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INTUITIONS, HEURISTICS, METAPHORS 333
the development of the modern (post-Aristotelian) concept of the mind (Rorty 1980, Lakoff
and Johnson 1999). Let’s consider a key component of this development: the transformation
of the faculty of reason, intellect, or understanding, into an organ of sense which peers into a
distinct perceptual space, called ‘the mind’ (a Rylean category mistake, if ever there was one).
The intuitions to be explained can be generated by several parallel and mutually reinforcing
analogical (CSG) inferences which employ distinct but related visual metaphors and proceed
from source-domain premises about different acts and achievements of visual perception.
One of the most important of these conceptual metaphors is the metaphor Thinking-about as
looking-at which motivates metaphorical talk of ‘looking hard at the problem’, ‘looking at the
issue from different sides’, etc. A CSG inference which employs its basic mapping takes us
from the source-domain premise that when we look at things we use our eyes to the
conclusion that
C 0
When we think about something, we use our eyes.
Source-domain
premise
Operation
Target-domain
conclusion
1 S looks at X Substitution S thinks about X
2 Implies (1;3-4) Substitution: identical implies (1;3-4)
3 S uses Y Substitution: identical S uses Y
4 S’s eyes (Y) Generation S’s eyes (Y)
INP is set to interpret fresh conclusions as expressing propositions the thinker already
believes true, namely in case some such proposition is semantically sufficiently similar to the
input. Both common sense and faculty psychology furnish us with a suitable belief, a belief we
can express by sentences which employ the same terms as C 0, almost throughout: ‘When we
think about things we use our…’ – ‘reason’, ‘intellect’, or ‘understanding’. In faculty
psychology as in ordinary language, these terms are used to refer not to any organ of sense
but to a faculty, power, or ability, namely to the ‘faculty of comprehending or reasoning’ or
the ‘power or ability to understand’ (as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it). But ‘intellect’
and ‘understanding’ can, like eyes, be said to be ‘used’ by subjects who ‘have’ them; like eyes,
they may be more or less ‘sharp’, etc. They share enough attributes and relations to enjoy a
degree of semantic similarity. The concepts employed earlier in the resulting statement are
identical with those filling the same thematic roles in C 0, and both statements fill the same
number of roles. Since the semantic similarity between two propositions is a function of (i)
the similarities of the concepts filling the same thematic roles in the different propositions
and (ii) the number of different such roles that get filled in either proposition (Budiu and
Anderson 2004: 38), the proposition
C 0
*
When we think about something, we use our understanding
is semantically highly similar to C 0. Therefore INP will activate C * 0 throughout, and
eventually strongly, so that it is accepted as interpretation of C 0, and the utterance of C 0 is
interpreted as expressing the prior belief C 0* .
This interpretation process is bound to trigger new mappings: INP aligns candidate
interpretations with the claim to be interpreted, and compares expressions in matching roles
for semantic similarity. In processing the present CSG conclusion, it aligns:
S – uses – his eyes.
S – uses – his understanding.