#metaphor #thinking #mapping Beside a number of skills that make up my inquirer toolkit, metaphoric thinking was and is still the hallmark of my sense-making process. I find in it a source of insights and a way to never run out of ideas when facing problems. It is a mode that fuels on the diversity of one's experience. By bridging remote domains of human understanding, it offers guidance when dealing with novel situations. This type of thinking is often misunderstood in a what-does-this-have-to-do-with-that manner. Some even deem it inferior to other types of reasoning. It relies on realizations that we have no control over their happening, they say. But, what do we have if we really start from scratch? Nothing, OR what is readily available to us. There is a good case to be made that our language and the way we think about the world is just an analogical import. An elaboration over our dealings with spaces and matter. These two experiential domains drive essential parts of our expressive apparatus. Since the day we were born, we kept accumulating understanding as to their possibilities and combinations. Upon that basis, we layered metaphor upon metaphor. We produced sophisticated languages that have a sense of mysterious interconnectedness. As if it derives from some esoteric principle that rules everything. At the end, it is just how we work. Yet, we keep marveling at our own divergent product. We keep retracing back to the origin to find it that it is all connected. How can it not be? Metaphors are the thread that sews all of our experiences together. Expressions like "Let me gather my thoughts." or "Your position in this argument..." are clearly metaphorical in a way. Thoughts aren't tangible objects to be gathered neither is an argument a physical space where one can position himself it. Yet, these expressions make perfectly sense to us. When you look at it, we are primarily visuo-tactile creatures. We spent a good time of our existence engineering tools that empower us by taking advantage of that fact. Building interfaces that visually obviate meaningful information. Crafting tactile terminals that put control at our fingertips and imbue our gestures with control. Structure, size, shape, form, texture, definition, position and orientation are all space and matter concepts. They are all parameters we use in building our tools. Coincidentally, they also map perfectly to our visuo-tactile nature. So, what are metaphors, really. Metaphors are essentially comparative associations that effect an emphasis suggestive of the way we ought to think about something. All in all they are mappings between objects of life experience with all of what that mapping entails and details. Metaphors are sense-making devices that help us transcribe our own perception in a familiar format. The key phrase here is “*an emphasis suggestive of the way we ought to think about something*”. I am sure that most of you understand "metaphor" in the sense of figurative speech. Generally associated with exaggeration, metaphors are meant to amplify certain features to make a point or convey a feeling in the most extravagant ways. We tend to think of them as expressive embellishments. Even if there is more to them, that way of thinking earned them the prejudice of being less important when dealing with “serious” thinking. The prejudice is justified, yet it puts an unnecessary barrier in our thinking voiced as, “we can’t see how metaphors can be useful in life”. In fact, we can and they are named, conceptual metaphors. Figurative metaphors forward a subjective way to think about something. A view that is only valid locally, we aren't supposed to seek any type of generalization after it. For example, the statement “She is a rose.” doesn't motivate us to apply rose-logic to the "she" in question. It is just that in the setup we speaking of and from the very specific point-of-view we are adopting, she is a rose or more exactly she has features that get amplified when associated to a rose. Conceptual metaphors on the other hand, not only give us a way to think about something locally but also suggest a whole approach that generalizes to more than the actual instance. Of course, that structure is sewed up with some logic to it that dictates the range of validity of such metaphor. To illustrate, I’d like you to have look at the phrase “He gathered his thoughts”. As we said before, thoughts aren’t material objects. They can’t be gathered like one would gather pieces of a puzzle. However, this suggests a useful imagery that depicts what the person is trying to do with his thoughts. This metaphor doesn’t stop here. It also suggest that we can map our experience of material objects to give a concrete image of what we are doing with our mental ones. We can then produce similar expressions like, “line up some ideas”, “construct an argument”, “weight the proposal”, “dodge the question”, etc. As you can see no metaphor is useless within its understood range of validity. I don’t know if you already made the link yet but well most of our language and terminology evolved through metaphoric thinking. Indeed, it has been always there under your nose. Idioms for example are known to be a pain for people who aren’t native because they don’t translate literally. What they mean can only be understood if you get the association that is being made and yes that’s a metaphor right there. Whether we are speaking about figurative or conceptual, metaphors relate domains of life experience. They act as bridges which allow us take advantage of insights and methodologies beyond the scope of their birth-domain. These construct are a power tool when dealing with the unknown; be it an indescribable feeling or an incomprehensible phenomenon. Metaphors offer us a way to leverage what we already known. And so, the universe unfolds as a grand metaphor, where galaxies are verses and stars are punctuation marks, each celestial body a brushstroke on the canvas of perception, inviting us to decipher the hidden allegories of existence.