The thermal qualities of substance: a cross-cultural account

A bewildering array of food items, diseases, individual and group dispositions, colors, eventualities, and spatial arrangements are projected into the hot/cold scale. While there are clear examples from routine everyday use (in English and other languages), there are also elaborate expositions of the thermal properties of entities, people and substances laid out within the Ayurvedic tradition in South Asia, within traditional Chinese medicine, as well as in Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian and Native American medical systems. The work reported in this paper represents the first systematic attempt to use modern cognitive theories of concept acquisition and use to analyze this vast array of data. We show how the theory of Idealized Cognitive Models (ICM) and prototypes, and radial category structure extended through metonymy and metaphoric blends can begin to provide an account of the semantic space inhabited by thermal qualities.