Abstract
This chapter offers a broad contextualisation of the argument developed in the book. It serves to outline the scope of the study. The chapter introduces the reader to the fundamental notions and research assumptions as well as the philosophical setting against which these main assumptions are set.
There are more things in HEAVEN and EARTH, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your PHILOSOPHY.
Hamlet (William Shakespeare )
Novelist and existentialist philosopher Albert Camus posed the question, ‘Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?’ His point was that everything in life is choice. Every second of every day, we are choosing, and there are always alternatives. Existence, at least human existence, is defined by the choices people make.
Schwartz, (2004, p. 42)
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Notes
- 1.
The data cited herein were extracted from the British National Corpus, which is distributed by the University of Oxford on behalf of the BNC Consortium. All rights in the cited texts are reserved. The emphasis in the examples is added by the author to better illustrate the discussed cases.
- 2.
In the book the following notational convention is observed (see also Sect. 1.1): small caps to signify concepts; italics to mark out the words that represent concepts; and Capitalisation to distinguish philosophical terms. For example, cube is to be understood as a word, Cube as a Platonic solid, and cube as a conceptual category that encompasses both expert and non-expert understanding.
- 3.
In their tribute paper to Claude Vandeloise and his original functional approach to the study of spatial prepositions, Michel Aurnague and Gilles Col (2017, p. 8) note: ‘Indeed, from the very start of his investigations on the expression of space in French, Vandeloise (1984, 1986, 1991) developed his own framework of analysis—within the trend of cognitive linguistics—and went on using and enhancing it until the last written work gathered in this special issue (Aurnague, 2008). He defined five groups of functional universal features that, according to him, should be taken into account when examining the semantics of spatial prepositions/adpositions: anthropomorphic principles forming the human body, naïve physics, access to perception, potential encounter, and general and lateral orientations.’ Though it seems that Vandeloise minimises the role of geometry for its structuring of our perception and instead promotes functional attributes of space, there is still some common ground that can be found between Vandeloise’s approach and that adopted in this book. The shared elements relate to the recognition of human body, naïve physics, and access to perception as being central to the description of spacetime. In his peer review of the draft manuscript of this book, Professor Andrzej Pawelec also points to differences which stem from the varied research assumptions adopted by Vandeloise and the current study: ‘As for the content of the book, the current formulation of the model could be profitably confronted with alternative approaches. For instance, the mostly static and schematic representation of human location in spacetime offered by CL (in this account) could be opposed to a more pragmatic and developmental vision offered by Claude Vandeloise in his article “Length, width, and potential passing” (1988). From the latter perspective, the position and potential movement of the agent would be central in order to determine the actual shape of the model.’ As might be inferred from these observations, cubic architecture might, therefore, be viewed by Vandeloise as at most a secondary rather than a primary form of spatiotemporal experience, as geometric configurations are determined by the agentivity of a human individual rather than the other way round.
- 4.
Cf. Antonowicz (2015, pp. 93–94) and his discussion of the studies by Cohen and March (1974) and March and Olsen (1976) on the metaphorisation of decision-making processes in a hybrid organisation characterised by vaguely defined goals. The metaphors reconstruct as a result of the process of comprehensively studying the contemporary university evoke notions of structured anarchy (organised anarchies), in which decision-making processes are illustrated through reference to the notion of ‘garbage can situations’, a term used by the modern theories of organisation that denotes taking decisions under continuously changing circumstances and permanent uncertainty with regard to the tools and procedures in which decisions are to be optimally taken.
- 5.
During the international conference held in Łodź in 2002, Ronald W. Langacker criticised the notion of pre-conceptuality in relation to image schemas, especially those well-grounded in the mental repositories of interlocutors such as idealised cognitive models (Lakoff, 1987). Langacker suggests that the term pre-conceptual should better be replaced with the term pre-linguistic as this notion more appropriately addresses the ontology of the schemas in question. I would like to thank Professor Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk for her remarks on the issue.
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Kuźniak, M. (2021). Introduction. In: The Geometry of Choice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78655-7_1
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