Are there any original ideas?
Ideas are made by combining primal metaphors that all neurologically-normal human beings use to organize their conscious experience. These are metaphors such as direction (in front of, in back of), vision (“I see the truth of this”), touching (“I picked her out a crowd”), grasping (“I grasped that the situation was out of my control”), proximity (“these facts are closely correlated”), etc. All of these basic metaphors come out of our nature as embodied beings. They don’t really exist in objective reality – trees have no “fronts” except where we decide the are based on our angle of vision, we don’t “see” knowledge, etc. When we discuss anything – particle physics, theology, the nature of identity, etc. – our language can always be broken down into these basic types of metaphors. We don’t so much describe the world as it really is as much as we come up with metaphorical schemes that describe the world in terms of our senses and physical abilities. See the book “Philosophy in the Flesh” f
