29. Object bias

In their book Metaphors we live by, Lakoff and Johnson argued, in 1980, that apparently self-evident categories, even in what appears to be direct observation, are in fact metaphors rather than ‘literal descriptions’. In fact, literal description does not exist.

An apparently literal description is always already a conceptualisation. We grasp our actions in the physical world, in which we have learned to survive, to construct meanings of abstract categories. ‘Up’, ‘upwards’ and ‘rising’ according to Lakoff and Johnson indicate something good, and ‘downwards’ and ‘falling’ something bad because when we are alive and well we stand up while we are prostrate when ill or sick.

The basis for far-reaching metaphorization lies in ‘primary metaphors’ that build on proprioception (groping, grasping) and bodily survival. Think of our own movement in the world, the speed and direction of the sabre-toothed tiger, the shelter of a roof, a spear and its trajectory, the whereabouts of a lost child, the carrying of a burden. We would not have successfully evolved if we hadn’t been reasonably accurate with such categories. This yields a certain basic conceptualisation in our thought and language, in terms of things, including actors, their movement in time and space, distinction between subject and object, and their action, including causal action.

This is reflected in Chomsky’s universal grammar, where the basic elements of sentences are noun phrases and verb phrases. The basis for thought lies in things (including living things) that ‘do’ something. Those ‘things’ form the paradigmatic nouns and the ‘doing something’ forms the paradigmatic verb.

The object bias would suggest that we think in terms of distinct, discrete entities that appear in sequence in time, and that it does not come easily to us to see entities connected in a continuum, or in a field of force, or in an integrated process of duration, in which moments are not experienced as discrete but as integrated in a flow, as Henri Bergson proposed. We experience it but are unable to conceptualise it.

When we move a word from one sentence to another we are inclined to think that its meaning remains the same, as if we move a chair from one room to another, while in fact the meaning shifts. As if the legs drop off the chair or it changes colour. We think of communication as the transfer of meaning-things across a communication ‘channel’, while in fact in expression and interpretation meanings are transformed.

In sum, my thesis is that in our conceptualisations we have an object bias and an actor bias, a difficult to dodge inclination to see everything, including abstract, immaterial things as objects that have a location, move or do something. The grammatical notions of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ still carry intuitions of causal action while mostly there is no question of that. How does that conceptualisation do under current conditions, where abstractions, such as happiness, meaning, truth, morality, not to speak of democracy, identity, and so on, may now be crucial for human survival?