I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World by James Geary

Author:James Geary
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Sociology, Psychology, 21st Century, Literary Studies, Amazon.com, Retail
ISBN: 9780061710285
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2011-01-19T15:00:00+00:00

Psychologist Sam Glucksberg carried out a variation on Tversky’s experiment, in which frame flipping is clearly evident. He presented adults with a set of four objects—paintings, billboards, pimples, and warts321—and asked them to pair off those that were most similar. Most people grouped paintings with billboards and pimples with warts, an obvious enough choice. After all, paintings and billboards are both visual displays, while pimples and warts are both dermatological blemishes.

But then Glucksberg tilted the frame, substituting “statues” for “pimples.” Given this new set—paintings, billboards, statues, and warts—most people grouped paintings with statues and billboards with warts. Paintings and statues are both forms of visual art, while warts and billboards are both blemishes—the former on a person’s body, the latter on the landscape. As a result of the substitution, a fresh network of associated commonplaces emerged. The new frame produced a new metaphorical meaning. “The same pair of objects322 can be viewed as similar or different depending on the choice of a frame of reference,” Tversky observed.

In metaphor, framing is the name of the game and our ability to swiftly swap frames increases with age. Take John Donne’s famous line:

No man is an island323.

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