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336 FISCHER
explains: ‘When I speak of objects as existing in the mind ... I would not be understood in the
gross literal sense, as when bodies are said to exist in a place’ (Berkeley 1734, 250). These
thinkers continue to accept mappings M and N and continue to posit mind-spaces and
understanding-organs in us. They then seek a non-literal interpretation merely for the spatial
terms (‘x is in y’ and ‘x is before y’). Proper metaphorical interpretation removes from CSG
conclusions employing vision-to-thought analogies all reference to perceptual spaces and
organs of any kind or description. By contrast, early modern ersatz metaphorical
interpretation leaves us stranded with notions of non-physical ‘locations’ and ‘spaces’ without
extension – which gives rise to seminal versions of the ontological mind-body problem.
This paper has addressed a possible source of this problem: CSG inferences with mappings M
and N carry over spatial relations and posit entities which stand in the same spatial etc.
relations to subjects and the objects they think about as visual fields and eyes, stand to visual
observers and the things they see:
– a ‘mind’ in which those objects are located [C2]
– before an ‘understanding’ [C1, C3]
– with which they are perceived [C4].
Ersatz metaphorical interpretation manifests knowledge that there are no such entities.
When accepted by thinkers who offer such interpretative glosses, these intuitive conclusions
hence violate what we may call the ‘no assumed false lemma rule’ (not to be confused with
the ‘no false lemma rule’ proposed in response to the Gettier problem): Do not rely in your
judgments, intuitive or deliberate, on assumptions you believe to be false. The intuitions
explained rely on existence assumptions thinkers know to be false.
If correct, our explanation reveals that these intuitions possess all four defining
characteristics of cognitive illusions (section 1): They violate the uncontroversial ‘no assumed
false lemma rule’ which constrains what a thinker has warrant to conclude or believe, that is,
a normative rule. Second, the violations exposed are predictable, not random: Both INPgenerated
mappings and the transformation of CSG conclusions through INP can be
predicted with: the proposed metaphor heuristic, information about which conceptual
metaphors are linguistically realised in the thinker’s language, and information about the
thinker’s prior beliefs and their subjective semantic similarity to conclusions inferable with
the heuristic. Third, both interacting processes, namely, application of the metaphor heuristic
and INP, are largely automatic in character – even if their joint outputs may be subject to
effortful modification (including the explanations quoted, which evidence better knowledge).
Fourth, even once they have realised that these claims cannot be right, thinkers find these
intuitions intuitively compelling enough to presuppose them in further reasoning (Fischer
2011).
The exposure of such cognitive illusions can perhaps help us resolve a number of
philosophical problems. Ontological problems arise where we spontaneously project spatial
properties onto non-physical things we know not to have them, and seminal versions of the
ontological mind-body problem might arise in this way. Where we do not re-interpret
paradoxical intuitions or conclusions q but accept them despite their apparent conflict with
extant convictions p, or among each other, we raise reconciliation problems, typically, though
not invariably, articulated by questions of the form: How is it possible that p (given that q,
and that q →¬p)? We can, I submit, resolve some problems of these kinds by showing that
they are raised only by cognitive illusions.