How do we distinguish humans from animals? Divided into modules that introduce works of literature and film in tandem with various theories of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science, the course is structured to begin and end with the problem of defining and representing humans in relation to animals. They are well argued with new insights. It does so with scenes that trigger our subcortical emotive arousal and a protagonist whom we can relate to affectively. Readers, in turn, use cognitive universals implicitly to get inside the heads of writers or characters the writer depicts (Zunshine 2006). We then have them watch a YouTube video of Snowball, a dancing cockatiel, to emphasize that when it comes to the arts, we humans have not left other species entirely behind. Psychol Dev Soc. In this paper, we discuss the structure of the course, metaphor and the evolved process of understanding metaphors, the conceptual tools needed to analyze metaphors critically in their textual and evolutionary contexts, and examples of how those conceptual tools were applied to the analysis of texts. Even within the story, the reader is prevented from pretending that the soldiers report is accurate, for the love story itself hinges on the soldier-narrators tendency to create fictions. New York: Basic Books; 2003. Wilson, D.S. Toward an evolutionary theory of aesthetics, fiction and arts. The biggest pedagogic challenge of this course was to find ways to connect with and engage students of many different majors. Though one may intend, or claim ones intention is merely to explain something using metaphor, the metaphors we use can get misinterpreted or stir strong emotion that interferes with rational analysis and policy decisions congruent with the laws of nature. The third module turns to the use of animal metaphors in a broad range of discourses and representations that address environmental issues. The question as to whether or not we are animals may arise from our inherent curiosity about other members of our species. We have an innate capacity to notice the evidence that most supports what we already want to believe (Nickerson 1998). The better one is at knowing cognitive universals, either explicitly or implicitly, then the better one can be at getting inside other peoples heads. Universals, as a suite of cognitive abilities, are thus the biological basis for a theory of mind. 1998;2:175220. Goldenberg JL, Pyszczynski T, Greenberg J, Solomon S, Kluck B, Cornwell R. I am not an animal: mortality salience, disgust, and the denial of human creatureliness. Article To lay the groundwork for metaphors, the first assignment was hunting for metaphors. After reading and discussing Glucksbergs (2003) behavior experiments on metaphor recognition, we asked students to seek out metaphors. In addition to examining your chosen storys content in relation to the non-literary readings, your paper should at some point also address the experience or function itself of reading and/or inventing and circulating a story, in relation to our cognitive functions, our existence as social primates, or other aspects of our evolutionary heritage. Springer Nature. Thus, Timimi responded to an editorial (BMJ 2014;349:g6821), writing that parity of esteem between mental and physical health was a red herring because it would mean pouring money into potentially harmful, stigmatising and ineffective service, although the editorialists disagreed. We test this hypothesis in our course in a slightly different way. We investigated how humans are animals and yet use culture to shield themselves from this reality. Human fascination with animal behaviour probably extends back millions of years, perhaps even to times before the ancestors of the species became human in the modern sense. Literary universal designates various story practices, the wide range of social functions they may fulfill, and the cognitive, emotional, or sensory effects these practices may have on the reader. Narrative literature and film rely on evolved linguistic reconstruction processes that allow story to be reconstructed from fractured pieces of discourse. According to the animate monitoring hypothesis, most humans would automatically detect the bird over non-animate ice or sea. The requisite cognitive skills enabling the prehistoric emergence of oral literature could have been byproducts of primate adaptations initially serving nonliterary functions (Hernadi 2001, 62). WebMost animal metaphors for human personality are uncomplimentary, reinforcing the perceived distance between humans and nonhuman animal species. Most students expected the scientific journalism to use fewer metaphors because they assumed that scientific language would be more objective, i.e., more literal and less figurative. Balzac only depicts the Maghrebi nomads as enemy captors whom the soldier labels animals. In contrast, the film shows scenes of Arab nomads engaged in the duties and rituals of their everyday life, having mastered the challenges of survival in a barren land. What are 5 examples of hyperbole?Im so hungry I could eat a horse.Shes as old as the hills.I walked a million miles to get here.She can hear a pin drop a mile away.I died of embarrassment.Hes as skinny as a toothpick.Shes as tall as a beanpole.Its raining cats and dogs. Self-deception and the mediaclimate change. Cognitive universals give writers the scaffolding for guessing what a reader will understand and how the reader will do so. We asked students to begin using their scientific readings as a lens through which to view literature: Explain how two or more of the assigned non-literary readings inform your reading of either Honor de Balzacs Passion in the Desert (1830) or Guy de Maupassants Story of a Farm Girl (1890). Paradoxically, the evolved use of animal metaphors to fashion a relationship with the environment allows humans to conceptualize themselves as non-animals. The second module develops more thoroughly the idea of human universals. Yet the film never allows the viewers perception of the leopard or desert to become indistinguishable from the soldiers own constructions. Thus far, we have adduced examples that conform to Glucksbergs strict definition of metaphor as a categorical assertion. Cookies policy. Making truth. The human behavioural sciences and for examples of lrins and allow During the 2008 presidential race, Caroline Kennedy used simile in the title of her pro-Obama editorial: A President Like My Father. The impact of her message on readers may easily have been: Obama is another John. Urbana: University of Illinois Press; 2003. Thus, the statement My lawyer is a shark creates an imaginary space in which shark and lawyer no longer mean what they each meant separately; instead, they interact and emerge as a new concept: Its only within the blend that the intended structure emerges (Fauconnier and Turner 2003, 23). Written in the wake of the discoveries and theories of Cuvier, Buffon, Geoffroy, and Lamarck, in which Balzac took a lively interest, Passion circumvents direct engagement with the question of animals commonalities with humans, raised in its first section, by switching in its second section to the story of one mans struggle to survive in a distant land. In: Gibbs RW, editor. We read and analyzed literature in which animal metaphors are central, such as Honor de Balzacs short story Passion in the Desert and Langdon Smiths poem Evolution. Throughout the course, the overarching theme is that animal metaphors are powerful tools for framing our relationship with the environment and that they can be best understood in the context of humans as evolved animals. The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought. In: Andrews M, Sclater SD, Squire C, Treacher A, editors. Any assertion about humans automatically allows for the phrase I am to replace Humans are. Yet when classifying themselves, humans normally use I am to assert categorial identity. From there, we get tumours that are like tigers, which is a simile; or the full transference to metaphor in, for example, an article with the subtitle, can we identify the tigers from the pussy cats. Urologists in particular have adopted this distinction, for prostate and bladder cancer. The authors point out: Some cultures go to extreme lengths to distance themselves from animals, whereas others seem more at one with nature (Goldenberg et al. Pinker S. The language instinct. WebIts getting to see with your own eyes, the life and death struggles of wild animals. What we found most fascinating were experiences that ranged from the anthropocentric to the abstract. The fourth assignment, a final project, was scaffolded into a proposal, an oral presentation, and a final paper. Poetic meter, for instance, exercises our capacity for synchronization, an adaptation thought to promote cohesion and cooperation in human groups (Boyd 2009). Fine Line Features; 1998. The animal metaphor test required the subject to draw the first two animals that came to mind and describe certain qualities of those animals: from which the investigator would draw up a profile. New York: William Morrow; 1993. The following are illustrative examples. Categorial identity refers to the symbolic ways in which humans define themselves in relation to a group, ostensibly (though not always in practice) adhering to the groups values and norms, or fulfilling one or more roles within the group (Hogan 2009). When members of his regiment finally located him, he was still weeping. One way the poem grapples with such anxiety is by establishing a notion of progress. Animal Metaphors and Metaphorizing Animals: An Integrated Literary, Cognitive, and Evolutionary Analysis of Making and Partaking of Stories, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12052-010-0301-6, http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/why-environmental-underst_b_205477.html, http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/int/evolution.html, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0. This reification of metaphor is not surprising given the purported neural basis of the largely unconscious mechanisms for treating metaphors from different kinds of sensory sources, or modalities, as equivalent in the multimodal space of cognitive simulation (Barsalou, 2008). Animal metaphors are extremely powerful communication tools because they are automatically processed, focus on entities to which we preferentially attend, and tap into the wealth of thematic and literary universals that drive narratives. Anthropocentric to the animate monitoring hypothesis, most humans animal metaphors for human behaviour examples automatically detect the bird non-animate! On evolved linguistic reconstruction processes that allow story to be reconstructed from pieces... Strict definition of metaphor as a categorical assertion only depicts the Maghrebi nomads as enemy captors whom soldier... 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