Properties Are Contents

metaphor

Source: Containers → Event Structure

Categories: cognitive-sciencelinguistics

From: Master Metaphor List

Transfers

When we talk about properties and attributes of things, we routinely treat them as contents inside a container. A rock has hardness in it. A person has courage in them. A theory has elegance in it. The properties do not sit on the surface — they are inside, contained by the thing that possesses them. This metaphor maps the physical structure of containment onto the abstract relationship between an entity and its attributes.

Key structural parallels:

• The entity is a container — the thing that has properties is understood as a bounded enclosure. A person, an object, a situation — each is a vessel that holds its qualities within. “There’s a lot of goodness in that child.” “I see real potential in this project.”
• Properties are substances inside — attributes fill the container the way liquids or objects fill a vessel. They can be abundant or scarce, deep or shallow. “She is full of energy.” “There’s no originality in this work.” The scalar mapping is important: more contents means more of the property.
• Discovering properties is looking inside — to learn what something is like, you look into it, probe its contents, see what is there. “When you look deeper into his character, you find real integrity.” “There’s more to this problem than meets the eye.” Knowledge of properties requires penetrating the container boundary.
• Change of properties is change of contents — when something gains or loses a property, contents enter or leave the container. “The joy went out of her.” “Confidence crept into his voice.” This connects to the broader Event Structure system where changes are movements.

Limits

• Properties are not separable from their bearers — a container’s contents can be removed while the container persists. But you cannot extract the redness from a rose and leave the rose otherwise intact. Properties are constitutive of the entity, not independent objects sitting inside it. The metaphor treats attributes as separable substances when they are often essential features without which the entity would not be what it is.
• The container metaphor implies fixed capacity — containers have limits. “She’s so full of anger there’s no room for love.” This zero- sum framing distorts the nature of properties: a person can be simultaneously courageous, kind, anxious, and creative without any of these “filling up” the available space. Properties do not compete for volume.
• It obscures relational properties — many important properties are not intrinsic to a single entity but emerge from relationships. “Expensive” depends on a market; “tall” depends on a comparison class; “compatible” depends on what you are compatible with. The container frame locates all properties inside a single entity, hiding the relational structure that gives many properties their meaning.
• The depth metaphor privileges hidden properties — because contents are inside, the metaphor suggests that the most important properties are the deepest, most hidden ones. “Deep down, she’s a good person.” This creates a surface/depth hierarchy that may not reflect reality: visible behavior is not necessarily less “real” than hidden character.
• It conflates quantity with intensity — “full of joy” and “a little sadness in him” use amount of contents to map intensity of a property. But many properties are not scalar in this simple way: being wise is not about having a large quantity of wisdom-substance inside you.

Expressions

• “There’s a lot of good in that person” — moral properties as contained substance (Lakoff, Espenson & Schwartz 1991)
• “She’s full of energy” — abundance of a property as a full container (common usage)
• “There’s no originality in this work” — absence of property as empty container (common critical usage)
• “He has a lot of anger in him” — emotional property as contained substance (Master Metaphor List 1991)
• “The joy went out of her” — loss of property as contents leaving a container (common usage)
• “I see real potential in this project” — discovering properties by looking inside (common usage)
• “Deep down, she’s a kind person” — essential properties as deep contents (common usage)
• “There’s more to this problem than meets the eye” — hidden properties as unseen contents (common usage)

Origin Story

PROPERTIES ARE CONTENTS appears in the Master Metaphor List (Lakoff, Espenson, and Schwartz 1991) as part of the Event Structure metaphor system’s location case. It works alongside PROPERTIES ARE POSSESSIONS (the object case variant) to provide two complementary ways of understanding how entities relate to their attributes: properties are either contained within the entity or owned by it.

The containment version is grounded in the CONTAINER image schema, one of Lakoff and Johnson’s foundational cognitive structures identified in Metaphors We Live By (1980). We experience our own bodies as containers (emotions are inside us, thoughts are in our heads) and extend this to all entities and their qualities. The metaphor is productive across nearly every domain of discourse — from character assessment to literary criticism to scientific description.

References

• Lakoff, G., Espenson, J. & Schwartz, A. Master Metaphor List (1991), “Properties Are Contents”
• Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Metaphors We Live By (1980) — the CONTAINER image schema
• Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) — the Event Structure metaphor system
• Osaka University Conceptual Metaphor Home Page, Properties_Are_Contents.html

Related Entries

• Properties Are Possessions
• Activities Are Containers
• States Are Locations
• Properties Are Physical Properties

Structural Neighbors

Entries from different domains that share structural shape. Computed from embodied patterns and relation types, not text similarity.

• Understanding Is Grasping (embodied-experience/metaphor) container, matching, contain, cause
• States Are Shapes (geometry/metaphor) container, matching, contain, cause
• Force Is a Substance Contained in Affecting Causes (fluid-dynamics/metaphor) container, contain, cause
• Possessing Is Holding (embodied-experience/metaphor) container, contain, cause
• Properties Are Possessions (embodied-experience/metaphor) container, contain, cause
• Harm Is Being in a Harmful Location (spatial-location/metaphor) container, contain, cause
• Subjects Are Areas (spatial-location/metaphor) container, contain, cause
• The Visual Field Is A Bounded Region (embodied-experience/metaphor) container, contain, cause

Structural Tags

Patterns: containerpart-wholematching

Relations: containcause

Structure: boundary Level: primitive

Contributors: agent:metaphorex-miner