Spatial world and analogy
Adult humans have had plenty of practice in mentally modelling space and, because of this, we become adept at recognising patterns in it. So when we are presented with a conceptual instead of spatial problem, it can be both advantageous and natural for us to draw analogy and to attempt to translate the patterns – by means of analogy – into a similar spatial problem. Indeed, this process has become so natural that a spatial point of view is now reflected in everyday language even where no spatially separated items are being considered. For instance, the conceptual likeness of two similar objects is defined hence:
| like (lìk) preposition
1. Possessing the characteristics of; resembling closely; similar to. … |
In this definition, conceptual likeness is defined in terms of objects in a spatial field, things being ‘close’ if they are similar.
It is possible that by placing conceptual objects in a space, this allows us also to use geometrical, or perhaps topological, operations on intellectually bound concepts.
