Rain Falling at a Distance

There seems to be some evidence that the logic and structure of abstract concepts is taken from the structure uof concrete experience through some kind of metaphorical mapping. This is the 'conceptual metaphor theory' which allows us to understand otherwise incomprehensible ideas like 'justice' but non-consciously imagining it as, for example, a set of scales. Since the basic concrete experiences that provide the templates for this metaphorical mapping are often quite complex in structure it might be useful to look at this structure more closely to see if some of this complexity is inherited by the metaphor. One that I noticed recently was the way that the phenomenological experience of movement in the vertical dimension is dependent upon how distant the object moving vertically was from the observer (me). Rain falling at a distance seems to fall only a small distance whilst rain falling nearby drops through the whole of my visual field. In Cheshire rain often seems to fall outside of my visual field entirely, staying entirely in the dark and falling directly onto my head.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• phenomenology
• epistemology
• knowledge
• metaphor
• George
• Lakoff
• Mark
• Johnson
• rain
• vision
• visual
• consciousness
• perception