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and the body. This view is taken from Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) intro-
duced by Lakoff and Johnson (
1980
), which proposes that concepts are primarily
structured by metaphorical relations, the majority of which are
orientational
, under-
stood relative to the human body in space or time. In other words, the conceptual
system is grounded in the perceptual system. The expressive power of orientational
metaphors is that it structures concepts not in terms of one another, but in terms of
the orientation of the physical body. These metaphors allow concepts to be related
to one another as part of a broad, largely coherent system.
Returning to Fig.
9.4
, showing programming metaphors in the Java language,
we find the whole class of orientational metaphors described as a single metaphor
P
ROGRAMS OPERATE IN A SPATIAL WORLD WITH CONTAINMENT AND EXTENT
.
In line with CMT, we suggest this is a major understatement, that orientational
metaphors structure the understanding of the majority of fundamental concepts.
For example, a preliminary examination leads us to hypothesise that orientational
metaphors such as A
BSTRACTION IS
U
P
and P
ROGRESS IS
F
ORWARD
would be
consistent with this corpus, but further work is required.
Gärdenfors (
2000
) formalises orientational metaphor by further proposing that
the semantic meanings of concepts, and the metaphorical relationships between
them are represented as geometrical properties and relationships. Gärdenfors posits
that concepts themselves are represented by geometric regions of low dimensional
spaces, defined by quality dimensions. These dimensions are either mapped directly
from, or structured by metaphorical relation to perceptual qualities. For example
“red” and “blue” are regions in perceptual colour space, and the metaphoric seman-
tics of concepts within the spaces of mood, temperature and importance may be
defined relative to geometric relationships of such colours.
Gärdenforsian conceptual spaces are compelling when applied to concepts re-
lated to bodily perception, emotion and movement, and Forth et al. (
2008
) report
early success in computational representations of conceptual spaces of musical
rhythm and timbre, through reference to research in music perception. However, it
is difficult to imagine taking a similar approach to computer programs. What would
the quality dimensions of a geometrical space containing all computer programs be?
There is no place to begin to answer this question; computer programs are linguis-
tic in nature, and cannot be coherently mapped to a geometrical space grounded in
perception.
For clarity, we turn once again to Gärdenfors (
2000
), who points out that spa-
tial representation is not in opposition to linguistic representation; they are distinct
but support one another. This is clear in computing, where hardware exists in our
world of continuous space, but thanks to reliable electronics, conjures up a world of
discrete computation. As we noted in the introduction, humans are able to conjure
up this world too, for example by computing calculations in our head, or encoding
concepts into phonetic movements of the vocal tract or alphabetic symbols on the
page. We can think of ourselves as spatial beings able to simulate a discrete environ-
ment to conduct abstract thought and open channels of communication. On the other
hand, a piece of computer software is able to simulate spatial environments, perhaps
to host a game world or guide robotic movements, both of which may include some
kind of model of human perception.
