‘The horizon of speculative logos’ would seem to be a differential apparatus where ratios fix the meanings of concepts into a systemic gestalt.  But such a horizon would seem to be perpetually just out of reach: an autonomous functionalism leaves unanswered the question of how names, or even semantically contiguous statements, get grounded to the ‘objective’ physical world.  Ironically, the persuasive power of Ricouer’s assertion depends itself on a conceptual metaphor, namely, that knowing is seeing, that tried-and-true staple of Cartesian epistemologies.  Ricouer’s seductive—albeit, not all that original—variation is that knowing is seeing from a high place.

Poststructuralists, on the other hand, seeking to wriggle out from under the burden of truth-correspondence, turn the positivist valuation on its head.  They tend to lionize metaphor as the quintessential meaning disruptor, freeing discourse even from its ‘configurational’ tethers and transforming the world into a play of signs, a polysemy of language games.  For the most part, this dialectic of positivist thesis and poststructuralist antithesis, while undergoing various cosmetic mutations, has remained the prevailing frame of argument in literary theory until recently.  Second generation cognitive science shifts this frame.  To return again to etymology, one notices that the word ‘concept’ derives from the Latin verb concipSre, to conceive, which, in turn, links the phonemes, capSre, to take or gather, with con-, altogether.  So once again an idea, in this case the meta-idea of ‘concept’, abstracts a particular form of labour: the physical act of gathering up or bundling together.  From this perspective, the positivist antagonism between concept and metaphor no longer seems appropriate.  A porter must necessarily first gather together that which he or she intends to carry across.  Accordingly, physicists gather together their conceptual entities into kinds, categories, classes—in other words, abstracted containers—before they carry them over to the physical world through experiment.  Dead metaphors, mummified—by Ricouer’s account—within a horizontal space of configurational properties, do not reincarnate as polysemy-free concepts, at the disposal of physicists and other purveyors of realism.  To have any lasting cultural currency, concepts necessarily must be both differential and grounded in some relatively universal physicality.

In Where Mathematics Comes From, Lakoff and Núñez argue: ‘For the most part, human beings conceptualize abstract concepts in concrete terms, using ideas and modes of reasoning grounded in the sensory-motor system.  The mechanism by which the abstract is comprehended in terms of the concrete is called conceptual metaphor.’[3]  Two decades of research in cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology, and computational neural modelling have emphatically confirmed the suspicion that those dead metaphors now known to us as concepts, it turns out, were not quite so dead after all.  In effect, the sensorimotor system of the human brain, the system that mediates the body’s interactions with its environment and social groups, has evolved a double function: through the mechanism of conceptual metaphor, the brain can also cogitate abstractions.  These abstractions do not originate in some transcendental a priori realm of pure form, but emerge organically through the embodied mind’s ongoing negotiations with its social and natural environment.  Within the discipline of cognitive linguistics, ‘“conceptual metaphor” has a technical meaning: It is a grounded [in the sensorimotor system], inference-preserving cross-domain mapping—a neural mechanism that allows us to use the inferential structure of one conceptual domain (say, geometry) to reason about another (say, arithmetic).’[4]  We must imagine the mind as the porter now: metaphor in this context is no longer merely the trade of poets, consigned to the marketplace of rhetorical embellishment.  Cognitive science has demonstrated empirically that metaphor serves a fundamental function in nearly all forms of thinking, not just poetic discourse.  Taken in its broadest sense, the porter that is conceptual metaphor—as ‘cross-domain mapping’—carries a bigger burden than hitherto thought: not only does the porter bear the name that belongs to another—or the entire statement, if one subscribes to Ricouer’s reinvigoration of Aristotelian differentialism—but the porter also carries the inference patterns associated with that name, which spill over and dangle from the name-bundle, trailing off in all directions, getting tangled up in other name-bundles, in other concepts, creating a complex web of inference patterns and associations, in effect, constituting the world.

If one considers poets and physicists both as porters, as traffickers in metaphor, what distinguishes them?  I would argue that the distinction between physicist and poet is a matter of emphasis: in their labours, in their cogitations and negotiations, poets preoccupy themselves more with the carrying over, with the work of crossing and binding together horizontal interpersonal spaces.  On the other hand, physicists are more intent on the work of gathering up and bundling together, of binding together their formalisms into ever more precise ratios and relations—so that when these formal mechanisms are firmly grounded to a sensorimotor experience of the world, by way of instruments such as the colliders and detectors at CERN, they multiply and magnify the effectiveness of our basic metaphors in their capacity to transform the world.  Transference allows for more and more potent transformation, for economies of scale.  Metaphor, in this sense, through the physicist’s preoccupation with the binding together of their mathematical formalisms[5], manifests as technology.

In Philosophy in the Flesh, Lakoff and Johnson describe the role of metaphor in the process of reasoning thus:

* Correlations in our everyday experience inevitably lead us to acquire primary metaphors, which link our subjective experiences and judgments to our sensorimotor experience.  These primary metaphors supply the logic, the imagery, and the qualitative feel of sensorimotor experience to abstract concepts.  We all acquire these metaphorical modes of thought automatically and unconsciously and have no choice as to whether to use them.

* Many, if not all, of our abstract concepts are defined in significant part by conceptual metaphor.  Abstract concepts have two parts: (1) an inherent, literal, nonmetaphorical skeleton, which is simply not rich enough to serve as a full-fledged concept; and (2) a collection of stable, conventional metaphorical extensions that flesh out the conceptual skeleton in a variety of ways (often inconsistently with one another).

* The fundamental role of metaphor is to project inference patterns from the source domain to the target domain.  Much of our reasoning is therefore metaphorical.[6]

So, if one is willing to define conceptual metaphor in a broad sense as cross-domain mapping, it becomes possible to analyze the ontologies of theoretical physics in a new way.  It is such a methodology that I will deploy in this chapter: to tease out beneath the supposed essences of fundamental physical entities a basic-level metaphor and its corresponding inferences.  These basic-level metaphors, ‘characterized by mental imagery, motor interaction, and gestalt perception’, ground basic ideas, prototypical categories of essence.[7]  Basic-level metaphors usually fulfil the following conditions: one, they are the highest level where single mental image can represent an entire category (for example, ‘car’ or ‘tree’); two, category members have similarly perceived overall shapes; three, a person uses similar motor actions for interacting with category members; and four, it is the level at which most of our knowledge is organized.[8]  For basic-level metaphors, ‘the idea that our categories of mind fit the categories of the world is not that far off.’[9]  These metaphors then are ‘fleshed out’ through their concomitant inferences and, in turn, blended with other metaphors to constitute more complex mappings that further integrate and consolidate sensorimotor interactions with cognitive processes.  Cognitive scientists Fauconnier and Turner contend that ‘blending is not just manipulation or projection of inferences.  Rather, it leads to genuine novel integrated action.’[10]  They observe that ‘[o]ften the point of the blend is not to obscure incompatibilities but, in a fashion, to have at once something and its opposite.’[11]  Such conceptual blends ‘provide compressions to human scale of diffuse arrays of events’.[12]  Taken together, these blends of conceptual metaphors may form a cohesive system that, as a whole, engenders a stable body of knowledge concerning physical reality (while still posing some problematic contradictions).  Such a blend of conceptual metaphors would then become a viable candidate for a theory in the most scientifically rigorous sense of the word, a theory robust enough to glean the regularities in an ostensibly inchoate body of evidential data and to make predictions about repeatable experimental outcomes.  What is important in characterizing a conceptual metaphor is not whether it is real, but rather, whether it is apt.  Lakoff and Johnson suggest:

In general, to say that a science is metaphorical is not to belittle it.  Because metaphors preserve inferences, and because those inferences can have nonmetaphorical consequences, one can often test whether or not a scientific metaphor is apt.  Indeed, metaphor is what allows mathematical models to be linked to phenomena in the world and to be regarded as scientific theories.[13]

A mountain of precise experimental evidence reinforces the conviction that the quark, a variety of subatomic particle that makes up the protons and neutrons in the nuclei of atoms, is a much more apt conceptual metaphor than a cosmology where the earth sits on the back of a gargantuan turtle.

How do basic-level metaphors become complex and robust enough to achieve the status of a legitimate theory?  According to cognitive science, they do so through a confluence of two cognitive processes.  One, theories exploit novel deployments of various cross-domain mappings: for example, spatial relations concepts; figure-ground reversals; container schemas; image schemas; aspectual schemas (having to do with events and actions); source-path-goal schemas; and composite structures.  Second, all physical theories (including string theory, obviously) inevitably betray a reliance on what Lakoff, Johnson, and Núñez designate ‘folk theories’.  A folk theory, they argue, is ‘a cognitive structure characterizing a typically unconscious, informal “theory” about some subject matter’.[14]  The folk theories that are most relevant to our examination of string theory are the following:

(1) The folk theory of the intelligibility of the world: The world makes systematic sense, and we can gain knowledge of it.

(2) The folk theory of general kinds: Every particular thing is a kind of thing.

(3) The folk theory of essences: Every entity has an ‘essence’ or ‘nature’, that is, a collection of properties that makes it the kind of thing it is and that is the causal source of its natural behaviour.

(4)In the case of abstract essences, these three physical properties become source domains for metaphors of essence: Essence as substance, essence as form, and essence as pattern of change.

(5) The folk theory of the all-inclusive category: There is a category of all things that exist.[15]

To reiterate, calling any theory a ‘folk’ theory is not to imply that it is false, a myth or form of magical thinking.  As conceptual metaphors go, these foundational folk theories have without doubt proven to be incredibly efficacious, if we take at all seriously the tangible accomplishments of science as a whole.  Of course, they are not without their limits.  As we proceed with our examination of the conceptual metaphors that constitute string theory, I believe it will become apparent just how pivotal these folk theories—especially the fourth one—are to the institutionalisation of physical theories.

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