The Kid , the Clerk , and the Gambler · Critical Studies in Statistics and Cognitive Science

concepts with increasingly concrete ones: Once a domain of knowledge becomes well known, it can itself serve as a source domain (basis) for understanding more novel concepts (Feldman, 2006, p. 209). After you have learned to think of light as a kind of water (that flows, pours in, fills the room, etc.), you can then learn to think about hope or reason as a kind of light. Ultimately, your knowledge of any abstract domain is thus grounded in your direct, first-hand, physical experience. If this grounding hypothesis is correct, it suggests that the “conceptual system” postulated by the theory could be seen as a large, ordered structure (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980b). Its roots would be immediate, sensory experiences, and its leaves would be abstract concepts. Figure 2.1 shows one way of sketching such a conceptual system, with nodes representing concepts, and the connections representing cognitive analogies. (The links shown in the picture are based on Lakoff et al. (1991), but the specifics are not particularly important here.) This image, in turn, suggests that careful analysis might trace back any particular piece of abstract knowledge — about, say, mathematics, politics, or poetry — to its roots in bodily experience. 2.1.1 Beyond the Metaphysics of Immediacy The purpose of this chapter is to point out some conceptual and empirical problems with this picture of a “tree of knowledge,” and with the notion that careful