Conceptualising Symbols and Metaphors from Everyday Life

Director of studies: Prof. Ivan Mladenov, DSc

(On the philosophy of Pragmatism, Semiotics, Neohistoricism and other contemporary methods)

We conceptualise the world of ideas in order to orient ourselves in it. But even at the most elementary level we do conceptualise. Any co-ordinated movement of our bodies means that a lightning-fast concept has been performed in our mind and we have acted according to this short scheme that we received from the mind. We conceptualise the symbols and the signs we constantly perceive, which means that we are permanently de-coding and de-ciphering the realm of signs, which comes towards us. That is, we try to make a successful leap between the two distant elements out of which each metaphor consists (the traditional view of the metaphor did not change too much from the ancient times: a distant comparison between two elements, where "as if" is missing).

Why "metaphor"? Simply, because most of our thinking flows as a permanent substituting process and we know something by comparing and relating it to something else, which is more familiar to us. Then we conceptualise the newly received knowledge, that is, we "store it" in our memory and it becomes a part of our previous experience.

I do believe that we wake up early in the morning and if we have a clear vision of what we are going to do today, this makes us happier. If we can ease the general ordering and hierarchy of our tasks, we might improve our lives. Peirce believed that he had found a clue to do that, we will try to explicit this clue of his philosophy.