网范文：“Are abstract concepts like dinosaur feathers” 历史上,人们倾向于寻找生命的意义。质疑我们的存在的意义，似乎是一直就有的,从大量的摄影著作,音乐,诗歌,文学和艺术领域，英语毕业论文，都在探究这个主题。这篇哲学范文讨论了人的抽象思维。生活显然是有意义的,但是没有被广泛接受的理论。也许最有趣的回答，寻求的解释不是生活的意义,而是意义本身。换句话说,生活经验和概念结构之间的联系。
探讨打开了认知理论，认知是基于神经系统进化的自适应，英语论文范文，而不是抽象思维。概念结构是基于经验，特别是感觉运动系统。然而身体和精神之间的关系仍通达。下面的范文讲述了这一问题。
Introduction
Historically, people have a tendency to search for the meaning of life. Questioning the significance of our existence seems to be deeply ingrained, and there is a plethora of works of cinematography, music, poetry, literature and art in general that explore this topic. Events in one's life are clearly meaningful, yet there is no widely accepted theory as to how that meaning is derived. Perhaps the most interesting questions seek to explain not the meaning of life, but meaning itself. In other words, what is the relation between life experiences and our conceptual structure.
A promising avenue in research on this topic has been opened by the theory of embodied cognition. Embodied cognition is based on the assumption that nervous systems evolved for the adaptive control of action rather than abstract thought (Semin and Smith 2017: 1) therefore conceptual structure is grounded in an experiential foundation: specifically the sensory-motor system. However, the connection between the body and the mind is still far from perspicuous, and research insight is still intertwined with metaphors specific for researchers' methodologies (Eliasmith 2017). One direction of exploring the mind-body relationship, often applied to cognitive linguistics research, is to study metaphors produced in language and other modalities in order to speculate about the nature of underlying conceptual representations. Defining metaphor as the act of understanding or speaking about a concept in terms of another concept,
Conceptual Metaphor Theory1 proposes that human con-ceptual system is inherently metaphorical in that abstract notions are conceptualised in terms of concrete phenomena. Although CMT is an important development in exploring the relationship between the body, language, and mind it has been criticised vigorously for a number of methodological shortcomings, most notably lack of falsifiability and predictive power (Vervaeke and Kennedy 1996, 2017). It is the opinion of the author of the present thesis that most of these issues can be addressed at the theoretical level by introducing additional constraints on metaphorical mapping and postulating the existence of premetaphoric conceptual structure.
It is the author's belief that such a restructuring effort would increase the accessibility and plausibility of CMT for other branches of cognitive science, most notably computational modelling, neuropsychology, psychology, developmental psychology and others. The author will seek to reach these goals by proposing a hierarchical model of metaphor based on a simple network model of the conceptualisation system. The proposed changes in CMT include integrating the solutions from the image schema theory (Rohrer 2017; Hampe 2017; Johnson 1987), LCCM hypothesis (Evans 2017) and Objectification Theory (Szwedek 2017) into a CMT-based framework, and applying a tiered model of metaphoric processes to conceptual metaphor research.
Within this conceptual model, Objectification, or the ontological metaphorization from abstract to concrete domains, introduced by Szwedek (2017, 2017) provides the much-needed constraints on metaphorical mapping, and is understood as an emergent feature. What is more, postulating a developmental hierarchy of metaphoric processes imposes structure on the CMT model. As a result not only does it improve the predictive power of the theory, but also makes it easier to construct falsifiable hypotheses. Both of the proposed changes are supported with empirical evidence gathered by the author of the study alone and in collaboration, as well as relevant research from other domains. The empirical part of this thesis consists of two studies on the understanding of abstract and concrete concepts in the framework of Objectification Theory and the related hierarchical metaphor model. An important part is an empirical study on the importance of gesture in blind and seeing children and young adults providing further evidence in favour of the proposed model.
Conceptual Metaphor Theory and its implications for cognitive science research
Human beings are very much limited by habits developed from perception and experience. Imagine a simple box with an opening in front and a mirror on one of its sides. The box is constructed in a way that allows the user to put their hand inside where it becomes occluded so that one can only see its reflection in the mirror. If, having inserted the dominant hand inside this contraption, we try to trace even the simplest of shapes with a pen on (a circle, a triangle, or a schematic drawing of a house) the task turns out to be surprisingly difficult. The information we receive from the mirror image of our drawing hand is counter-intuitive and deceiving. Proprioception and visual perception tell the brain different stories about how the hand should be moving. In order to succeed at the task we need to try and consciously ignore the very type of feedback that became the default source of information for our brain. Only by learning to position the hand in relation to external landmarks, rather than fall back on hand-eye coordination, can we complete the task successfully and quickly.
This simple experiment illustrates the extent to which we rely on sensory stimuli and how difficult it is to break routines established by sensorimotor perception. The construction of the human mind stays in a strong relation to the human body. The theory of embodied cognition takes into account this and similar observations, and speculates that meaning is derived from experience. Meaning in the sense of mental representations is grounded in embodied experience in that sensory and motor information are a part of conceptual structure. For example, the mental representation of a car is not an abstract verbal symbol, but rather an event in a complex multi-sensory network that involves neurons in the brain's visual areas re-enacting visual experience of cars (Thagard 2017: 192). A growing body of research corroborates this view: from studies showing infants' capacity for cross-modal inferencing as early as 1 month after birth (Meltzoff and Borton 1979; after Rohrer 2017) to experiments showing a correlation between physical behaviour and understanding of abstract concepts (Casasanto 2017, 2017; Casasanto and Lozano 2017; Boroditsky 2017; Miles et al. 2017).
At thispoint we need to resolve one vital issue. If we consider human bodies to be physical systems operating within a material world then, conceivably, the mind should only be able to perceive and conceptualize physical phenomena. Nevertheless, we are able to conduct complex mental operations on a daily basis, whether it is planning ahead to purchase dog kibble in bulk via the Internet or speculating about the nature of the multiverse. We are arguably one of the few if not the only species able to bridge the gap between sensorimotor experience and abstract reasoning. Still, mental representations of abstract domains have remained one of the mysteries of the mind. It is possible that abstract reasoning relies on basic "spatial perceptual mechanisms present in lower animals" (Lakoff 1990: 74) that underwent evolution. Consequently, one solution to the abstract concept origin problem could be that “the mind recruits old structures for new uses” (Casasanto 2017: 453–454). Sensory perception constitutes a plausible basis for more advanced processes of abstract reasoning. A question that remains is how the gap between the domains of the sensual and the nonsensual was crossed. One answer to this is: through metaphorization.
What is metaphor
It is a widely held belief that in ordinary circumstances people talk in literal terms. Figurative language use is often perceived as an exception rather than the norm. Outside of cognitive linguistics the term “metaphor” is accepted to mean poetic language, language that is out of the ordinary and used for the sake of originality or evoking emotions. Although there exist many more nuanced definitions even within cognitive linguistics itself, metaphor can be broadly defined as thinking or talking about something in terms of something else. Metaphor first became a known object of inquiry in the Antiquity, and took a prominent place in the rhetoric works of Aristotle. However, detailed descriptions of the historical beginnings of metaphor studies lie outside the scope of this thesis. Instead, let me briefly summarize the developments which led to the birth of Conceptual Metaphor TheoryDefinition of metaphor; similes and category inclusion statements Metaphor is an extensively studied phenomenon. Research on figurative language used to be more or less confined to the domain of philosophy and literary studies wherein metaphor was described as “a poetically or rhetorically ambitious use of words, a figurative as opposed to literal use” (Hills 2017). Going beyond this definition of metaphor has not been an easy task for two reasons. First, there needed to be an agreement whether metaphors are just distinctive iterations of existing language phenomena such as similes or category inclusion statements.
Second, regardless of the answer to the first question, it was not easy to pinpoint the reason behind the distinctive linguistic form of metaphorical expressions. As far as classification of metaphor in language is concerned, answers varied to a great extent. Proponents of the view that metaphor was just a new way of expression rather than a separate phenomenon took one of the two positions: metaphors are distinct cases of comparison or analogy (Keysar et al. 2017) or metaphors are just untypical categorisation processes (Thomas et al. 2017; Glucksberg 2017). The comparison view argues that in order to understand anomalous expressions such as “his father is a dinosaur” we first judge their truth-value. Metaphors are judged as literally untrue and, consequently, interpreted as if they were similes i.e. “his father is like a dinosaur”. This form permits inferencing because comparing two concepts requires the identification of shared features.
There are, however, two problems with the simile approach. First, metaphor and juxtaposition are different in that in metaphor we speak of one thing (the target domain) in terms of another thing (the source domain), whereas in juxtapositions two things are merely compared. In other words, metaphorical language suggests that the target and source domains are one and the same, while nothing like this is suggested in typical similes. Second, any two things can be alike in innumerable ways so it impossible to identify precisely those ways that are intended in any given context (Glucksberg 2017: 92). An alternative view is that metaphors are anomalous class inclusion statements, where one thing (the target domain) is included or classified within the other (the source domain).
The statement “his father is a dinosaur” would be interpreted as an assertion that the father in question can be classified as part of the “dinosaur” category. Within the categorisation view class inclusion statements like these trigger an in-ferencing process investigating how the concept of “father” and the prototypical members of the “dinosaur” category can be classified together so that the features they share are brought to the foreground and contribute to metaphor understanding. The categorisation view has two distinct advantages over the comparison view. It does not assume that in order to understand metaphorical statements literal meaning must be rejected first, a belief that has been empirically shown as untrue (Glucksberg 2017). Moreover, rather than solely focus on features that category members share, it highlights the importance of feature salience.
For instance, while the concept of “father” and “dinosaur” share such properties as breathing, digestion, or having skin they are not what the metaphorical expression “his father is a dinosaur” brings to the foreground. On the other hand, salient properties of the concept “dinosaur” which may not be salient in “father”, such as being a relic of the past, are highlighted in the metaphor. The categorisation view of metaphor paved the way for research that focused not only on its role in language, but on the underlying conceptual structure. However, the question whether metaphor is a conceptual or a language phenomenon could not have been answered without deciding where to draw the distinction between the literal and figurative.
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