seeks none. It simply tries to provide an after-the-fact ac-count of what similarities there are. Thus, in the cases where similarities can be found, the weak homonymy position still gives no account of why just those similarities should be there.

To our knowledge, no one explicitly holds the strong homonymy position, according to which concepts ex-pressed by the same word (like the two senses of "but-tress" or the many senses of "in"), are independent and have no significant relationships. Those who hold the homonymy position tend to identify themselves as holding the weak position, where the interdependencies and inter-relationships that are observed between concepts are to be accounted for by similarities based on the inherent nature of the concept. However, to our knowledge, no one has ever begun to provide a detailed account of a theory of similarity that could deal with the wide range of examples we have discussed. Although virtually all homonymy theorists espouse the weak version, in practice there seem to be only strong homonymy theories, since no one has attempted to provide the detailed account of similarity necessary to maintain the weak version of the theory. And there is a good reason why no attempt has been made to give such a detailed account of the kinds of examples we have been discussing. The reason is that such an account would re-quire one to address the issue of how we comprehend and understand areas of experience that are not well-defined in their own terms and must be grasped in terms of other areas of experience. In general, philosophers and linguists have not been concerned with such questions.

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19 Definition and Understanding

We have seen that metaphor pervades our normal conceptual system. Because so many of the concepts that are important to us are either abstract or not clearly delineated in our experience (the emotions, ideas, time, etc.), we need to get a grasp on them by means of other concepts that we understand in clearer terms (spatial orientations, objects, etc.). This need leads to metaphorical definition in our conceptual system. We have tried with examples

to give some indication of just how extensive a role metaphor plays in the way we function, the way we conceptualize our experience, and the way we speak.

Most of our evidence has come from language—from the meanings of words and phrases and from the way humans make sense of their experiences. Yet students of meaning and dictionary makers have not found it important to try to give a general account of how people understand normal concepts in terms of systematic metaphors like LOVE IS A

JOURNEY, ARGUMENT IS WAR, TIME IS MONEY, etc. For

example, if you look in a dictionary under "love," you find entries that mention affection, fondness, devotion, infatuation, and even sexual desire, but there is no mention of the way in which we comprehend love by means of metaphors

like LOVE IS A JOURNEY, LOVE IS MADNESS, LOVE IS WAR,

etc. If we take expressions like "Look how far we've come" or "Where are we now?" there would be no way to tell from a standard dictionary or any other standard ac-count of meaning that these expressions are normal ways of talking about the experience of love in our culture. Hints of

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the existence of such general metaphors may be given in the secondary or tertiary senses of other words. For instance, a hint of the LOVE IS MADNESS metaphor may show up in a tertiary sense of the word "crazy" (= "immoderately fond, infatuated"), but this hint shows up as part of the definition of "crazy" rather than as part of the definition of "love."

What this suggests to us is that dictionary makers and other students of meaning have different concerns than we do. We are concerned primarily with how people under-stand their experiences. We view language as providing data that can lead to general principles of understanding. The general principles involve whole systems of concepts rather than individual words or individual concepts. We have found that such principles are often metaphoric in nature and involve understanding one kind of experience in terms of another kind of experience.

Bearing this in mind, we can see the main difference between our enterprise and that of dictionary makers and other students of meaning. It would be very strange in a dictionary to see "madness" or "journeying" as senses of "love." They are not senses of "love," any more than "food" is one of the senses of "idea." Definitions for a concept are seen as characterizing the things that are inherent in the concept itself. We, on the other hand, are concerned with how human beings get a handle on the concept—how they understand it and function in terms of it. Madness and journeys give us handles on the concept of love, and food gives us a handle on the concept of an idea.

Such a concern for how we comprehend experience re-quires a very different concept of definition from the standard one. The principal issue for such an account of definition is what gets defined and what does the defining. That is the issue we turn to next.

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The Objects of Metaphorical Definition:

Natural Kinds of Experience

We have found that metaphors allow us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another. This suggests that understanding takes place in terms of entire domains of experience and not in terms of isolated concepts. The fact that we have been led to hypothesize metaphors like LOVE

IS A JOURNEY, TIME IS MONEY, and ARGUMENT IS WAR

suggests to us that the focus of definition is at the level of basic domains of experience like love, time, and argument. These experiences are then conceptualized and defined in terms of other basic domains of experience like journeys, money, and war. The definition of subconcepts, like

BUDGETING TIME and ATTACKING A CLAIM, should fall out

as consequences of defining the more general concepts etc.) in metaphorical terms.

This raises a fundamental question: What constitutes a "basic domain of experience"? Each such domain is a structured whole within our experience that is conceptualized as what we have called an experiential gestalt. Such gestalts are experientially basic because they characterize structured wholes within recurrent human experiences. They represent coherent organizations of our experiences in terms of natural dimensions (parts, stages, causes, etc.). Domains of experience that are organized as gestalts in terms of such natural dimensions seem to us to be

They are natural in the following sense: These kinds of experiences are a product of

Our bodies (perceptual and motor apparatus, mental capacities, emotional makeup, etc.)

Our interactions with our physical environment (moving, manipulating objects, eating, etc.)

Our interactions with other people within our culture (in terms of social, political, economic, and religious institutions)

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In other words, these "natural" kinds of experience are products of human nature. Some may be universal, while others will vary from culture to culture.

We are proposing that the concepts that occur in metaphorical definitions are those that correspond to natural kinds of experience. Judging by the concepts that are defined by the metaphors we have uncovered so far, the following would be examples of concepts for natural kinds of experience in our culture: LOVE, TIME, IDEAS, UNDER-

STANDING, ARGUMENTS, LABOR, HAPPINESS, HEALTH, CONTROL, STATUS, MORALITY, etc. These are

concepts that

require metaphorical definition, since they are not clearly enough delineated in their own terms to satisfy the purposes of our day-to-day functioning.

Similarly, we would suggest that concepts that are used in metaphorical definitions to define other concepts also correspond to natural kinds of experience. Examples are

cept they metaphorically define (e.g., LOVE) will be under-stood in terms of what we will call interactional properties.

In order to get a clearer idea of what interactional properties are in general, let us look at the interactional properties of an object. Take the concept GUN. You might think that such a concept could be characterized entirely in terms of inherent properties of the object itself, for example, its shape, its weight, how its parts are put together, etc. But our concept GUN goes beyond this in ways that can be seen when we apply various modifiers to the concept. For example, take the difference between the modifiers BLACK and FAKE as applied to GUN. The principal difference for objectivist accounts of definition is that a BLACK GUN is a GUN,

while a FAKE GUN iS not a GUN. BLACK iS seen as adding an additional property to GUN, while FAKE is seen as applying to the concept GUN to yield another concept that is not a subcategory of GUN. This is about all that is said on the objectivist view. It will allow the entailments:

This is a black gun. __________ This is a fake gun.

Therefore, this is a gun. and Therefore, this is not a gun.

What such an account does not do is to say what a fake gun is. It does not account for entailments like:

This is a fake gun.

Therefore, this is not a giraffe. This is a fake gun.

Therefore, this is not a bowl of bean-sauce noodles. And on and on .. .

To account for such an indefinitely long list of entailments, we need a detailed account of just how FAKE modifies the concept GUN. A fake gun has to look enough like a gun for the purpose at hand. That is, it has to have the contextually appropriate perceptual properties of a gun. You have to be able to perform enough of the appropriate physical manipulations that you would with a real gun (e.g.,

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hold it a certain way). In other words, a fake gun has to maintain what we might call motoractivity properties of a gun. Moreover, the point of having a fake gun is that it will serve certain of the purposes that a real gun could serve (threatening, being on display, etc.). What makes a fake gun fake is that it cannot function like a gun. If it can shoot you, it is a real gun, not a fake gun. Finally, it cannot originally have been made to function like a gun: a broken or inoperable gun is not a fake gun.

Thus, the modifier FAKE preserves certain kinds of the properties of GUNS and negates others. To summarize:

FAKE preserves: Perceptual properties (a fake gun looks like a gun) Motor-activity properties (you handle it like a gun)

Purposive properties (it serves some of the purposes of a gun)

FAKE negates: Functional properties (a fake gun doesn't shoot)

History of function (if it was made to be a real gun, then it's not a fake)

This account of how FAKE affects the concept of GUN indicates that the concept GUN has at least five dimensions, three of which are preserved by FAKE and two of which are negated. This suggests that we conceptualize a gun in terms of a multidimensional gestalt of properties where the di-

mensions are PERCEPTUAL, MOTOR ACTIVITY, PURPOSIVE, FUNCTIONAL, etc.

If we look at what perceptual, motor-activity, and purposive properties are, we see that they are not inherent in guns themselves. Instead, they have to do with the way we interact with guns. This indicates that the concept GUN, as people actually understand it, is at least partly defined by interactional properties having to do with perception, motor activity, purpose, function, etc. Thus we find that our concepts of objects, like our concepts of events and activities,

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are characterizable as multidimensional gestalts whose dimensions emerge naturally from our experience in the world.

Categorization

On the standard objectivist view, we can understand (and hence define) an object entirely in terms of a set of its inherent properties. But, as we have just seen, at least some of the properties that characterize our concept of an object are interactional. In addition, the properties do not merely form a set but rather a structured gestalt, with dimensions that emerge naturally from our experience.

The objectivist account of definition is inadequate to ac-count for understanding in another way as well. On the objectivist view, a category is defined in terms of set theory: it is characterized by a set of inherent properties of the entities in the category. Everything in the universe is either inside or outside the category. The things that are in the category are those that have all the requisite inherent properties. Anything that fails to have one or more of the inherent properties falls outside the category.

This set-theoretical concept of a category does not ac-cord with the way people categorize things and experiences. For human beings, categorization is primarily a means of comprehending the world, and as such it must serve that purpose in a sufficiently flexible way. Set-theoretical categorization, as a model for human categorization, misses the following:

1. As Rosch (1977) has established, we categorize things in terms of prototypes. A prototypical chair, for us, has a well-defined back, seat, four legs, and (optionally) two armrests. But there are nonprototypical chairs as well: beanbag chairs, hanging chairs, swivel chairs, contour chairs, barber chairs, etc. We understand the nonprototypical chairs as being chairs, not just on their own terms, but by virtue of their relation to a prototypical chair.

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2.We understand beanbag chairs, barber chairs, and contour chairs as being chairs, not because they share some fixed set of defining properties with the prototype, but rather because they bear a sufficient family resemblance to the prototype. A beanbag chair may resemble a prototypical chair in a different way than a barber chair does. There need be no fixed core of properties of prototypical chairs that are shared by both beanbag and barber chairs. Yet they are both chairs because each, in its different way, is sufficiently close to the prototype.

3.Interactional properties are prominent among the kinds of properties that count in determining sufficient family resemblance. Chairs share with stools and other kinds of seats the PURPOSIVE property of allowing us to sit. But the range of MOTOR ACTIVITIES permitted by chairs is usually different from stools and other seats. Thus the interactional properties relevant to our comprehension of chairs will include perceptual properties (the way they look, feel, etc.), functional properties (allowing us to sit), motoractivity properties (what we do with our bodies in getting in and out of them and while we're in them), and purposive properties (relaxing, eating, writing letters, etc.).

4.Categories can be systematically extended in various ways for various purposes. There are modifiers, called hedges (see Lakoff 1975), that pick out the prototype for a category and that define various kinds of relationships to it. Here are a few examples:

PAR EXCELLENCE: This picks out prototypical members of a category. For example, a robin is a bird par excellence, but chickens, ostriches, and penguins are not birds par excellence.

STRICTLY SPEAKING: This picks out the nonprototypical cases that ordinarily fall within the category. Strictly speak-ing, chickens, ostriches, and penguins are birds even though they are not birds par excellence. Sharks, blowfish, catfish, and goldfish are not fish par excellence, but they are fish, strictly speaking.

LOOSELY SPEAKING: This picks out things that are not ordinarily in the category because they lack some central property but which share enough properties so that for certain purposes it could make sense to consider them category members. Strictly speaking, a whale is not a fish, though, loosely speaking, it may be considered one in certain con-texts. Strictly speaking, a moped is not a motorcycle, though, loosely speaking, mopeds could be included among motorcycles.

TECHNICALLY: This circumscribes a category relative to some technical purpose. Whether something is technically in the category or not will depend on what the purpose in classifying it is. For the purpose of insurance, a moped is technically not a motorcycle, though for purposes of bridge tolls it technically is.

Some other hedges include in an important sense, to all in-tents and purposes, a regular ... , a veritable ... , to the ex-tent that ... , in certain respects, and many, many more. These various hedges allow us to place objects, events, and experiences under a wide variety of categories for various purposes, e.g., to draw practical distinctions in sensible ways, to provide new perspectives, and to make sense of apparently disparate phenomena.

5.Categories are open-ended. Metaphorical definitions can give us a handle on things and experiences we have already categorized, or they may lead to a recategorization. For example, viewing LOVE as WAR may make sense of certain experiences that you took as LOVE experiences of some kind or other but that you could not fit together in any meaningful way. The LOVE IS WAR metaphor may also lead you to categorize certain experiences as LOVE experiences that you had previously not viewed