Blog 577 Object Bias

 In an earlier item in this blog, I wrote about my hypothesis of an ‘object bias’. When language developed in early mankind, when people were hunter-gatherers, the priority, for survival, was an adequate perception and conceptualisation of things moving in time and space, such as a prey, an attacking beast or enemy, an incoming spear, a lost baby, a shelter.

 Lakoff and Johnson (1980), in their book ‘metaphors we live by’, proposed that we conceptualise things in general in metaphor to things in time and space. We say we are ‘in’ love, feel ‘at’ home, are ‘at’ war. This misfires with respect to abstractions. An expression does not ‘have’ content, a nationality, an identity, a thought. Nationality is not a box we are in, and it is as if one can be in different boxes at the same time. Meaning is not an object transported through a ‘communication channel’. It shifts and develops, as if a chair changes colour or drops a leg when carried from one room to another. Democracy is not something one sets up as a home for people to live in. Our early mind treated things as marbles, and in modern times we have lost our marbles.

 It is difficult to drop the object bias, and this has caused untold confusion in philosophy.

 A social or linguistic structure is seen as a machine with fixed parts, without freedom, while it is more like a can of worms. A whole stream of especially French Continental philosophers, such as Lyotard, Foucault, Derrida and Rorty, have militated against ‘structuralism’, with authoritarian regimes that erase or disregard differences, and suffocate freedom for the sake of the whole of the system, as in the philosophy of Hegel.

 The challenge is to conceptualise systems with as much freedom as possible for the parts. This is an issue also in organisation studies.

 

 Lakoff and Johmson 1980, Metaphors we live by, U of Chicago