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)

Corts: "Factors characterizing bursts of figurative language and gesture in college lectures" (2006)

Apparently, Daniel Corts and Howard Pollio published a study of the use of metaphor in college lectures in Metaphor and Symbol in 1999. Their conclusions were, unsurprisingly, that college lecturers tend to use figurative language when they have to explain something difficult. In 2006, Daniel Corts then published a new study which seem to cover pretty much the same ground.

What is a Metaphor "Burst"?

The data analyzed by Corts is a pair of videotaped lectures on geology and a pair on Greek mythology. Both pairs were held by a single lecturer.

The kind of "bursts" of metaphors that Corts has in mind are passages like the following, here taken from the geology lectures:

[269] That’s a glass with ice tea in it … this is the tea, and that is the ice … [272] so much sugar in there that it is very sweet … you drink that tea when it first arrives … it tastes very sweet … you come back later, and what’s happened to the iced tea there? … [276] The temperature melts the ice … changes the composition of the tea, and as you pointed out, it’s diluted … [279] That tea has a different chemical composition.

[316] That gets us to the end of … igneous rocks. Now I want to step across this line … move on to Objectives 3 and 4 … [319] This is kind of a gear shift … I want to help you through this gear shift.

[142] We have planes of weakness parallel to slope. Yeah, the best way to do that is a deck of cards. Take this deck of cards [places hands parallel to each other horizontally] and you tilt it [tilts hands]. Now, they’ll start sliding off one right after the other [after hands tilt, the top hand ‘slides’ off the other]. That’s in essence what we’re doing here – we’re taking a deck of cards … water gets in here...and then they’ll just get and go off these surfaces [hand slides off again].

The quotes are taken from his Table 4 on page 222. The numbers in square brackets refer to line numbers in the transcript.

As Corts notes, it is characteristic for all of these analogies that they are quite lengthy, quite novel, quite coherent, and that they are accompanied by suitable gestures. One might also add that they are quite explicit in nature, in the sense that no one listening to this lecture would doubt that we are talking in terms of analogies here.

Does Gesture Cohere With Speech?

According to Corts, one  of the conclusions of the original 1999 study was that gesture and speech appeared coherent in the college lectures:

When figurative language and gestures did overlap, they presented the same metaphorical concept rather than two different or independent representations of the concept. (p. 212)

This is true, he claims (p. 227), even for stock phrase metaphors such as

• "Here's where we've been so far … and here's where we're going…"

or

• "on one hand … but on the other…"

That's not quite consistent with the widespread speech/gesture incoherence that Daniel Casanto has reported in a number of studies. In fact, he claimed that the before/after dimension was almost always "conceptualized" as left/right by English speakers, not by behind/front, as Corts claims.

Wax Off, Wax On

It's difficult to assess whether this disagreement in the literature has come about because Corts has been overlooking contrary evidence, since we don't have his data. But at least one of his examples (p. 225) seems to indicate problems with a stricter version of the coherence claim:

Literature, especially oral literature [right hand loops backwards], reflects the way [right hand moves back and forth, flipping from palm up to palm down] the world is. It doesn’t generate the world [hands flip backward, palm down], it reflects it [hand flips forward, palm up].

OK, so if I'm a mirror, then I can "reflect" the world by holding up my hand, palm out, like a policeman stopping a car. But how does flipping my hand backwards, like I'm closing a cigar box, correspond to "generating" the world? This reminds me more of the weird examples Ray Gibbs cited in "support" of cognitive metaphor theory (1994, p. 165–67).

The real reason for this is probably rather that the gesture indicates contrast than that it has any inherent meaning on its own. Any sort of opposing hand movements could probably have done the same job (e.g., wave to the left, wave to the right).

And that's OK — it's only a problem if we claim that the gesture somehow reveals how this professor thinks about the subject, window-to-the-mind style. In that case, we would be forced into a highly awkward reading of the situation when we saw the "shovel water backwards" move next to the word generated.

Metaphor Comparison and Negation

Incidentally, this point is also confirmed by another of Corts' observations: In the discussion, he notes (p. 228) that we often find mixed metaphors in places where two analogies are explicitly compared, or one is negated:

• "Drug abuse is not a disease, it is a game"
• "Literature does not create the world as much as it reflects it"

The fact that we get the point of such comparisons, and especially of such negated metaphors, seems to indicate that we are less captives of our metaphors than the orthodox "conceptual structure" interpretation will have it. If anything, it is rather the metaphors that serve our purposes than the other way around.

Haun and Call: "Great apes’ capacities to recognize relational similarity" (2009)

In an attempt to map the evolutionary history of analogical reasoning, this paper compares the performance of children to apes on a selection task. The task is supposed to measure the ability to recognize "relational similarity," i.e., identifying a cup by its position relative to other cups.

The Chimpanzee Experiment

The set-up is this: An experimenter hides an object in one of three cups in his end of the table; the participant then has to find an identical object in one of three cups in the other end. However, the three cups are closer together in the experimenter's end of the table, and also aligned so that proximity clues conflict with relative position clues:

There are two additional conditions that I am not considering here: One in which the three cups are connected with plastic tubes to suggest that the object can roll from one cup to another, and another condition in which they are connected by strips of gray tape, suggesting a structural parallel.

In the task with no clues, chimpanzees seem to choose the "right" cup above chance levels (p. 155). This is taken as evidence of an ability to recognize relational similarity.

A Bias Reading

I personally feel a little reluctant about counting the cup on the far left as the only "correct" choice, although it will certainly begin to appear more and more so as the system gets established through repeated trials.

However, the proximity argument suggesting the "wrong" cup is not necessarily a wrong argument in all real-life situations. What the experiments shows is thus, I think, that chimpanzees have a taxonomic bias that orangutans do not, i.e., chimps prefer one-to-one mappings even when they conflict with proximity clues.

Children, on the other hand, show a marked bias towards the middle cup wherever the experimenter hides the target object. None of the apes seem to have this symmetry bias.

A Possible Process Analysis

A hierarchical Bayesian model might peel these biases apart by identifying the following levels of modeling:

1. Pr(a), the absolute probability of finding the target object in cup a, regardless of where the experimenter hid it.
2. Pr(a|x), the conditional probability of finding the object in cup a, given that it was hidden in cup x.
3. Pr(a|x,m), the conditional probability of finding the object in cup a, given that it was hidden in cup x and that the experimenter is using a mapping m.

All of these layers can in principle be informed by prior knowledge. For instance, (1) might exhibit a symmetry bias, (2) a proximity bias, and (3) a taxonomic bias.