Categories of the Mind
We sort more and less exciting things into consistent, conventional mental categories and subconsciously associate those in each category with each other.
“For it is by earth that we see earth, by water water,
By aether divine aether, and by fire destructive fire,
And fondness by fondness, and strife by baleful strife.”
— Empedocles (Kingsley and Parry 2020)
“Primarily on the basis of linguistic evidence, we have found that most of our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical in nature.”
— Lakaoff and Johnson (2008)
Evidence we relate qualities within categories of higher and lower excitement lies in how we think of and describe hotter temperatures, brighter lights, and faster speeds as “higher” or “up” and their opposites as “lower” and “down.” Verticality is not involved, or apparent in any way when temperature, brightness or speed change. One can see the relationship between qualities in the same category in various words with more than one meaning. For instance, the word “spring” can mean the season of increasing heat, upward movement, sudden movement or a fluid running out of the ground. Heat is like a fluid in “heat wave,” “sunbath,” “meteor…
