Friday, September 26, 2014

David Publishing Co. is (also) a scam

Yet another unsolicited email from a predatory publishing company:
… we invite you to submit this paper and related research papers to Psychology Research.
The new journal of Psychology Research, an award-winning peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary periodicals published by David Publishing Company, New York, NY 10034, USA., since July, 2011, welcomes the submission of original manuscripts reporting innovations or investigations in the Psychology area. Successful general submission manuscripts may report interdisciplinary efforts or be of a sufficiently broad nature to be of interest to those centered in related disciplines. Manusripts reporting innovations or collaborations leading to enhancements in Psychology are of particular interest to Psychology Research.
If you have the idea of making our journals as vehicles for your research interests, please send your WORD format manuscripts (papers or books) through e-mails/submission system (for more details refer journal Web page). We appreciate your support.
We also seek researchers who have deep research in and outstanding contribution to Psychology area to be our reviewers/editors. Good review board has insightful understanding in Psychology field, and can provide professional suggestions to authors. Anyone who is interested in our journals can send us CV. We are looking forward to your contribution!
Sincerely yours,
Lily, R.
Editor OfficePsychology Research, ISSN 2159-5542
David Publishing Company 240 Nagle Avenue #15C, New York, NY 10034, USA.
Italics, boldface, and typos in the original.

Some comments by other people:

Monday, September 15, 2014

Lambert Academic publishers is a scam

I've just received an email from company "Lambert Academic Publishing," a daughter company of the VDM group.

After making a reference to a conference abstract of mine which appears on a university website, the email continues:
As an international publisher whose aim is to disseminate research to a global audience, we would be especially interested in publishing your dissertation (or a recent scientific monograph) in paperback form.
I would greatly appreciate if you could confirm your interest in receiving a brochure with details about our services.

I am looking forward to hearing from you.

--
Kind regards/Freundliche Grüße

Ilie Tsilea
Acquisition Editor

LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing is a trademark of:
OmniScriptum GmbH & Co. KG

Heinrich-Böcking-Str. 6-8,
66121, Saarbrücken, Germany
This email and the company behind it is a scam — not exactly in the sense that the company doesn't exist, but in the sense that it applies aggressive and misleading sales tactics to feed off the insecurity and publication pressure of the academic world. If you receive an email from them (probably one that will be eerily reminiscent of the one quoted above), I recommend that you don't reply.

A number of other people have already written about the company, so I'll let them explain:
I'm sure there are more cautionary tales out there, but these should do.

Urban: Language and Reality (1938)

The American philosopher Wilbur Urban seems to have been one of the most vocal advocates for the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer in the English-speaking world. Most references I've seen to his work point to the 1938 book Language and Reality.

I haven't familiarized myself very much with this massive book, but it seems that its general thesis is that a phenomenological metaphysics can be reconstructed on the basis of a careful analysis of language. This involves, among other things, an inspection of what he calls "radical metaphor."

Wilbur M. Urban; uncredited photo snatched from this website.

Urban writes:
It has repeatedly been pointed out that metaphor, in the sense here understood, must be clearly distinguished from metaphor in the conscious reflective activity of the poet. It is rather the unconscious activity that is creative in language itself. (p. 176)
The essence of radical metaphor is that it is intuitive and involves the intuitive meaning which we analysed out and described in the preceding chapter. This is seen especially in the Erlebnis-Wert of the adjective. The transfer of the coldness of ice to the coldness of a reception, the height of a tree or mountain to nobility, the dirt of the streets to the dirt of the Yellow Press—in all such cases we recognize a certain natural affinity or likeness between the objects which makes the transferences natural and even inevitable. (p. 177)
It is true that such transfers may often be conceptually justified, but such a "verification" is always ex post facto. The transfer of the cold of the ice to the cold of a reception … may be thus justified. It consists in arguing that when A is to B as C is to D, the name A can be used to indicate C. But such validation is significantly different from the self-authenticating process by which the transfer takes place. (p. 178)
A recurring theme in these analyses is that language "moves upwards" in the sense of transferring meaning from concrete, physical concepts to more abstract or "spiritual" ones. Thus:
The general upward movement of language "from the physical to the spiritual," the transfer of names, analogical predication with the accompanying development of ontological predicates, creates an entire region or universe or discourse which is post-logical or metalogical in this sense. (p. 331)
… this "figurative" use of language is not so much a fanciful expression for something otherwise known, as the means of apprehending and fixating new aspects and meanings. The natural movement of language, the upward movement as we described it, is from the physical to the spiritual. All words are physical in their origin and have a physical reference. It is through metaphorical transfer that they acquire their new references, their second intentions, but they acquire these new references because they becomes the vehicle for the intuition and description or expression of new entities. (p. 345)
But these very figurative expressions are expressions precisely because they are representative, or rather constitutive, of the intuitions themselves. Here intuition and expression are one, for the reason that the figurative expression itself is part of the apprehension or knowing. (p. 345)
Although Urban muddles the point a bit, I think his take on the relation between metaphorical language and thought is that the language influences the thought. At least, this is what he appears to be focus on most of the time, perhaps because it is the most controversial direction of the claim.

His remark about "expressions" does seem to indicate, however, that he has some kind of phenomenological authenticity criterion in mind too. This could mean that he also considers figurative language to be an expression of certain cognitive "intuitions," although these intuitions may also, in a circular fashion, have been put there by the language shared by a given culture.

I. A. Richards: Interpretation in Teaching (1938)

Now, here's a thought:
Thinking is radically metaphoric. … To think of anything is to take it as of a sort … and that 'as' brings in (openly or in disguise) the analogy, the parallel, the metaphoric grapple or ground or grasp or draw by which alone the mind takes hold. (pp. 48–49)
My point is not that language is full of metaphors … It is that thought is itself metaphoric – not merely that it expresses itself in linguistic metaphors. The metaphor that a thought is using need not correspond to the metaphor that its language displays, though it usually does, and the thought will often adopt the verbal metaphor when it is noticed. But equally often we discount and disown the metaphors in our speech, treat them as dead, or kill them as we go. (p. 49)

Friday, September 12, 2014

Gardner: "Metaphors and Modalities" (1974)

This paper (by the later very famous developmental psychologist Howard Gardner) reports on an experiment in which college students and children of different ages were asked to apply adjectives like hot/cold to stimuli like uncommon stimuli like faces, color samples, or small objects. The young children were quite good at this, with some caveats.

The experiment is notable for employing materials that are not entirely obvious clichés, like the connection between big/small size and high/low tones.

In one task, for instance, the subjects to felt sandpaper of various degrees of coarseness, then deciding which of the two types of sandpaper was the more light, and which was the more dark. Other stimuli included as ping-pong ball vs. a jack (presumably meaning the edgy die used in playing the jacks), or the sound of a triangle vs. the sound of a recorder.

Table of materials used in the experiment; p. 86.

In general, Gardner found that even preschool children agreed more or less with the judgments college students made on these tasks. A notable exception was the application of color terms to new stimuli, something that seems to indicate a heavily conventional component in color metaphors, such as a blue tap for cold water (p. 88).

The smaller children also gave a number of bizarre, funny, and "incorrect" explanations for their choices. For instance,
The 7-year-old[s] equated "getting lots of presents on your birthday" with dark and "getting no presents" with light, because, as several subjects explained, "lots of presents are heavy to carry." Here the contrast to light/dark was apparently assimilated to light/heavy. (p. 88)
Also, the children equated
… a tactile-perceived Ping-Pong call with loud and a tactile-perceived jack with quiet; in this case, subjects reported that the Ping-Pong ball would make more noise if it fell, Here an action in which the elements might be involved overwhelmed the more conventional association of pointed compactness with noise and smooth emptiness with silence. (p. 88)
In both of these cases, the older children and the college students tended to arrive at the opposite conclusions.

The 11-year-olds in the study, by the way, also tended to answer that
[an] angry face is cold "because it makes you feel cold" (p. 88)
a finding that sits somewhat uneasily with Zoltán Kövecses' insistence on the universality of ANGER IS HEAT metaphors.

Wigod: The Matter of Metaphor and Its Importance for Linguistics (1972)

Chapter 10 of this MA thesis contains some useful references to state of metaphor theory in the early 1970s. I don't know anything about the author, but a bit of googling suggests that she now works in Canada as a journalist.

Notables

Wigod's own take on the cognitive underpinnings of metaphorical speech is that "metaphor is man's cognizing tool par excellence, and quite possibly his only such" (p. 84).

She also quotes John Middleton Murry as saying that "metaphor appears as the instinctive and necessary act of the mind exploring and ordering experience," and that the lexis of a language is "the record of past cognitive exploration." Both of these quotes come from his essay in the anthology Essays on Metaphor edited by Warren Shibles (1972; pp. 28 and 93, respectively).

A number of interesting quotes are also given from William Hilton Leatherdale's The Role of Analogy, Model, and Metaphor in Science (1974). Leatherdale claims that metaphor is "indispensable for positing hypotheses" in science (p. 133), and it leads to "a multi-dimensional, gestalt-like insight into new ways of looking at phenomena" (p. 22).

Wigod also explains that
… Leatherdale cites another two-fold classification of analogies. The first type is the observation of a simple resemblance, which is basically transparent common-sense cognizing. The other type is more prodigious, and compares one relation (in the mathematical sense) to another. (p. 87)
This sounds amazingly like the distinction between metaphor and analogy later emphasized by Dedre Gentner.

A Digression on Margaret Mead

Wigod also quotes Terence Hawkes as quoting Margaret Mead as saying that
… the metaphor we may embody in the statement 'Love will find a way' may simply not exit in some countries, or may have an utterly different role (and so call forth appropriately different responses in others. (p. 96 in Wigod's text)
But this is almost certainly a spurious quote. The source seems to be a passage from Mead's 1949 book Male and Female:
To get some sense of the experience an anthropologist brings to the consideration of a human problem, let us take the simple statement "Love will find a way," a well-worn and well-loved adage of our own tradition. To a young American, this phrase will conjure up images of difficult transportation, a determined young man thumbing his way across the United States, or driving thirty-six hours stopping only for hot dogs, to get there in time to see his girl—before she sails or decides to marry someone else. Or it may mean the way in which a girl plans, and saves, and even sews, to divise the dress that she then wears to the dance where she knows her estranged lover will see her and may choose her again. Through one's head will pass a variety of plots and incidents: motor cars, jobs, shortages of cash, failures of plane connections, occasionally even recalcitrant parents if the lovers are young enough or the parents rich enough for their views to matter. Mixed up with images from one's own experience will be snatches of scenes from movies, from novels, from radio serials, occasional images of Tom Mix riding across the plains, or Ingrid Bergman in some over-intense role, perhaps a line or so from Romeo and Juliet, or a couplet from an old valentine.
I don't have the rest of the quote, but I can see that it occurs in chapter 2 of the book ("How an Anthropologist Writes"), on page 35 of the 1949 edition, if I'm not mistaken.

The Works

In addition to these texts, Wigod cites the following useful references:

Thursday, September 11, 2014

Bloomfield: Language (1933), chs. 9 and 24

Leonard Bloomfield was a die-hard behaviorist in his approach to linguistics, and he aggressively against any attempt to explain metaphors or any other linguistic phenomena in "mental" terms (§9.4, pp. 142–144).

He was, however, well aware of the many metaphorical etymologies change in English and other languages, and he did put forward a few speculations about their forms and causes. The relevant parts of his book are in particular Chapter 9 ("Meaning"), particular pp. 149–50, and Chapter 24 ("Semantic Change").

The Ubiquity of Metaphor

My first claim—that he recognizes how widespread everyday metaphor is—can supported by the following quote:
Very many linguistic forms are used for more than one typical situation. In English, we speak of the head of an army, of a procession, of a household, or of a river, and of a head of cabbage, of the mouth of a bottle, cannon, or river; of the eye of a needle, and of hooks and eyes on a dress; of the teeth of a saw; of the tongue of a shoe or of a wagon; of the neck of a bottle and of a neck of the woods; of the arms, legs, and back of a chair; of the foot of a mountain; of hearts of celery. A man may be a fox, an ass, or a dirty dog; a woman, a peach, lemon, cat, or goose; people are sharp and keen or dull, or else bright or foggy, as to their wits; warm or cold in temperament; crooked or straight in conduct; a person may be up in the air, at sea, off the handle, off his base, or even beside himself, without actually moving from the spot. The reader will be able to add examples practically without limit; there is no greater bore than the enumeration and classification of these "metaphors." (p. 149)
He proposes what now appears like a kind of pragmatic repair theory of the comprehension of such phrases:
The remarkable thing about these variant meanings is our assurance and our agreement in viewing one of the meanings as normal (or central) and the others as marginal (metaphoric or transferred). The central meaning is favored in the sense that we understand a form (that is, respond to it) in the central meaning unless some feature of the practical situation forces us to look to a transferred meaning. … He married a lemon forces us to the transferred meaning only because we know that men do not go through a marriage ceremony with a piece of fruit. (p. 149)
He adds a cautionary note on ignoring the difference between languages in this respect:
We are likely to make the mistake of thinking that the transferred meanings of our language are natural and even inevitable in human speech — the more so, as they appear also in other European languages. This last, however, is merely a result of our common cultural traditions; while transferred meanings occur in all languages, the particular ones in any given language are by no means to be taken for granted. Neither in French nor in German can one speak of the eye of a needle or of an ear of grain. To speak of the foot of a mountain seems natural to any European, but it would be nonsense in Menomini and doubtless in many other languages. (p. 150)
Although he doesn't use the concept of "dead metaphors," it is also clear from his discussion of the "isolation" of meaning (Ch. 24, p. 432) that he thinks that many metaphors have no imagistic content for contemporary English-speakers.

The Dynamics of Meaning Change

Bloomfield; photo from the Yale website.
In the chapter on semantic change, Bloomfield first reviews the many metonymic and metaphoric paths by which a word can change its meaning over time, noting:
The surface study of semantic change indicates that refined and abstract meanings largely grow out of more concrete meanings. (p. 429)
He then moves on to the more complex question of what the cause of these changes are. As one might expect, he dismisses
… so-called psychological explanations, such as Wundt's, which merely paraphrase the outcome of the change. Wundt defines the central meaning as the dominant element of meaning, and shows how the dominant element may shift when a form occurs in new typical contexts. … This statement leaves the matter exactly where it was. (p. 435)
As an internative to these tautological theories, Bloomfield suggests that the engine of semantic change has to be the context in which the language is embedded:
The shift into a new meaning is intelligible when it merely reproduces a shift in the practical world. A form like ship or hat or hose designates a shifting series of objects because of changes in the practical world. If cattle were used as a medium of exchange, the word fee 'cattle' would naturally be used in the meaning 'money,' and if one wrote with a goose-feather, the word for 'feather' would naturally be used of this writing-implement. (p. 436)
Linguist Hermann Paul, from Spiegel.de.
The two latter examples are references to examples he had discussed previously (pp. 428 and 435): The English fee comes from Old English feoh (live-stock, cattle, property, money), and the English pen comes from the Latin penne (feather).


While this contextual theory in itself is clear enough, it still leaves open the question of why people stop using an old word or, in some cases, start using a new one when alternatives exists.

In the last couple of pages of the chapter, Bloomfield sketches a couple of possibilities, mostly of stylistic nature. One of the more interesting ones is his perceptive description of how "the salesman" might not want to sell a house as a house, since the availability of the alternative home will make house call up an image of "an empty shell that has never been inhabited" (p. 442).

Johnson and Malgady: "Some Cognitive Aspects of Figurative Language" (1979)

The purpose of this paper is to map the correlations between a number of variables related to metaphor comprehension, such as the difficulty of understanding the metaphor and the similarity of the concepts it is constructed out of. The experiment and its results are them selves utterly forgettable, but the paper is a good source of references as well as a probe of the mood of the cognitive science of metaphor around 1979.

First some references:
About the last reference: Note that the the Polish-American linguist Uriel Weinrich (1926–1967) is distinct from the German classist, philogist, and literary scholar Harald Weinrich (born 1927). The latter also wrote a number of texts on metaphor ("Semantik der Metapher" and "Wieder die Bildstürmer"/"Against the iconoclasts"). I was myself confused about this for a while.

Now for some quotes.

In the introduction of the paper, the authors approvingly quote Bolinger as saying that metaphor should be covered by a good semantic theory, and they continue:
Others … have also suggested that metaphor and related figurative language use ought to be thought of as an intrinsic (perhaps central) part of language, and not something that can be dismissed by simply shunting it off to the poet's corner as a deviant curiosity—albeit an aesthetically satisfying one. (p. 250)
In the concluding discussion section:
The ubiquity of both metaphor and association (alluded to in the introduction and elsewhere) gives the impression that both must play a central role in everyday cognition—and that they both may be simply "symptoms" of a single underlying process. It is no more correct, therefore, to say that metaphor is simply similarity or simply association than it would be to say that association or similarity judgments are simply examples of metaphor. (p. 263)
And finally:
It is the flexibility of the relationship between words and categories, augmented by the linguistic device labeled "metaphor," that allows productivity in thinking. Perhaps the chief function of metaphor is to provide—by setting the stage for the perception of similarity between dissimilar words—a way of forming new categories. (p. 264)

Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum: The Measurement of Meaning (1957)

Charles Osgood was a student of the psychologist Theodore Karwoski, who did a number of studies of synaesthesia between the 1930s and the 1950s. His own work partly continued this line, but also partly shifted the focus more explicitly to the expression of synaesthetic thought in language.

The Dimensions of Meaning

In this book, Osgood and his two coauthors thus use factor analysis to show that the actual dimensionality of semantic space is much smaller than the nominal, since there are strong correlations between oppositions such as up/down, good/bad, etc.

A test item used on one of the experiments reported in the book (p. 81).

In 1980, Osgood would summarize the findings as follows:
Happy is UP, COLORFUL, LIGHT, and CLEAR, but _sad_ is DOWN, COLORLESS, DARK and HAZY; heavy is DOWN, THICK, DARK, and LARGE, but light (weight having been specified) is UP, THIN, LIGHT and SMALL; excitement is VERTICAL, COLORFUL, CROOKED and SHARP, but _calm_ is HORIZONTAL, COLORLESS, STRAIGHT and BLUNT; woman is COLORFUL, THIN, (except for Mexicans), LIGHT, BLUNT and ROUNDED (except for Navajos), but man is (VERTICAL (woman tending to be HORIZONTAL), COLORLESS, THICK, DARK, SHARP and ANGULAR. These trends for four cultures suggest certain "universal" tendencies. (Quoted from the 1981 reprint, p. 59)
In the 1957 book, the authors explain:
 … it was found that, as used by our subjects in making their judgments, the semantic scales fell into highly intercorrelated clusters. For example, fair-unfair, high-low, kind-cruel, valuable-worthless, Christian-antiChristian, and honest-dishonest were all found to correlate together .90 or better. Such a cluster represents the operation of a single, general factor in social judgments, obviously here an evaluative factor. Scales like strong-weak, realistic-unrealistic, and happy-sad were independent of this evaluative group and pointed to the existence of other dimensions of the semantic framework. (pp. 24--25)
Funny how the metaphor "ANTICHRISTIAN IS DOWN" has escaped from the current literature on cognitive metaphor theory.

Watch the Music

Front cover of the book.
For his undergraduate thesis, Osgood had also studied a number of anthropological reports of "primitive man," coming to similar conclusions. He reports in the book that,
for example, good gods, places, social positions, etc., were almost always up and light (white), whereas bad things were down and dark (black). A prevalent myth tells how the gods helped the original man to struggle from the dark, cold, wet, sad world below the ground up to the light, warm, dry, happy world on the surface. (p. 23)
Given Osgood's background, all of these things of course had to be connected to synaesthesia:
It seems clear from these studies that the imagery found in synesthesia is intimately tied up with language metaphor, and that both represent semantic relations. (p. 23)
Or, more elaborately:
Whereas fast, exciting music might be pictured by the synesthete as sharply etched, bright red forms, his less imaginative brethren would merely agree that words like "red-hot," "bright," and "fiery," as verbal metaphors, adequately describe the music; a slow melancholic selection might be visualized as heavy, slow-moving "blobs" of somber hue and be described verbally as "heavy," "blue," and "dark." The relation of this phenomenon to ordinary metaphor is evident: A happy man is said to feel "high," a said man "low"; the pianist travels "up" and "down" the scale from treble to bass; souls travel "up" to the good place and "down" to the bad place; hope is "white" and despair is "black." (p. 21)

Metaphorical Grounding

They also proposed a genealogical explanation for these phenomena, essentially the same as the one given today by cognitive metaphor theorists once you strip away the behaviorist language:
Take the case of parallelism between auditory pitch and visual size (synesthetes typically represent high tones as small and low tones as large): it is characteristic for the physical world that large-sized resonators produce low frequency tones and small-sized resonators, high frequency tones (think of a series of organ pipes, bells, or even hollow logs and sticks, and of the voices of men vs. boys, large dogs vs. little dogs, or lions vs. mice). This means that repeatedly the visual stimulus of large objects will be paired with the auditory stimulus of low-pitched tones, and so on consistently throughout the continuum. Any representational processes associated with one (e.g., danger significance of threatening big dog vs. play significance of little dog) will tend to be associated with the other as well (e.g., sounds produced). This will a hierarchy of equivalent signs come to be associated with a common mediation process. Any encoding responses associated with this mediator, such as "large" drawing movements and saying the word "large," will tend to transfer to any sign which elicits this mediator — thus "synesthesia" when a deep tone produces "large" drawing movements and "metaphor" when the word "deep" is associated with the word "large." (p. 24)


Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Michel Bréal: Semantics (1900)

Bréal; from Wikimedia Commons.
Apparently, this book by Michel Bréal is considered by some to be a foundational document in semantics. However, it's not mentioned in Saeed's textbook, and I wouldn't have heard of it if it weren't for a footnote in a paper by Harald Weinrich — so think it's fair to say it's fallen pretty much into obscurity by now.

I looked at because I was interested in seeing what Bréal had to say about metaphor. It turns out that his observations are that the phenomenon is (1) widespread (2) mostly dead (3) often synaesthetic.

The Psychological Basis of Metaphor

As for the widespread nature of metaphor:
Our business is not to claim admiration for these images, which indeed have ceased to be images, but to show that language is full of them. (p. 123)
His take on the emergence of metaphors seem to be that they are invented for communitative purposes, not that that it reflects deep psychological structure. Most of his attention is devoted to the connection between cultural variables (e.g., Roman land ownership institutions) and the choice of metaphors.

However, he says that they demonstrate "the universal intelligence, which does not vary much from one nation to another" (p. 123). In his discussion of grammatical analogy, he also claims that opposites like night/day and dead/alive tend to take on similar forms, and that "Language here reveals to us a fact of psychology;" providing a hand-wavy sketch of the psychology of this phenomenon (p. 68).

The Death of a Metaphor

There is not doubt that Bréal thinks that metaphors wither and die over time:
But the metaphor remains such at its outset only; soon the mind becomes accustomed to the image; its very success causes it to pale; it fades into a representation of the idea scarcely more coloured than the proper word. (p. 122)
But for the child who learns to speak them the complication [of faded historical meanings] does not exist: the last meaning, the meaning farthest removed from it original, is often the first learnt. (p. 133)
More indirectly, this is also evidenced by his interest in the difficulty of etymological problems. He notes, for instance, that it is not immediately obvious which of the meanings of the Latin gemma are the older, "pearl" or "bud." In fact, Cicero seems to have gotten the historical order wrong (p. 125).

Synaesthetic Metaphors

Bréal also notes the importance of cross-sensory transfers of meaning:
A special kind of Metaphor, extremely frequent in all languages, comes from the communication between our organs of sense, which permit us to transport the sensations of sight into the domain of hearing, or the ideas of touch into the domain of taste. We speak of a "a warm reception," "a broad style," "a bitter reproach," "a black grief," with the certainty of being understood by everybody. … A deep sound, a high note were originally images. (pp. 129-30)
Again, however, he warns the reader not to pull etymologies out of a hat:
Sometimes it is difficult to tell exactly from what organ of the body these expressions came: for example, it was long considered doubtful whether the adjective clarus came from sigh or from hearing. Without the words acies, acus, acutus, acer, we should not know that acid (the French aigre) did not always belond to the sense of taste. (p. 130)
 So much for introspective psychology, then.

Monday, September 8, 2014

Asch: "The Metaphor: A Psychological Inquiry" (1958)

The social psychologist Solomon Asch was interested in how we perceive, understand, and describe other people, and this let him (among other things) to conduct this small, cross-linguistic study on the polysemy of some common sensory adjectives.

He wanted to investigate whether the cross-modal ambiguity of English words like sharp was a language-specific coincidence, so he selected a set of promising terms and asked some informants what other meanings the corresponding word in their language could have.

Cutting the Cake

Asch presents his materials as follows:
Included among the terms were the following: warm, cold, hot; right, left; dull, bright, pale, shining; straight, twisted, crooked; sweet, bitter; colorful, colorless, white, black (and some other color terms); rought, smooth, slippery; dry, wet; clear, cloudy; deep, shallow, high, low; broad, rounded, sharp; hard, soft. (p. 88)
The languages he compared were ancient Hebrew, ancient Greek, "Chinese" (not further specified), Thai, Malayalam, Hausa, Burmese (p. 88).

The conclusion he came to was that "… all the languages examined here contain terms that simultaneously describe both physical and psychological qualities" (p. 89). However, he also warned about overextrapolating these findings:
From the linguistic evidence alone, even if it were more complete, we could not, of course conclude about the responsible operations. For this purpose we need a psychological analysis. (p. 91)

Solomon Asch with his wife Florence (from the Asch Center website).


Cognitive Operations

After having presented his results, Asch also speculates about the "conceptual basis" for this dual function of sensory words:
Dual terms may be the consequence of stable associative connections established between dissimilar physical and psychological  conditions that regularly share some stimulus properties. (p. 92)
The concepts in question have little in common with abstract logical operations. They are not generalizations of what is common to an array of different instances. Rather they are concrete cognitive operations in terms of which we naïvely comprehend events and similarities between them. (p. 93)
We see natural events as conductors of the same fundamental forces that we find in the human sphere. Therefore we speak spontaneously of seeing a point, of shedding light on or illuminating a problem, of penetrating to the heart of a matter. (p. 93)

The Schema of Interaction

Thus:
What now is the sense of hard when it refers to a person? It describes an interaction that is formally similar. We see a man refusing the appeal of another. This interaction we experience as a force proceeding from one person, having as its aim the production of a change in the other, which, however, fails to move him, or which produces resistance. The hardness of a table and of a person concerns events radically different in content and complexity, but the schema of interaction is experienced as dynamically similar, having to do with the application of force and of resulting actions in line with or contrary to it. (p. 93)

Williams: "Synaesthetic Adjectives" (1976)

Based on an inspection of English and Japanese adjectives, this paper claims that the etymological development of meaning by metaphorical extension always follows a particular pattern, shown in the figure below.

Figure 1 from Williams' paper (p. 463).

For instance, sound can be conceptualized as touch (soft music), but the opposite is not the case (loud touch). Williams emphasizes, though, that the law is quantitative, not logical:
Even in English, the generalization is not exceptionless. But its regularity varies between 83% and 99%, depending on how we compute what counts as an observation of it. (p. 463)
These numbers refer to the number of dictionary entries inspected (not, for instance, token frequencies in running text).

Towards the end of the paper, he wonders whether "these sequences [of consecutive word meanings] might be reflected in any physical basis of sensation" (p. 472) like its evolutionary history, or the developmental history of the individual. In the conclusion, he writes:
Obviously it is presumptuous, to say the least, to seek a biological foundation for a phenomenon that may not universally exist, in an aspect of human cognition about which very little is known. But the parallels that do exist … indicate … a point of interaction between mind an brain. (p. 473)
However, it is important to keep in mind that he explicitly presents his hypothesis as one about "rule-governed semantic change" (p. 473), not about cognition.

Friday, September 5, 2014

Hull: Touching the Rock (1990)

John M. Hull is a former (now retired) professor of religious studies who struggled with poor heath and receding eyesight for decades, finally going completely blind at age 48. In this sort-of-autobiography, based on a series of tape-recorded diary entries, he recounts the slow and painful process of adjusting to his new condition.

He writes about the everyday challenges and frustrations of his new life: How to lecture without notes, how he struggles to find his way around the snow-covered streets of Birmingham, how he copes with the difficulties of meeting new people at conferences and in bars. He is honest about his moments of panic and depression, but you also sense how he gradually, over the span of about five years, learns to live with his blindness.

I just finished reading the book now, and I'm completely in love with it. It's frankness and its small nuggets of wisdom and lived experience give an extraordinary sense of the difficulty of living with blindness, but also of the new and different world that comes with it. I really recommend reading it; but since we're all busy people, I'll also give a few long quotes below.

'See You'

I originally picked up the book because of its testimony of the strange linguistic situation blindness causes: Not being able to see yet having to use the visual metaphors of sighted language.

Hull explains:
'Well, I'll see you around.'
'Nice to see you again.'
'I see what you mean.'
When I use expressions like these, some of my sighted friends are surprised. They laugh, perhaps teasing me, and say, 'You don't really mean that, do you John?' I explain that, when I say I am pleased to see you, what I mean is that I am pleased to meet you, pleased to be with you, glad to be in your presence. I explain that this is surely what anybody, blind or sighted, would mean by that expression. (p. 21)
Not just words like see that are affected by these changes. So does the role of people's eyes, faces, and expressions, and the language surrounding them:
Another strange feature of not knowing what people look like is the effect this has upon reported speech. When I am describing an encounter with someone, I may want to say, 'He looked blankly at me'. I feel a little sensitive about this, because I cannot help thinking that the sighted person to whom I am talking would know that I could not possibly know how my friend looked at me. To say, 'He responded in a blank manner' is absurd and pedantic. … To say, 'He paused before replying and seemed to be at a loss' would be perfectly accurate, but to use the brief, concrete idiom of the sighted exchange is so natural and vivid. What am I to do? (p. 16–17)
This is interesting in itself, but it also makes me wonder to what extent such descriptions ever really report visual observations. Do I, as a sighted person, describe my social or my visual experience when I say a cold stare, give me the eye, and sparkling eyes?

Face to Face

Hull continues:
Another result of all this is that the face no longer has the central place for me which it has in normal human relationships. The face is merely the place from which the voice comes. I look towards the face with conscious effort, for there is no real reason why I should do so. … I no longer have any natural sense of needing to be face to face. (p. 17)
The marine biologist Geerart Vermij (who had his eyes removed at age three) makes a similar point in his discussion of "sentimentalists" who lament the loss of sight as a tragedy for social competence:
What these sentimentalists forget is that the face is only part of the whole person. The voice—its quality, its intonation, the use of language—is unique and every bit as informative as the face. I can detect surprise, disgust, pleasure, boredom, dishonesty, thoughtfulness, and a hundred other states of mind from the voice. (p. 17)

On Pretty Women

Hull mostly remains quite vague and abstract about sex, but he does make some very interesting remarks about his continued desire to associate with pretty women:
Sometimes I ask one of my sighted friends to give me a quick impression of what somebody else looks like. I am often interested in a sort of thumb-nail sketch of a new acquaintance. This is particularly true if my new acquaintance is a woman. What colour is her hair? What is she wearing? Is she pretty? Sometimes I long to know. I remain, after all, a man, reared in a certain sighted culture, conditioned to certain male expectations. Perhaps I should change, and be less influenced in my judgment of women by my male conditioning, but it is painful to have this change forced upon me by mere blindness.
It makes a difference to the way I feel about a new female acquaintance if a colleague, having caught sight of her, remarks on her beauty or plainness. There is a double irrationality in this. In the first place, by feelings should not be so dependent upon a woman's appearance. I know that, and I apologize. But I still feel it. The second thing is that it is surely a deplorable lack of independence on my part to be so affected by a criterion which can be of no significance to me.
What can it matter to me what sighted men think of women, when I, a blind man, must judge women by quite different means. Yet I do care what sighted men think, and I do not seem able to throw off this prejudice. (p. 17)
Again, this says as much about sighted relationships as it does about blind. Do men pursue pretty women for pleasure or prestige? To have sex or to assert their power over other men?

The thought does not come up again, perhaps because its importance to Hull gradually wanes. However, he does later note (with, perhaps, an undertone of despair) that the loss of vision has cut him off from one of the most intense sources of sexual excitement:
So it is possible, I think, for a heterosexual blind man to be bored by women and yet to be conscious of sexual hunger. The trace of a perfume and the nuance of of a voice are so insubstantial when compared with the full-bodied impact upon a sighted man of the appearance of an attractive woman. It must take a long time for a man who loses sight in adult life to transfer the cues of sexual arousal from the visual to other senses. There must be many men in that position who wonder whether they will ever again be capable of genuine sexual excitement. (p. 38)
This is interesting because it negates the popular conception that the sense of smell somehow bypasses our "rational minds" and penetrates directly into our subconsciousness. (Billy Jean may have looked "like a beauty queen from a movie scene," but the intensity only goes up as Michael Jackson can "smell the sweet perfume.") Whatever the physiological facts are, Hull does not seem to find the effect very impressive.

What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

A few months after Hull finally lost his sight completely, he started to noticing that he was picking up a new sensitivity to the space around him, a kind of intuitive sonar:
I gradually realized that I was developing some strange kind of perception. … As the months so past, sensitivity seems to be increasing. I find that I am now quite often aware of approaching lampposts … (p. 19)
He elaborates:
Not only have I become sensitive to thinner objects, but the range seems to have increased. When walking home, I used only to be able to detect parked cars by making contact with my cane. These days I almost never make contact with a parked car unexpectedly. Nearly always, I realize there is an obstacle in my path before my stick strikes against it. This is in spite of the fact that I am now using the very long cane. I think the range for detecting parked cars must be approximately six to eight feet. Another feature of this experience is that it seems to be giving me a sort of generalized sense of the environment. There is one part of my route where I must step aside to avoid an upward flight of steps. I am expecting these, of course, since I come this way every day. Nevertheless, I am now aware of their approach, and not merely of the lower, closer steps, but of the whole massive object, looming up and somehow away from me. The phenomenon seems to be partly dependent on attention, since at home I can easily walk into the edge of doors, having had no warning of their proximity. Possibly in a house where sound is muffled by carpets and curtains, echoes would be less easily perceived?
The experience itself is quite extraordinary, and I cannot compare it with anything else I have ever known. It is like a sense of physical pressure. One wants to put up a hand to protect oneself, so intense is the awareness. One shrinks from whatever it is. (p. 20)

Space and Time

These and other changes to his perception naturally changes the way he relates to his environment. In particular, he reports that the difference between front and back becomes less important:
Here is another feature of the acoustic world: it stays the same whichever way I turn my head. This is not true of the perceptible world. It changes as I turn my head. New things come into view. The view that way is different from the view looking this way. It is not like that with sound. New noises do not come to my attention as I turn my head around. I may allow my head to hand limply down upon my chest; I may lean right back and face the sky. It makes little difference. (p. 63)
This also sounds a lot like a remark a blind informant made to the (sighted) anthropologist Gili Hammer during one of her interviews: "Hearing operates in 360 degrees; however, you can't see what's behind you."

Hull also notes that his relationship to time changes, although in a different way and for quite different reasons:
When I had sight, I would have worked with a feverish haste, correcting forty footnotes in a single morning. Now, I am happy if, with the help of a sighted reader, by the end of the morning I have corrected ten. I do not think to myself, 'Oh damn. I've only done ten'. I think, 'Good. That's ten done. Only another three mornings like this and the job will be finished.' I am so glad that I am able to do it at all. (p. 60)
He seems to find some hope or comfort in the indefatigable spirit others bring to the fight:
I think of my friend Chris with his multiple sclerosis. … It takes him 45 minutes to tie his shoelaces in the morning. It doesn't matter. He does not get impatient. He just does it. That is how long it takes to tie shoelaces. (p. 60)
As he notes towards the end of the book, his solution cannot exactly be Stoicism, not exactly acceptance of the situation, but perhaps some sense of reaching the other side of the ocean of despair.