Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius: By th’mass, and ‘tis like a camel indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.
Hamlet: Or like a whale.
Polonius: Very like a whale.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
IN THE TALE of the ox and the donkey, it is easy to see that we are dealing with story, projection, and parable. It is harder to see these capacities at work in everyday life, but we always use them. The rest of this book explores how the human mind is always at work constructing small stories and projecting them.
Story, projection, and parable do work for us; they make everyday life possible; they are the root of human thought; they are not primarily—or even importantly—entertainment. To be sure, the kinds of stories we are apt to notice draw attention to their status as the product of storytelling, and they often have an entertaining side. We might therefore think that storytelling is a special performance rather than a constant mental activity. But story as a mental activity is essential to human thought. The kinds of stories that are most essential to human thought produce experience that is completely absorbing, but we rarely notice those stories themselves or the way they work because they are always present.
This conjunction of what is absorbing but unnoticed is not as weird as it sounds. Human vision, for example, produces content that is always psychologically absorbing to everyone—we are absorbed in our visual field, no matter what it contains—but only a neurobiologist is likely to notice the constant mechanisms of vision that create our visual field. What everyone notices are some exceptional products of vision: A fireworks display seems more interesting than an empty parking lot, even though vision uses the same mechanisms to see both of them. We almost never notice the activity of vision or think of vision as an activity, but if we do, we must recognize that the activity of vision is constant and more important than anything we may happen to see.
Story as a mental activity is similarly constant yet unnoticed, and more important than any particular story. In the next three chapters, we will analyze some very basic abstract stories and some very basic patterns of their projection. We will find that the same basic mechanisms of parable underlie a great range of examples, from the everyday to the literary.
The basic stories we know best are small stories of events in space: The wind blows clouds through the sky, a child throws a rock, a mother pours milk into a glass, a whale swims through the water. These stories constitute our world and they are completely absorbing—we cannot resist watching the volley of the tennis ball. Our adult experience actually revolves around pouring the drink into the cup, carrying it, watching the bird soar, watching the plane descend, tracking the small stick as the stream carries it away.
As subjects of our prolonged conscious investigation, however, these small spatial stories may seem hopelessly boring. We are highly interested in our coherent personal experiences, which are the product of thinking with small spatial stories, but we are not interested in the small spatial stories themselves. When someone says, “Tell me a story,” he means something unusual and interesting. King Lear is a “story”; Peter Rabbit is a “story.” Someone pouring coffee into a cup is not a “story.” Why waste time thinking about a human being pouring liquid into a container? This small spatial story takes place billions of times a day, all over the world, with numbing repetition. No one who pours the liquid thinks it is an interesting story, what is the point?
We must adopt a scientific perspective to see why something we already know how to do without effort or conscious attention can pose an extremely difficult and important scientific puzzle. The capacity for recognizing and executing small spatial stories is—like the capacity to speak, to see color, or to distinguish sounds—an obvious and deceptively easy capacity. In fact, it presents the chief puzzle of cognitive science. How can five billion different human beings all recognize and execute small spatial stories?
Even the most boring person can do it, so we have a hard time imagining that the capacity can be interesting. We devalue it as we devalue any plentiful resource. Since it is universal instead of scarce, the calculus of supply and demand must fix its price at zero. But it is actually worth whatever it is worth to be a human being because if you do not have this capacity, you do not have a human mind.
These small stories are what a human being has instead of chaotic experience. We know how they go. They are the knowledge that goes unnoticed but makes life possible. We do not need to worry about our movements or our interaction with the world because we have absolute confidence in these stories. They are so essential to life that our mastery of them must be almost entirely unconscious; from a biological point of view, we cannot be trusted to run them consciously. In important moments, we had better not notice them, just as we had better not notice mechanisms of vision while we are fleeing a predator. We have in fact no practical need to analyze them. Biologically, they must be unproblematic, making them seem intellectually boring. But they become intellectually interesting the moment we lack them.
These stories are inventions. They are essential, but they are invented. This conjunction of adjectives may seem paradoxical if we think of essential things (like a heartbeat) as compulsory or necessary and invented things (like a light bulb) as optional. In that way of thinking, what is essential and what is invented must be contraries. But although these small spatial stories are inventive constructions of the human mind, they are not optional. The necessary biology and the necessary experience of any normal human infant inevitably produce a capacity for story in the infant. It is not possible for a human infant to fail to achieve the concept of a container, for example, or liquid, or pouring, or flowing, or a path, or movement along a path, or the product of these concepts: the small spatial story in which liquid is poured and flows along a path into a container. Our core indispensable stories not only can be invented, they must be invented if we are to survive and have human lives.
We can see their status as inventions by contrasting them with alternative representations of the world. When we watch someone sitting down into a chair, we see what physics cannot recognize: an animate agent performing an intentional act involving basic human-scale categories of events like sitting and objects like chair. But physics offers a representation of the world that leaves out agency, motive, intentionality, and a range of structure that is part of the conceptual equipment of everyone, including physicists. The basic elements of physics are not tied to the human scale; sitting and chair are elements of story but not elements of physics. The fundamental units of physics exist at levels that are foreign to us—subatomic quarks, metrics of space-time, integrations from zero to infinity. Where physics offers an impenetrable but accurate physical description in the form of a wave equation, story offers Einstein sitting in a chair.
In our small stories, we distinguish objects from events, objects from other objects, and events from other events. We categorize some objects as belonging to the category person and other objects as belonging to the category chair. We recognize what a person does with a chair as belonging to the category sitting.
We understand our experience in this way because we are built evolutionarily to learn to distinguish objects and events and combine them in small spatial stories at human scale in a way that is useful for us, given that we have human bodies. This is what the human brain does best, although a divine intelligence with a God’s-eye view might have no use for the human concepts object and event, no use for human perceptual categories of kinds of objects and events, and no use for small spatial stories.
There is a general story to human existence: It is the story of how we use story, projection, and parable to think, beginning at the level of small spatial stories. Yet this level, although fully inventive, is so unproblematic in our experience and so necessary to our existence that it is left out of account as precultural, even though it is the core of culture. When it is left out of account, the human condition can appear to have no general story. As Clifford Geertz has observed,
It is necessary then to be satisfied with swirls, confluxions, and inconstant connections; clouds collecting, clouds dispersing. There is no general story to be told, no synoptic picture to be had. Or if there is, no one, certainly no one wandering into the middle of them like Fabrice at Waterloo, is in a position to construct them, neither at the time nor later. What we can construct, if we keep notes and survive, are hindsight accounts of the connectedness of things that seem to have happened: pieced-together patternings, after the fact.
But Geertz’s claim that there is no general story is itself a general story not of what we know but of how we know, and his story is possible only because there is already in place, behind it, a general story about human thought. The general story is that human beings construct small spatial stories and project them parabolically. Geertz’s story depends upon this general story: Like Hamlet and Polonius, he gives us small spatial stories in which we recognize clouds that collect or disperse, shapes that we assign to categories of objects, pieces that we put together, liquids or gases that swirl and flow together, vistas that we see, and so on; and he encourages us to use the mental process of parable to project these small spatial stories we know and must know since we are human onto the story of human culture and knowledge. His description of the absence of a general story begins with small spatial stories and projects them parabolically onto stories of human thought. Its compelling use of story, projection, and parable demonstrates the general story of the human condition—a story whose existence it denies. How do we recognize objects, events, and stories? Part of the answer has to do with “image schemas.” Mark Johnson and Leonard Talmy—followed more recently by Claudia Brugman, Eve Sweetser, George Lakoff, Ronald Langacker, me, and many others—have analyzed linguistic evidence for the existence of image schemas. Image schemas are skeletal patterns that recur in our sensory and motor experience. Motion along a path, bounded interior, balance, and symmetry are typical image schemas.
Consider the image schema container. Like all image schemas, it is minimal. It has three parts: an interior, an exterior, and a boundary that separates them. We experience many things as containers: a bottle, a bag, a cup, a car, a mountain valley, rooms, houses, cupboards, boxes, chests, and drawers. Two of our most important containers are our heads and our bodies.
We use the image schema motion along a path to recognize locomotion by people, hands reaching out to us, our own hand reaching out, a ball rolling, milk pouring into a cup.
Simple image schemas can combine to form complex image schemas. For example, the goal of the path can be the interior a container. This combination produces the complex image schema into. Alternatively, the source of the path can be the interior of a container, producing the complex image schema out of. The path can intersect a container, producing the complex image schema through.
There are many other image schemas we use to structure our experience, and thereby to recognize objects and events and place them in categories. Leonard Talmy originally analyzed image schemas of force dynamics such as pushing, pulling, resisting, yielding, and releasing. Other dynamic image schemas include dipping, rising, climbing, pouring, and falling.
Image schemas arise from perception but also from interaction. We perceive milk flowing into a glass; we interact with it flowing into our bodies. We recognize a category connection between one door and another, one chair and another, one ball and another, one rock and another, one event of pouring and another not only because they share image schemas of shape or part-whole structure, but also because our image schemas for interacting with them are the same. Our image schemas for interacting with an object or an event must be consistent with our image schemas for perceiving it if perception is to provide a basis for action.
To recognize several events as structured by the same image schema is to recognize a category. We have a neurobiologies pattern for throwing a small object. This pattern underlies the individual event of throwing a rock and helps us create the category throwing. We have a neurobiologies pattern for reaching out and picking something up. This pattern underlies an individual event of reaching out and picking something up and helps us create the category reaching out and picking up.
Every time such a pattern becomes active it is slightly different. If we think of how often we reach out to pick up a glass and under what different conditions the event takes place, we see how varied the actual event is in its exact details each time it occurs. Our bodies are at slightly different orientations to the glass; the glass is slightly nearer or farther away, the glass sits on a slightly different surface; there may be obstructions to be avoided; the glass has a slightly different shape or weight or texture. We recognize all of the individual events of picking up a glass as belonging to one category in part because they all share a skeletal complex image schema of dynamic interaction.
Partitioning the world into objects involves partitioning the world into small spatial stories because our recognition of objects depends on the characteristic stories in which they appear: We catch a ball, throw a rock, sit in a chair, pet a dog, take a drink from a glass of water.
Parable often projects image schemas. When the projection carries structure from a “source” we understand to a “target” we want to understand, the projection conforms to a constraint: The result for the target shall not be a conflict of image schemas.
For example, when we map one rich image onto another, the (relevant) image schemas of source and target end up aligned in certain ways. It may seem obvious when we say someone’s head is hanging like a wilted flower, or when Auden describes a solitary man weeping on a bench and “Hanging his head down, with his mouth distorted, / Helpless and ugly as an embryo chicken,” that the verticality schemas in the source images (flower and chicken) and target image (human head) should align. It may seem equally obvious that part-whole relationships in source and target images should align, that a bounded interior should project to a bounded interior, that directionality of gaze should correspond in source and target, that relationships of adjacency should correspond, and so on. But in fact it is not at all obvious, however natural it seems. The specific details of the rich images need not correspond, but the relevant image schemas are lined up.
When we project one concept onto another, image schemas again seem to do much of the work. For example, when we project spatiality onto temporality, we project image schemas; we think of time itself, which has no spatial shape, as having a spatial shape—linear, for example, or circular. We like to think of events in time, which also have no spatial shape, as having features of spatial shapes—continuity, extension, discreteness, completion, open-endedness, circularity, part-whole relations, and so on. This way of conceiving of time and of events in time arises by projecting skeletal image schemas from space onto time.
We think of causal relations as structured by spatial image schemas such as links and paths. These image schemas need not be static. For example, we have a dynamic image schema in which one thing comes out of another, and we project that image schema to give structure to one of our concepts of causation, as when we say that Italian emerged from its mother, Latin. Abstract reasoning appears to be possible in large part because we project image-schematic structure from spatial concepts onto abstract concepts. We say, for example, “Shame forced him to confess,” even though no physical forces are involved. Forms of social and psychological causation are understood by projection from bodily causation that involves physical forces. This is parable.
A woman sees a rock, moves toward it, bends down, picks it up, and stands back up. Her legs, body, and arms begin an amazingly intricate sequence of movements. Her hand releases the rock, which follows a trajectory through the air to hit the window, which shatters.
The brain is extremely good at constructing refined and intricate sequences of movement and then executing them, as when we run to catch a baseball. William H. Calvin’s Cerebral Symphony is a meditation upon whether this capacity might be considered the one central capacity of human intelligence. As Calvin shows, running and walking are marvels of the brain’s ability to compose and execute motor sequences. We share the capacity for such sequencing of bodily action with other species. But peculiarly human mental activities also depend upon sequencing. Composing or recognizing a musical phrase, speaking or listening to a sentence, and telling or understanding a story are all examples of our ability to recognize or execute a sequence that counts as a whole. The sequential nature of speech has historically been recognized as one of the defining features of language. Many cognitive scientists have observed that the human brain is uncommonly sophisticated in its capacity for constructing sequences.
To recognize small spatial stories requires us to recognize not only objects involved in events, but also sequences of these situations. The ball is pushed; it rolls; it encounters an obstacle; it knocks the obstacle over, or the obstacle stops the ball. In another small spatial story, our father’s hand grasps an object and moves the object to a position in front of us; the hand releases; the hand withdraws; we reach out; we touch the object; we grasp the object; we put it into our mouth; we release it; we remove our hand; we chew it; we swallow it.
In recognizing small spatial stories, we are recognizing not just a sequence of particular objects involved in particular events, but also a sequence of objects that belong to categories involved in events that belong to categories. Every time our father places food in front of us, both his actions and the food will be somewhat different, and our actions in response will be somewhat different. But we recognize the objects and events as essentially the same, as belonging to the same category. We recognize a general story. Our experiences differ in detail, but we make sense of them as consisting of a repertoire of small spatial stories, repeated again and again.
These small spatial stories are routinely held together by one or more dynamic image schemas. Consider a fish jumping out of the water through an arc and back into the water, a baseball hit from a bat to fly through an arc into the stands, a rock thrown to hit a distant object, a bird flying from one tree to another. All of these sequences are structured by the image schema of a point moving along a directed path from a source to a goal. This dynamic image schema inherently carries with it a sequence of spatial situations. Consider the image schema of something moving to the edge of a supporting plateau and falling off. This is a temporal sequence combining image schemas. There is no end to the number of particular small spatial stories it structures: a ball rolling off a deck, a keg rolling off a dock, a puddle of tea pouring off the side of a table, a human being walking off a roof.
Most of our action consists of executing small spatial stories: getting a glass of juice from the refrigerator, dressing, bicycling to the market. Executing these stories, recognizing them, and imagining them are all related because they are all structured by the same image schemas.
If we see someone pick up a stone and throw it at us, we do not need to wait for the stone to hit us before we can recognize the small spatial story and respond to it. We recognize small spatial stories on the basis of partial information. When we duck, it is because pattern completion tells us the possible end of the small spatial story in which we are hit by the stone. Suppose we see nothing but a stone smashing into a window. We immediately look in the direction from which the stone came to see who or what threw it. Suppose we see only someone’s arm go back, and a few seconds later, a stone hitting a window. We can imagine the intermediate sequence in the story. Finally, suppose we see none of the story, but only imagine it with our eyes closed. In this last case, the recognition of the small spatial story has been activated without perception of any of its parts.
We duck when we see someone cock an arm to throw a stone at us because we are predicting: we recognize the beginning sequence of a small spatial story, imagine the rest, and respond. Narrative imagining is our fundamental form of predicting
When we decide that it is perfectly reasonable to place our plum on the dictionary but not the dictionary on our plum, we are both predicting and evaluating. Evaluating the future of an act is evaluating the wisdom of the act. In this way, narrative imagining is also our fundamental form of evaluating.
When we hear something and want to see it, and walk to a new location in order to see it, we have made and executed a plan. We have constructed a story taking us from the original situation to the desired situation and executed the story. The story is the plan. In this way, narrative imagining is our fundamental cognitive instrument for planning.
When a drop of water falls mysteriously from the ceiling and lands at our feet, we try to imagine a story that begins from the normal situation and ends with the mysterious situation. The story is the explanation. Narrative imagining is our fundamental cognitive instrument for explanation.
Small spatial stories involve events and objects. We recognize some of these objects as animate actors. From time to time it has been considered philosophically embarrassing that we think of animate actors as causes in themselves. Objects and events seem to have a claim on objective existence, but animacy and agency seem almost supernatural and suspicious as elements of a scientific theory. Many attempts have been made to reduce animacy and agency to simple matters of objects and events. We have eliminated river gods and wind deities and tree spirits from our descriptions of the natural world. But small spatial stories are often populated with animate actors that show no sign of disappearing. What are they?
Prototypical actors—human beings and many animals—are recognized as self-moving and as capable of sensation. Self-movement, like all movement, is recognized by means of dynamic image schemas: we recognize an event of self-movement when we recognize it as conforming to an image schema of self-movement. It is more difficult to say how we recognize sensation by actors other than ourselves, since we can have only our own sensations, not theirs. We can perceive their movements but we cannot perceive their sensations. We must infer their sensations by analogy with ourselves: they appear to move in reaction to sensations just as we would. We recoil when startled; we track a visual stimulus; we turn from an unpleasant smell. They appear to do the same things. We see the cat jump backward in surprise or move when it recognizes a bird, and we infer the cat’s sensations from its movements. Recognizing objects (other than ourselves) as having sensations depends in this way upon recognizing them as self-moving: we can infer their sensations from their self-movements. This is already parable: We see a small spatial story in which an actor other than ourselves behaves in certain ways, and we project features of animacy and agency onto it from stories in which we are the actor.
Prototypical objects can be moved. Objects that are prototypical actors are perceived as able to move themselves and able to move other objects. If actors move objects, what moves the actors? What is the source of their movement? One answer that has come up historically is the soul. The soul is what moves the body. The body is the object the soul moves as a consequence of its own self-movement. In On the Soul, Aristotle surveys theories on the nature of the soul, showing that in nearly all of them, soul is regarded as having movement and sensation. His survey testifies to the antiquity and durability of recognizing actors as movers and sensors. This abstract concept of the soul is created by a parabolic projection. We know the small spatial story in which an actor moves a physical object; we project this story onto the story of the movement of the body. The object projects to the body and the actor projects to the soul. In this way, parable creates the concept of the soul.
When Aristotle writes of self-movement, he appears to be thinking of movement complexes, because something that is self-moving uses its capacity for self-movement often, making the trajectory of its movement irregular. A horse, for example, does not move the way a cannon ball moves or the way an apple falls from a tree or the way a ball rolls down a smooth incline: the horse moves here and there, to one side and the other, moving its head this way and that. The movement of a person or an animal looks like a complex of many movements, resulting in a complex trajectory. In short, the image schema for recognizing the self-movement of an actor is more detailed than the image schema for recognizing the “self-movement” of the ripe apple’s fall to the ground.
We detect self-movement by an object when we recognize an image schema of movement not caused by external forces. We detect animacy when this image schema is a complex of a number of movements. We detect caused motion when we recognize a complex dynamic image schema in which the motion of one object causes the motion of another object. We detect animate agency when we recognize an image schema of animacy combined with an image schema of caused motion, as when a baby reaches out (animacy) and picks up the rattle (caused motion). The causal object in an image schema of animate agency is usually recognized as an actor.
These recognitions do not stand up scientifically. We know that the wind may move variously and blow the leaves in subtle and varied patterns, or that the acid may eat the metal violently and erratically, thus fitting image schemas characteristic of actors, yet we do not want to place the wind and the acid in the same category with human beings and animals. But our reluctance to do so shows only that when we acquire a sophisticated scientific knowledge, we discount the validity of some of our recognitions. For virtually the entire history of human cognition, it has seemed plausible to regard the wind as an honorary actor because although it lacks sensation, it has the image schemas of animate agency. To the intelligent newborn child, the jouncy voice-activated mobile above the crib that moves when the child vocalizes may seem to be an excellent candidate for actor.
The term image schema was proposed by Mark Johnson, but the notion has a long lineage and many current cousins. Here, I review some of the most salient research. In “Further Reading on Image Schemas” I list some general introductions to image schemas as well as the specific works I cite in this section.
IMAGE SCHEMAS IN THE BRAIN. It is relatively easy to see image schemas at work in behavior and language. To walk in the rain, we must go outside our house-container so we will not be under a roof that stops the rain from falling down onto us, and we must move along a path out of doors.
It is harder to locate image schemas at work in the brain, but there are early indications. The cerebellum, for example, has traditionally been recognized as a specialized part of the brain suited for neuronal group patterns whose activation results in sequences of precisely timed and coordinated movement, like throwing a curve ball or touch-typing a common word or playing a theme on the piano. What we would like to know is how such brain patterns for spatial movement are connected across modalities: When we see someone throw a rock at a window, the visual image schemas according to which we recognize and understand the event are presumably connected to the kinesthetic image schemas according to which we perform the event, the auditory image schemas that belong to the event, and the tactile image schemas of touching the rock. Theories of connections between such image schemas have only recently been developed and remain speculative. Antonio Damasio has proposed a neurobiological model of “convergence zones” that might have something to say about such cross-modal integration. His model “rejects a single anatomical site for the integration of memory and motor processes and a single store for the meaning of entities or events. Meaning is reached by time-locked multiregional retroactivation of widespread fragment records. Only the latter records can become contents of consciousness.” Because a higher-order convergence zone is cross-modal, it offers a site for activating different neuronal patterns corresponding to the identical image schema across different modalities.
The most specific evidence of image schemas in the brain comes from reports of what are known as “orientation tuning” columns. The primary visual cortex responds to moving bars of light in an interesting way: A given neuron will have a preferred “orientation tuning”—it will respond best to a bar at a given angle. Other neurons in the column appear to have the same preferred stimulus, so that the column constitutes a neuronal group of cells that fire together in time in an organized manner to recognize a line at a preferred angle. Different orientation columns prefer different angles. In this way, orientation tuning columns work like neurobiological image schemas for structuring certain kinds of visual experience and for understanding it. These orientation tuning columns in the primary visual cortex are connected to neuronal groups in another, separate visual map, known as V2, and these two connected visual maps respond coherently to the same preferred stimulus, which suggests that image schemas in primary visual cortex are coordinated with analogous image schemas in V2.
Gerald Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection offers a suggestion for a general neuroscientific explanation of image schemas. In simplistic outline, it has the following logic. A sensory sheet (like the retina) projects to various regions of the nervous system (called “maps”). For any particular map, repeated encounter with a stimulus results in changes in synaptic strengths between neurons in the map, thus forming up (“selecting”) certain neuronal group patterns in that map that become active whenever the stimulus is encountered. For any particular stimulus object, there will be many neuronal group patterns in many maps. (For example, there are different maps for different modalities, like vision, and for different submodalities, like form, motion, and color.) These various neuronal group patterns in the various maps are linked through another hypothetical neurobiological process Edelman calls “reentrant mapping”: a given stimulus will result in activity in many maps, and these activities are linked reinforcingly through “reentry.”
For example, an image schema for container would be a coordinated dynamic interaction across neuronal group patterns in various maps that arose through experiential selection and reentry during encounters with a great variety of things that gradually came to be categorized as containers exacdy because we take them to share this dynamic interactional image schema. The image schema itself needs no translation: it is meaningful, when activated, as corresponding to this category.
It would be a mistake to overwork or overinterpret these beginning results. It is not clear how to connect the evidence for image schemas in the study of the mind to the evidence for image schemas in the study of the brain. Perhaps the neurobiologies analogue of an image schema is not one neuronal group pattern but rather the complex interaction of several neuronal group patterns in different sites, all coordinated. The best evidence to date of the specific nature of image schemas still comes from the study of language.
IMAGE SCHEMAS IN BASIC-LEVEL CATEGORIES. Outside the neurosciences, psychological studies are beginning to provide evidence for the role of image schemas in categorization and cognition. Psychologists Eleanor Rosch and Carolyn Mervis and a range of associates have made insightful discoveries in the last fifteen years concerning the conceptual categories of concrete objects. Rosch and her colleagues showed that there is one level of abstraction around which most information is organized. They call it the “basic” level—the level of concepts like dog, table, car, tree, house, bicycle, spoon, and giraffe. The basic level, essentially, is the level at which we partition our environments into objects with which we interact in small spatial stories: chair, door, knife, ball, rock. Rosch presents evidence that the basic level is the highest level at which category members share overall perceived shapes and the highest level at which members call for similar interactions motor patterns. Since these overall shapes and these interactions patterns are image schemas, Rosch’s work provides evidence for the role of image schemas in structuring perceptual and conceptual categories. Although the tradition of research on “basic-level” categories is controversial, none of the controversy detracts from this essential point.
IMAGE SCHEMAS IN DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY. In a 1992 article in Psychological Review called “How to Build a Baby: II. Conceptual Primitives,” Jean Mandler presents evidence for image schemas from clinical experiments in developments psychology. She claims that infants develop concepts of animacy and agency on the basis of image schemas. The image schemas she proposes are closely equivalent to those we have considered above.
Mandler attempts to explain how the developing infant might go from forming discriminable perceptual categories to using them for thought. She proposes that certain kinds of perceptual information are recoded into forms that represent meanings. This recoding produces a set of image schemas that serve as conceptual primitives (in the sense of being foundational, not in the sense of being atomic, unitary, or without structure). She proposes that infants form an image schema of self-motion (“an object is not moving, and then, without any forces acting on it, it starts to move”), of animate-motion (motion with an irregular trajectory), of self-moving animate (a complex combination of the previous two), of caused motion (a trajector impinges on an object and it then moves), and of agency (a combination of the image schemas of animacy and caused motion, in which an animate object moves itself and also causes another object to move.)
Mandler, in essence, proposes a general psychological process whereby perceptual experience is redescribed “into an image-schematic form of representation” used in building concepts.
At conception, an individual human being carries an individual genetic endowment (genotype) that arose under evolutionary pressures of selection and that guides her individual brain as it develops in its changing environments. That genotype cannot determine the fine specifics of point-to-point wiring and activity in the individual brain, but it can (and must) contribute to setting up a nervous system that will reach certain target values under experience. That genotype must do this because of Darwinian pressures: Genes that lead to less competent brains will be selected against. The genes implicitly provide target values for the developing brain. Those values derive implicitly from the history of selection on our ancestors. The particular target values that have arisen in our species are, at a minimum, stable regulation of homeostasis and metabolism, dispositions toward survival and reproduction, bodily movement in space, perceptual categorization, and the recognition and execution of small spatial stories. The combined operation of genetic influence and necessary experience of the sort inevitable for any normal human infant with a human body in a human environment leads to the ability to recognize and execute small spatial stories.
Seen in this way, narrative imagining, often thought of as literary and optional, appears instead to be inseparable from our evolutionary past and our necessary personal experience. It also appears to be a fundamental target value for the developing human mind.