Metaphorical Reasoning Research Articles

Nurturing Students Design Skill through Analogy and Metaphor Reasoning

Nurturing Students Design Skill through Analogy and Metaphor Reasoning

NEW VENTURES CREATION AND JUSTIFICATION IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

We argue that creating novel ventures consists of inductive analogical or metaphorical reasoning, which generates a platform for the creation and commercialization of novel ventures andfacilities the comprehension and justification of a vent lire. We argue that such inductive reasoning is shaped by two determinants (the applicability of prior entrepreneurial experience and the motivation to resolve uncertainly and acquire legitimacy) that interrelate to predict and explain pattern of analogical and metaphorical reasoning by which novice and experienced entrepreneurs construct meaning for themselves as well as others in the early stages of creating a venture

‘Activists in a Suit’: Paradoxes and Metaphors in Sustainability Managers’ Identity Work

Both sustainability and identity are said to be paradoxical issues in organizations. In this study we look at the paradoxes of corporate sustainability at the individual level by studying the identity work of those managers who hold sustainability-dedicated roles in organizations. Analysing 26 interviews with sustainability managers, we identify three main tensions affecting their identity construction process: the business versus values oriented, the organizational insider versus outsider and the short-term versus long-term focused identity work tensions. When dealing with these tensions, some interviewees express a paradoxical perspective in attempting to accept and maintain the two poles of each of them simultaneously. It emerges in particular that metaphorical reasoning can be used by sustainability managers in varied ways to cope with the tensions of identity work. We read these findings in light of the existing literature on the relation between paradoxes and identity work, highlighting and discussing their implications for both research and practice.

The value of metaphorical reasoning in bioethics: An empirical-ethical study.

Background:Metaphors are often used within the context of ethics and healthcare but have hardly been explored in relation to moral reasoning.Objective:To describe a central set of metaphors in one case and to explore their contribution to moral reasoning.Method:Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 16 parents of a child suffering from the neurodegenerative disease CLN3. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, and metaphors were analyzed. The researchers wrote memos and discussed about their analyses until they reached consensus.Ethical considerations:Participants gave oral and written consent and their confidentiality and anonymity were respected.Findings:A central set of metaphors referred to the semantic field of the hands and arms and consisted of two central metaphors that existed in a dialectical relationship: grasping versus letting go. Participants used these metaphors to describe their child’s experiences, who had to “let go” of abilities, while “clinging” to structures and the relationship with their parent(s). They also used it to describe their own experiences: participants tried to “grab” the good moments with their child and had to “let go” of their child when (s)he approached death. Participants, in addition, “held” onto caring for their child while being confronted with the necessity to “let go” of this care, leaving it to professional caregivers.Discussion:The ethical analysis of the findings shows that thinking in terms of the dialectical relationship between “grasping” and “letting go” helps professional caregivers to critically think about images of good care for children with CLN3. It also helps them to bear witness to the vulnerable, dependent, and embodied nature of the moral self of children with CLN3 and their parents.Conclusion:Metaphorical reasoning may support the inclusion of marginalized perspectives in moral reasoning. Future studies should further explore the contribution of metaphorical reasoning to moral reasoning in other cases.

Gestural modality and addressee perspective influence how we reason about time

AbstractA growing body of literature has established that spatiotemporal metaphoric reasoning processes can be affected by the active experience of motion (such as actual motion, fictive motion, and abstract motion). In this study, the effects of metaphoric gestures on spatiotemporal metaphor use and the effects of addressee perspective on comprehension of these gestures are investigated. Participants were asked an ambiguous question that yields different responses depending on which metaphor variant is used. This question was asked with simultaneously produced metaphoric gestures depicting either sagittal or lateral motion and presented to participants either in shared perspective (side by side) or opposing (face to face) perspective. Findings suggest that not only does gesture influence metaphoric reasoning in discourse interpretation, but that addressees reliably interpret gestures from their own perspective, even when it is not shared with the speaker. Furthermore, conversational bystanders similarly adopt the perspective of the addressee in gesture comprehension.

Constitutive metaphor and mental mappings: meaning construction in the language of science and technology

The study of scientific and technical language, where metaphor is central, is enriched by the cognitive linguistics approach. This paper is based on the research project that culminated in the Bilingual Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Metaphors and Metonymies, developed to depict metaphorical terms and mental mappings, thus unfolding cognitive metaphors in science and technology. Although terminological metaphors as a whole exceed widely in number those that constitute part of conceptual metaphors, the importance of the latter radicates in its relevance as a constitutive element of scientific thought and language. Focusing on the analysis of metaphorical terms from earth sciences, agronomy, and mechanical engineering, the study reveals the presence of several conceptual metaphors, typified as ‘humanizing’, ‘organicist’, and ‘objectual’, according to their source domain’s nature. The work presents some very productive conceptual metaphorical patterns found in knowledge representation in engineering, in English and in Spanish, and shows evidence that metaphorical reasoning is a mechanism present at the core of creative scientific development albeit certain socio-cultural variations. This contribution opens a door for further research on the role of metaphor in constructing meaning within all branches of science and technology, as well as on the study of knowledge representation variations in different languages and cultures.

THE POTENTIAL OF REASONING METHODS AS A TEACHING STRATEGY SUPPORTING STUDENTS’ CREATIVE THINKING IN ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN

Much research has emphasized the importance of ‘learning by doing’ in design education. Reasoning methods would be an effective strategy to support students’ reflection-in-action in designing. ‘Knowing how’ is associated with ‘design thinking’, and further, with ‘creativity’, which is essential for design outcomes. This research explores the potential of reasoning methods, specifically analogical reasoning and metaphorical reasoning, in design education for encouraging students to produce creative thinking in a design studio. For one semester, students were educated to adopt analogies and metaphors in designing and how students approached given design problems to produce design ideas was observed. The results showed that adopting reasoning methods as a teaching strategy in a design studio encouraged the development of the students’ design thinking by reorienting their approach to design, which eventually led to enhanced creativity in designing. Based on the results, this research presents critical issues to be considered for encouraging students to utilize analogical and metaphorical reasoning in designing.

The effects of analogical and metaphorical reasoning on design thinking

This research sought to examine whether analogical and metaphorical reasoning could be taught as a teaching strategy to enhance students’ creative thinking in the design process. To investigate the effects of analogical and metaphorical reasoning in design thinking, research was conducted with second year university students majoring in interior architecture. First, a pilot study was conducted to identify the effectiveness of analogical and metaphorical reasoning in supporting design thinking. Based on the results of the pilot study, a curriculum was developed and implemented in a studio course for one semester that encouraged students to engage in analogical and metaphorical reasoning. A further experiment was conducted to validate the effects of the curriculum on students’ design thinking processes. The overall results suggested that a teaching strategy that emphasises the use of analogical and metaphorical reasoning could enhance students’ design thinking and lead to more creative design processes.

A semiotics of creativity and a poetic metaphor: Towards a dialogical relation of expression and explanation

AbstractThis paper aims to examine the status and ontology of expression level of sign to propose the concept of creativity in connection with Peirce’s theory of symbol and particularly symbolization. I argue that the process of symbolization has a certain directionality from the ontological to the substantial domain of sign. Thus, the internal world of concept is connected to the external world of things. In other words, a symbol as a cultural code with connoted meaning requires another dimension of a new creative expression. As a result, denotation on the expression level becomes extended. Based on this, symbols grow through symbolization with creative thinking. This process of symbolization is commensurate with explaining how two domains are connected. Consequently, the concept of creativity on the expression plane needs an explanation from a semiotic viewpoint as to how the ontological domain of concepts or ideas is connected to the substantial domain of expression or things based not on a psychological aspect but on a logical inference through metaphorical and analogical reasoning.

Causality in Contemporary American Sociology: An Empirical Assessment and Critique

Using a unique data set of causal usage drawn from research articles published between 2006–2008 in the American Journal of Sociology and American Sociological Review, this article offers an empirical assessment of causality in American sociology. Testing various aspects of what we consider the conventional wisdom on causality in the discipline, we find that (1) “variablistic” or “covering law” models are not the dominant way of making causal claims, (2) research methods affect but do not determine causal usage, and (3) the use of explicit causal language and the concept of “mechanisms” to make causal claims is limited. Instead, we find that metaphors and metaphoric reasoning are fundamental for causal claims-making in the discipline. On this basis, we define three dominant causal types used in sociology today, which we label the Probabilistic, Initiating and Conditioning types. We theorize this outcome as demonstrating the primary role that cognitive models play in providing inference-rich metaphors that allow sociologists to map causal relationships on to empirical processes.

Mind the metaphor! A systematic fallacy in analogical reasoning

Conceptual metaphors facilitate both productive and pernicious analogical reasoning. This article addresses the question: When and why does the frequently helpful use of metaphor become pernicious? By applying the most influential theoretical framework from cognitive psychology (structure-mapping theory) in analysing the philosophically most prominent example of pernicious metaphorical reasoning (the early modern transformation of ‘the mind’), we identify a philosophically relevant but previously undescribed fallacy in analogical reasoning with metaphors. We then outline an explanation of why even competent thinkers commit this fallacy and obtain a psychologically informed ‘debunking’ explanation of the kind experimental philosophy’s ‘sources project’ seeks.

Metaphor Clusters: Characterizing Instructor Metaphorical Reasoning on Limit Concepts in College Calculus

Novice students have difficulty with the topic of limits in calculus. We believe this is in part because of the multiple perspectives and shifting metaphors available to solve items correctly. We investigated college calculus instructors' personal concepts of limits. Based upon previous research investigating introductory calculus student metaphorical reasoning, we examined 11 college instructors' metaphorical reasoning on limit concepts. This paper focused on previous research of metaphor clusters observed among students to answer the following: (a) Do college instructors use metaphorical reasoning to conceptualize the meaning of a limit? (b) Can we characterize instructor metaphorical reasoning similar to those observed among students? (c) Will an instructor's self‐identification of metaphor clusters be consistent with our metaphor coding? We found that college instructors' perspectives vary, either graphical or algebraic, in their explanations of limit items. All the instructors used metaphors, and instructor metaphorical reasoning aligned with student metaphor clusters. Instructors tended to change their metaphors with respect to the limit item. Instructors were not aware of their use of metaphors, nor were they aware of their inconsistency in their choice of metaphor. We believe that instructor awareness of their own distinct perspectives and metaphors would assist students' understanding of limit concepts.

Review of Steve Larson,Musical Forces: Motion, Metaphor, and Meaning in Music(Indiana University Press, 2012)

[1] Some fifteen years ago there was a flourish of interest among music theorists the work of Mark Johnson on metaphor and embodied reasoning (Johnson 1987), and applications of this work drew attention to the hidden role of image schemas, such as the path and the container schemas, structuring musical thinking.(1) According to Johnson, we learn such schemas basic embodied experience, as moving along actual paths and interacting with containers (and being containers ourselves), and we commonly transfer this understanding from concrete, physical domains to more abstract domains such as temporality, giving us metaphoric pathways such as curriculum vitae (the course of one's life) and metaphoric containers such as moods, ages, and financial states in which one can be (e.g., in a good mood, in one's twenties, or in debt).(2) In the case of music, the initial applications of this approach pointed out the plain and systematic manifestation of the path and the container schemas, among others, music epistemology, as melodic lines and contours and the notion of musical works as containing themes, transitions, chords, and, of another sort, meaning.(3) The takeaway from this is that musical meaning becomes embodied as a result of the following process: when we describe music terms of and space, we import our understanding of physically moving through actual space into our understanding and experience of music. This approach is both beneficial and potentially problematic, as I will explain below.[2] Manifestations of the path and the container schemas musical concepts are part of a more general metaphoric understanding of music terms of motion, and Musical Forces Steve Larson explores some of the logical entailments of this more general understanding. As he explains, if we look at how people familiar with Western tonal music talk about, perform, and compose this music, it is as if music involves through some kind of space, including negotiation of musical such as gravity, magnetism, and inertia. These are the three musical forces at issue this book, and they are presented as logical entailments of our metaphoric understanding of music terms of motion. They are logical entailments musical understanding because they are so our experience of actual motion: we negotiate these forces everyday motion, and we import this into our understanding of musical motion, with the result that our vocabulary and reasoning are saturated with implicit and explicit evidence of the presence of these forces. In exploring the details of this metaphoric reasoning, Larson describes the systematic structure whereby relations among ephemeral and mass-less sounds come to be understood terms of motion [of some entity] within a gravitational field (84).[3] In the first half of the book, following his exposition of metaphoric musical and musical forces, he describes how this applies to melodic expectation, rhythm and meter, and Schenkerian analysis, and the second half he offers empirical evidence that supports the theory. More specifically, following a wide ranging introductory chapter, Part 1 we are offered a helpful introduction to metaphoric reasoning (Chapter 2), followed by an account of metaphoric musical (Chapter 3), an introduction to the three musical forces (Chapter 4), and then an application of the theory of musical forces to a theory of melodic expectation (Chapter 5), rhythm and meter (Chapter 6), and four sample analyses (Chapter 7). Part 2 offers evidence for the theory via an introductory chapter on converging evidence from different disciplines and sub-disciplines (Chapter 8), followed by considerations of evidence from visual perception theory and from neuroscience (Chapter 9), studies involving compositions and improvisations (Chapter 10), examinations of music-theoretical misunderstandings (Chapter 11), a study of listener judgments (Chapter 12), and comparison of computer models and results from production experiments (Chapter 13). …

Theodoret’s People: Social Networks and Religious Conflict in Late Roman Syria by Adam M. Schor (review)

Reviewed by: Theodoret’s People: Social Networks and Religious Conflict in Late Roman Syria by Adam M. Schor Nathanael Andrade Theodoret’s People: Social Networks and Religious Conflict in Late Roman Syria. By Adam M. Schor. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. 360 pp. $49.95 (cloth). In Theodoret’s People, Adam Schor examines the complexities of the doctrinal and social authority of Roman Syria’s bishops amid the Christological controversies of the 420s–450s. These decades of controversy were punctuated by the council of Chalcedon (451), which spawned three separate Middle Eastern churches with distinct theological views on the nature(s) of Christ. But they also represent the floruit (with some hiccups) of Theodoret’s career as bishop of the suffragan see Cyrrhus and as a leading “Antiochene” theologian, historian, and disputant of his day. As such, the book is divided into two interrelated parts. In part 1, Schor harnesses the heuristic advantages of social network theory to explore the consolidation and transformations of the “Antiochene network” and its shifting manifestations as a doctrinal faction during this period, with specific emphasis on bonds among bishops, monks, Roman administrators, and their proxies or gobetweens. In part 2, he shifts focus to bishops’ patronage of clients and the web of horizontal, diagonal, or vertical relationships that bishops mobilized to mediate the exchange of favors. The two parts therefore cohere to provide a multidimensional perspective on the social and religious authority that bishops exercised in late Roman Syria. At the center of Schor’s analysis is of course Theodoret, a key player in the Antiochene network. Records and letters from the ecumenical councils of the 420s–450s illuminate contemporary social relations, but Theodoret in addition produced a copious collection of surviving letters to various peers and clients that both illustrate his efforts to build social networks and constitute some of the instruments through which he did so. Along with such vital documents, Theodoret also produced an ecclesiastical history, a history of Syrian monasticism, and defenses of proper Christian doctrine and practice. These too reflect Theodoret’s mental mapping of an Antiochene network and his efforts to persuade peers to recognize and affiliate with it. Accordingly, Schor provides a vision of Syria’s social landscape as perceived, experienced, and even shaped by Theodoret, whose works he qualifies and measures against the rich documentation of the period. In his introduction and the chapters of part 1, Schor vaunts the virtues of embracing network theory to analyze the consolidation of doctrinal factions during the period of Christological debates. His approach resolves an impasse in the preceding scholarly tradition, as Schor himself observes (p. 9). Some scholars have viewed the debates [End Page 182] from a purely theological or intellectual angle. They have therefore treated the fissures between doctrinal factions of the 420s–450s as the product of ineffable differences in beliefs regarding the single or dual nature of Christ. Others, by contrast, have examined the controversies from a social or cultural perspective and have therefore linked doctrinal factionalism to the efforts of bishops to consolidate regional authority, maintain clients, define Christian identities, and otherwise wield social power over discrete groups. In response to these distinct trends, Schor analyzes such formations within the framework of network theory, which “pictures society as a web of relationships” whose participants exchange “cultural cues” (p. 10). These relationships in fact “give context to people’s performances,” inform metaphorical reasoning, and stabilize narratives that enable communities to cohere (p. 13). In regard to network type, Schor explores the utility of modeling episcopal relations on the modular scale-free network, the survival or destruction of whose hubs, or core nodes with multiple and substantial connections to other core members and outliers, determine the survival or disintegration of the network as it expands. In this light, Schor stresses that networks foremost represent a cognitive configuration; diverse forms of interaction permeate social landscapes, but their recognition as meaningful social relationships and the basis for collective activity or identification constitute a mental mapping (of both ancient players and modern scholars). All told, the strength of Schor’s approach is multiform. It dovetails with current theories of religion as a symbolic system or discourse generating social...

The Law and Economics Virus

The Chicago School of Law and Economics is a leading example of a highly successful legal ideology. As one recent commentator has noted: [T]he basic characteristic of the Chicago School is the belief that free markets and the price mechanism are the most effective and desirable ways for a society to organize production and economic life in general. The Chicago School of Law and Economics applies these insights to legal questions and views the creation and enforcement of legal rules primarily in terms of how legal rules and institutions promote allocative efficiency and wealth maximization.While much ink has been spilled in chronicling the strengths and weaknesses of a Chicago School approach to particular legal problems, there has been far less analysis of why certain fields of law and legal jurisdiction have been prone to adopt a Chicago School approach and why others have been resistant.This essay is the first step to analyze the successes and failures of the Chicago School in terms of the institutional characteristics of the fields of law where the Chicago School has had the most influence and those where it has encountered the most resistance. I argue that the institutional characteristics of the field of law are a more significant determinant of whether the Chicago School takes hold or is rejected than the correctness or the error of the substance of the analysis that it offers or the interests that it serves or opposes.I use the metaphor of the virus to capture the dynamics of how the Chicago School has spread by penetrating a new area of the law, replicating itself, and transmitting itself to adjacent bodies of law and where it has been rejected. The viral metaphor is particularly apt as a tool to analyze the spread or rejection of legal ideology because it both describes and predicts how an outside influence gains entrance into a host body of law, uses the host to reproduce and spread within that body of law, and later expresses the now multiplied virus to other near by hosts.This essay proceeds as follows. I first briefly summarize the development of the Chicago School of law and economics, analyze the importance and necessity of metaphoric reasoning in law, and explore the nature of the virus with an emphasis on how it attaches itself to and enters its hosts, replicates itself many times over using the host's own cellular structure to do so, and then expresses itself to carry on the process again and again with new hosts.Part IV uses the viral metaphor to suggest two tentative hypotheses to explain the relative successes of the Chicago School in some fields and its relative failures to dominate the discourse in other fields. First, I contend that the more centralized the host body of law, the greater likelihood of success of a successful infection and the adoption of the new ideology. Second, I contend that the presence of a strong competing first principle in the host body of law will act as an effective antibody immunizing the host from the successful introduction of a new ideology, be it the Chicago School or other way of thinking and speaking about law.I then test these hypotheses by examining a wide range of legal discourse where the Chicago School has been introduced. Examples drawn from US and European antitrust law, consumer protection, child and family law, and even Catholic Social Thought illustrate how my hypotheses help explain where the Chicago School has succeeded or failed in changing the legal discourse, or where it is simply too soon to tell. Part VI concludes with my reflections on how the viral metaphor can be extended as well as some ironies that the metaphor suggests about the future influence of the Chicago School itself.

The Case for Metaphor in Political Reasoning and Cognition

Metaphor is a central component of human cognition. Research on metaphor's role in politics has thus far focused predominately on metaphors used by the political elite. While these metaphors are important, they provide limited insight on metaphor's capacity as a reasoning tool for citizens. Metaphor as a cognitive mechanism enables citizens to make sense of the political world by drawing from previous knowledge and experience in nonpolitical domains. Because metaphors shape and constrain understanding by framing it within existing knowledge structures, they generate important predispositions. As a result, the study of metaphor offers an opportunity to enrich our descriptive understanding of the political cognition of citizens. The implicit nature of metaphorical reasoning means that empirical investigation will be a challenge for future research, but previous studies on metaphor suggest some productive avenues. Metaphor offers not only the chance to better explain how citizens view the political world and why they hold the preferences they do, but its criteria and processes hold wider relevance for political psychology and public opinion research.

Establishing metaphorical reasoning in children with autism

Researchers have shown that children with autism have difficulty with non-literal language, such as irony, sarcasm, deception, humor, and metaphors. To date, few studies have attempted to remediate these deficits, and no studies of which we are aware have attempted to teach children with autism to understand metaphors. Metaphorical reasoning consists of complex verbal behavior, involving relations of coordination, hierarchy, and distinction, at a minimum. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate multiple exemplar training for teaching children with autism to attend to relevant features of the context in which a metaphor is used and to engage in the required relational responding in order to respond correctly to metaphorical questions. Participants included three children, ages 5–7. Results suggest that multiple exemplar training is effective for teaching children with autism to understand metaphors. Furthermore, generalization to untrained metaphors was found for all participants.

Motivated word meanings and vocabulary learning

The introduction of English as a foreign language in many countries at ever younger ages poses new challenges for teachers, material designers and researchers in terms of finding out and dealing with the needs of such young children when learning a foreign language. This paper focuses on vocabulary learning at early ages, arguing for the inclusion of figurative language in young learners’ English input for two main reasons: firstly, some figurative uses are very frequent in general language and suitable for young learners’ communicative needs and, secondly, research (Piquer-Píriz, 2005) has shown that children as young as 5 years old are able to work out figurative extensions of words whose literal meanings they know, through associative (metonymic) and analogical (metaphoric) reasoning. The specific case of hand is explored, drawing on some of the findings mentioned above, to discuss the potential of cognitive linguistic-inspired approaches in the young learner classroom.

Creative Introspection and Knowledge Acquisition

Introspection is a question-led process in which one builds on what one already knows to explore what is possible and plausible. In creative introspection, whether in art or in science, framing the right question is as important as finding the right answer. Presupposition-laden questions are themselves a source of knowledge, and in this paper we show how widely-held beliefs about the world can be dynamically acquired by harvesting such questions from the Web. We show how metaphorical reasoning can be modeled as an introspective process, one that builds on questions harvested from the Web to pose further speculative questions and queries. Metaphor is much more than a knowledge-hungry rhetorical device: it is a conceptual lever that allows a system to extend its model of the world.

Embodying Music

Part I: Introduction[1] This essay describes a hypothesis of how music becomes internalized into the bodies and minds of listeners. The hypothesis underlies a larger theory of musical meaning, concerning affect, metaphoric reasoning, gender, and other areas of inquiry related to bodily experience, but the implications for these larger areas of meaning must wait until the details of the hypothesis have been made plain. Accordingly, this essay focuses on these details and is only suggestive of some of the implications.[2] The attention to embodiment situates this essay amid other writings, within and beyond music, that are concerned with the role of the body in the construction of meaning. Within music this includes work by Suzanne Cusick on gender (Cusick 1994), Naomi Cumming on subjectivity (Cumming 1997, 2000), and several scholars who have applied ideas from cognitive philosopher Mark Johnson (1987) on metaphor (Saslaw 1996, 1997-98; Zbikowski 1997, 1997-98, 1998; Brower 1997-98; Larson 1997-98). These and other scholars are exploring a lacuna left by the largely disembodied objectivity of our discipline (at least as practiced in the USA), which helps perpetuate, as Cusick puts it, the mind-body problem.(1) The hypothesis addresses the matter of embodiment by showing how musical imagery-recalling, planning, or otherwise thinking about music-is partly motor imagery. Motor imagery is imagery related to the exertions and movements of our skeletal-motor system, and in the case of music this involves the various exertions enacted in musical performance. The hypothesis details how this might play out and suggests how it might underlie conceptualization and meaning.(2)[3] The initial premise of the hypothesis is that part of how we comprehend music is by way of a kind of physical empathy that involves imagining making the sounds we are listening to. This is a special case of the general human proclivity to understand one another via imitation, which we can refer to as cognition or comprehension, where is used in the manner specified below; hence, the mimetic hypothesis.[4] The role of imitation in human cognition has received a good deal of interest recently, and, as demonstrated by the references below, this has now begun to make its way into the field of music theory. For this vein of inquiry to produce good results, however, we need to be precise about how imitation actually plays out in music perception and cognition, and this is the purpose of the hypothesis.Relevance of the Mimetic Hypothesis[5] The hypothesis is relevant to any area of musical inquiry related to embodiment. This includes basic music perception and cognition as well as higher-level areas of meaning mentioned above. It is also relevant to pedagogy because it concerns the nature of the mental representation of pitches and rhythms, which bears not only on auditory imagery and aural skills instruction but also on the relationship between sound and musical meaning in the music theory classroom. I will consider briefly some of the implications of this claim, but the primary purpose at this stage is to establish and clarify the essential role of the skeletal-motor system and its neurological representation in everyday music perception and conceptualization.Some Preliminaries[6] I want to note that my use of in this context is not the same as classical mimesis, which, roughly speaking, is more about art imitating life. The hypothesis is much more concerned with the perceptual and cognitive processes whereby music gets into the flesh, blood, and minds of listeners.(3)[7] Understanding through overt imitation is plainly evident in children, but one of the principles here is that this continues throughout our lives and becomes more subtle and covert as we mature. The covert form is imagery, and since it involves imagined actions it is motor imagery, and since these actions are imitative it is motor imagery (MMI). …