Listen to thisAnger is a negative force, with some exceptions. Our cognitive model of anger is evaluative and gives anger a negative value. Anger is understood as a negative emotion because of the effects that our cognitive model asserts that it has on self and the community. The cognitive model demands that occurrences of anger be prevented or undone. Left without redress, anger will mount and ultimately destroy its host and possibly others around him or her. This is the prototypical cognitive model of anger, pervasive in communities of English speakers.
Metaphor defines personal responsibility. Questions of responsibility are settled mostly through metaphorical definitions of events, rather than through structural-temporal descriptions of actual occurrences – we know the order in which things happened, but we typically disagree about how to color the events, how to describe them content fully. Purely object-oriented and sequential language gives us only a notion of causation. Objectification and serial ordering are not enough to formulate a moral concept like responsibility – and in fact are used often to have the opposite effect, to de-moralize descriptions. What language we use to define personal agency matters a great deal and has an impact on results, consequences, and social and personal responses to the actions of others. Both children and cultural outsiders find that they understand when things happened; they just are not privy to why things mean what they mean to bona fide members of the cultural community. Why situations are marked by anger eludes them, even when they understand their own actions can result in anger in others.
Metaphor extends human development. Cultural specificity of content, brought about by the use of metaphor, means that children and outsiders both progress slowly and painfully toward cultural mastery and social participation; they understand the temporal dimension of social situations long before they can define properly the semantics – significance – of human interactions. For this reason, children and outsiders are mired in difficulties while navigating the moral worlds of socialized cultural members. Social interactions do not just transpire in sequence; they are colored through metaphorical language that stems from the communication habits of specific communities.
The economy of cultural time. When we handle incidents of anger, in child care settings for example. Figurative language, such as metaphors and metonymies, help us to create a symbolic context in which constructive actions can be taken, sometimes even before some formal science can be produced and consulted. It is true that for individual participants in cultural communities this means a longer learning curve and longer stays at the periphery of communities. However, for society, these artifacts bring the processing and storage of remarkable quantities of information.
The open society. Cognitive models and metaphors do not give us knowledge that is final, finished, and sacred. Only some elements of our understanding are based on universal human experiences. Our constructions of a concept like anger go much further than anything direct observations could ever yield. Communities of speakers of a language and practitioners of cultures create notions and collect and transmit them to the uninitiated cultural apprentice. As creators, therefore, we need always be aware of the role we play in the production of understanding, and we must not allow the presence of our past solutions to derail our necessary and continuing journey towards more useful ways of understanding our reality.
This feature: Child Care Exchange
