Metaphors are us…. We all carry a large collection of tools in our cognitive toolkit, metaphor is one of them, I think it is probably most pervasive tool that we carry around, we use it all the time but mostly we don’t notice it being there. When we interact with the world around us, we pull out a metaphor from our bag of tricks, connect it to the world, we interact with its interface, we twiddle its knobs, press its buttons, look through its lenses, it is the only thing familiar to us, our only window of opportunity to explore the unknown and become familiar with. As we interact with the world, we zoom in, zoom out, change the metaphor like the lens on microscope, select the one matching desired resolution. One might wonder, where these metaphors come from, I think the short answer is that we build them from existing ones, we build complex ones using simple ones and enrich them with new information, we add new knobs; buttons; features and discard the obsolete ones. Our understanding of the world entirely depends on the metaphors avialble in our bag of tricks and ability to use the most appropiate one to fit the situation we are trying to deal with. It won’t be an over stretch to state that our world is entirely made up of metaphors. It probably begins very early in our life, may be from the very first day we enter this world. If we dig deep enough almost everything in our mental lexicon may end up being made up of metaphors, it is such a versatile tool that it is impossible to imagine cognition without it. A while back I came cross this example of a little kid trying to use an iPad as a metaphor for exploring a magazine. Wrong choice of metaphor on part of the kid but I guess it is good enough example to explain the point. youtu.be/aXV-yaFmQNk
Posted on: Fri, 24 Oct 2014 08:26:25 +0000