Conceptual metaphor

See w:conceptual metaphor and (for its use and usefulness in propaganda) Disinfopedia: conceptual metaphor.

Consumerium is founded on the principle that buying decisions are a way of expressing one's values, and that this is unavoidable. That is, that the way of seeing someone as the sum of his or her consumption and service choices is a "metaphor one cannot avoid" - a conceptual metaphor necessary to self.

Postmodern thought is generally founded on the principle that there is no "foundation" for "Reality", nothing more "real" than a conceptual metaphor - that nothing is actually grounding the human choice of symbols and actions other than such metaphors, in the most basic case, comparing everything to the body or family or basic ideas like "home" which "we" share with animals. An exploration of these issues in the w:philosophy of mathematics led to the w:cognitive science of mathematics where one is assumed to understand mathematics better by examining the brain and cognitive use humans make of it, and how they share their experience, and come up with tests and abstractions (such as those which make up the score and eventually result in such advice as the Consumerium buying signal, which is ultimately based on such scores).

Conceptual metaphor purists often insist on a strict separation of bodily ("some body") and non-bodily ("no body") interests. Trolls are an expression of this view, and will bite you on the leg if you don't share it very completely. They protest and ridicule the status given reputation and other non-bodily constructs, by remaining anonymous and fomenting ambiguities about their bodily identity. In so doing they hope to make the conceptual metaphors their opponents use, and their lack of grounding, much more clear:

Trolls consider sysops to be claiming a God's Eye View or at least doing psychiatry on them, and both are attacks and usurpations of bodily power. Trolls want to compare everything to bodies and work out empathy relationships,

Both trolls and animal rights advocates may use this or similar statements as the reason why they consider themselves more akin to Great Apes than to sysops. This is the most basic conceptual metaphor, based in genetics and social similarity between those and human species. Feminists share this view to a degree, but tend to view mother-child relations as more basic metaphors. Where the two views come together is in consideration of the "ape mother" conceptual metaphor, which focuses on observed similarities of gorilla and chimpanzee and bonobo and orang-utan behaviour to that of human mothers, and the seeming superiority of ape practices in some respects. If one rejects this view, then, the concept of conceptual metaphor itself may be factionally defined, which makes it hard to imagine how one could ever agree on anything really important.