Reading Ancient Minds: Metaphor, Culture, and Complexity

Scott Ortman, SFI Omidyar Fellow
September 12, 2010
How much does culture influence human societies? The traditional view in many fields is that material forces -- land, climate, warfare -- trump less tangible human conceptualizations like currencies and laws. But Ortman argues that we don't really know, yet. Cognitive science suggests that conceptual metaphors are the building blocks of human systems, from governments to ideologies. He illustrates how new archaeological methods and linguistic analysis can reveal these metaphors and allow us to better understand the critical role culture plays in human history.

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isn't this what philologists have been doing for centuries? probably millennia? I mean hermeneutics did this with scripture to try to get at abstractions through language and artifacts. I just don't know why he assumes this is a new approach.