primitive image-schemas 2

[Salinas17 at aol.com]

In a message dated 6/9/04 1:45:49 AM, rjfreeman at email.com writes:
<< If such primitives are posited I agree with Monica that there is a
conflict to be resolved. If language is subjective, and language reflects cognition,
why should there be universal cognitive primitives (you can make it so by
adding complexity to the theory, but why _should_ it be so?)  It starts to sound
like a confusion between "primitive" and "average". Are the primitives we see
really primitives, or are they the average of a lot of subjective conceptions
of the same thing? >>

Just an observation.  It's not like we are talking about purely "subjective"
matters when we talk about things like spatial relationships.  There is a
concrete and rather complex physical world out there that does demand a certain
conformity between what is subjective and what is objective.

If image-schemas are at all helpful in getting us to and opening the
refrigerator door (or helping us tell someone how to do that), then we can expect a
fundamental conformity to physical laws in the way these "cognitive" organs have
evolved and therefore operate.  Likewise, the pain nerves in my toe tell me
that my toe is part of "me", despite any subjective schema that attempts to
leave it out of what is "me".  One might call it a biological dictate.

In asking whether such commonality of observation and effect is either
"primitive" or "average", we are fundamentally asking what these image-schemas would
be like in a human (or other organism) in a world where spatial relationships
are different than the world in which we live.  Otherwise, we might expect
primitive and average to be pretty much one and the same -- whether it is
learning the world or biological evolution that shaped them.  Fundamentally
inaccurate image-schemas on a basic level are not going to get very far in terms of
simple survival value.  And that is why we expect them -- on a basic level -- to
be universal.

Steve Long