of matter rolling
around”.
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The embodied view
Thought is carried out in the brain by the same
neural structures that govern vision, action, and
emotion. Language is made meaningful via the
sensory-motor and emotional systems, which
define goals and imagine, recognize, and carry
out actions. Now, at the beginning of the
twenty-first century, the evidence is in. The
ballgame is over. The mind is embodied.
George Lakoff (Preface)
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Prices are going up
Up
More = Up
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If I look upward when I hear the word “UP”, then that response is part of
the meaning of “UP”.
How do I then go from that response to UP, to:
The price of gasoline is up?
Answer: Via a principle of similarity, we extend the concept of “UP”,
from our embodied experience of a pile of books growing upward to
the abstract notion “more”.
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What about UP in:
gassing up before a journey?
filling up a beer mug?
finishing up my work?
closing up shop?
mopping up the floor?
Answer: we extend the metaphor of UP=MORE to the idea of
COMPLETION.
Pinker: It’s the abstractness of the idea
COMPLETE that’s doing the work for us!
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The abstract ideas define the dimensions of similarity…that allow a
conceptual metaphor to be learned and used. You can’t think with
metaphor alone.
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The essential issue
The metaphorical flavour of language comes from the fact that
skeletal concepts like “go,” “place,” and “agonist” maintain
connections to physical reasoning. They are most easily triggered
by the experience of seeing things move around; they are used by
children in spatial senses before they are used in abstract senses…
yet as they take part in moment-to-moment thinking, they are
abstract symbols.
versus
As far as meaning goes, we are distinguished from other animals
not in that we've evolved a brand new mental organ but rather that
we have recycled older systems for a new purpose. We use our
primate perception and action systems not only when we’re
actually perceiving or acting but also when we’re understanding
language about perceiving or acting.
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