Spatial Metaphors and Mental Patterns : A Sociological Perspective

Abstract

When we think about thinking, we usually envision an individual thinker –a chess player analyzing her opponent’s last move, a scientist designing an experiment, an old man reminiscing about his childhood. This vision of an individual thinker, so powerfully captured by Auguste Rodin in his statue The Thinker, is a typical product of Western civilization, which practically invented individualism. Since the seventeenth century, it has also been bolstered by the empiricist theories of knowledge developed by John Locke and George Berkeley, which posit a blank mind (tabula rasa) upon which the world impresses itself experientially through our senses.