The Stuff of Thought

According to an article in The Times, a new book by Steven Pinker called The Stuff of Thought considers the connections between language and the ways we think. Pinker point out that language is an imperfect way of representing what we perceive in the world about us, and because of this, it is provides wonderful insight into our manners of perception.

One element of thought which Pinker focuses on is the use of metaphors. He considers phrases which compare love to a journey, political allegiance to physical bonds, or intellectual argument to an act of war. These metphors provide insight into our psychology by suggesting that perhaps we really do consider many abstract concepts through the visor of more concrete metaphors.

Apparently, there's been a fair bit of research on the connection between metaphor and psychology. A Google search for "psychology" and "metaphors"--two terms which I would certainly not have expected to occur in the same sentence--returns 2,240,000 hits. I found that many famous thinkers, including Giambattista Vico, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Paul, Gustav Gerber, Alfred Biese and Friedrich Nietzsche have all contributed to this field. One article from Nottingham University called "Mind, Meaning and Metaphor: the philosophy and psychology of metaphor in 19th century Germany" seems to have a similar philosophy to that of Pinker's book. It's abstract tells how it "explores a German philosophy of metaphor, which proposed a close link between the body and the mind as the basis for metaphor, debunked the view that metaphor is just a decorative rhetorical device and questioned the distinction between the literal and the figurative."

This cause me to wonder: is there any real connection between the literal and the figurative? Do we need concrete ideas to understand the abstract? Or do we simply use concrete nouns to help clarify abstract concepts or to make them more understandable to young children? Is the idea of joy as a sense of lightness something which is found across the world in all different languages or is it something which is specific to our own particular culture? When people are angry we English speakers represent this abstract emotion with the concrete sense of temperature, saying that they are hot-headed. Are people's heads actually hotter when they are angry than when they are calm? Do English speaker's heads get hotter than the heads of people who speak languages without a metaphorical connection between anger and heat? It seems like an interesting, though largely unexplored, field of study.