ABSTRACT
Image schemas, according to contemporary cognitive science, are conceptual structures arising from sensorimotor and in some cases social experiences. They are not fully-fledged images or mental pictures, since they lack particularity and detail: they are abstract or recurrent patterns – tropes, if you will, of space, time, material and action. Examples include “container,” “path,” “force,” “link,” “cycle,” “part-whole,” “up-down,” “center-periphery,” “hot-cold,” and so forth. As conceptual substructures, image schemas (and their elaboration into metaphoric imagery) organize and pervade every area of thought, from the nuts and bolts of categorization and grammar, through ordinary perception and idiomatic speech, to the heights of philosophy and ethics. For instance, even so basic a logical structure as the syllogism is founded on the “containment” schema: if all As are Bs (A is inside B) and C is an A (C is inside A), then C is a B (C is inside B) – a relation easily portrayed through the concentric circles of a Venn diagram. Cognitive science’s most public face is probably the collaborative work of linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By (1980) and Philosophy in the Flesh (1999). The latter is especially significant for its deft analysis of the image schemas and metaphors underlying major philosophies in history.
