Quote of the Day (Steven Pinker, on How Metaphors Help Us Understand New Concepts)

“Because we aren’t born with vocabulary for everything we might want to talk about, we have to develop new vocabulary for new concepts. And the terms we use have to be transparent enough that other people know what we’re talking about. So if there’s a new virus, for example, if I just call it a blicket, or a dropsy, then I invent the necessary words, but no one knows what I’m talking about. So it’s natural to reach for a metaphor, then people can understand it in terms something similar, which works since people know it’s not literally true, but it would nevertheless give them a leg up in understanding the new term. For example, we talk in mixed metaphors a little bit when we talk about a meme ‘going viral’, when something gets passed on to others, and lots of people who receive it pass it on in turn, and so on, resulting in an exponential explosion. The metaphor is of exponential, viral, replication. That’s the way viruses work. And you understand that even if you don’t know the concept of exponential growth. Even if you don’t remember your high school math, the metaphor allows you to understand the concept.

“In fact, when a metaphor becomes useful enough, it ceases to be metaphorical. People forget its origin and it just becomes a word in the language. It’s actually quite astonishing how much of our language is, or at least was, metaphorical. It’s actually not so easy to find language that wasn’t originally metaphorical.”— Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual Steven Pinker, quoted by Angela Tan, “Interview: Steven Pinker,” Philosophy Now, February/March 2024

The accompanying image of Steven Pinker was taken Oct. 4, 2023, by Christopher Michel.