More Is Up; Less Is Down
conceptual-metaphor Embodied Experience → Embodied Experience
Categories: cognitive-sciencelinguistics
What It Brings
Add more substance to a pile and it gets taller. Pour more water into a glass and the level rises. This is the simplest of the orientational metaphors — a direct perceptual correlation between quantity and vertical extent, so deeply embedded in cognition that it structures everything from everyday speech to graph design. When we say prices are “going up,” no one pauses to notice the metaphor. It is invisible because it is grounded in a near-universal experience of the physical world.
Key structural parallels:
- Accumulation as rising — “The number of books published each year keeps going up.” “Stocks rose sharply.” “Crime is on the rise.” Adding more of something is mapped onto upward movement. The metaphor preserves the correlation between physical accumulation (piling, filling) and vertical extent that holds for most substances in gravity.
- Reduction as falling — “Sales dropped.” “The temperature fell.” “Attendance is down.” Losing quantity is downward motion. The metaphor is bidirectional: the same vertical axis tracks both increases and decreases, giving quantity a single spatial dimension.
- Levels as measurement — “Production levels.” “Sea level.” “Reading level.” The metaphor converts quantity into height, which enables comparison. Two quantities can be “at the same level” or one can be “higher than” the other. This spatial framing is so natural that most data visualization (bar charts, line graphs) relies on it without comment.
- Peaks and bottoms as extremes — “Prices hit a peak.” “Unemployment reached rock bottom.” “Production topped out.” The metaphor gives quantity a topography: it has summits, valleys, floors, and ceilings. This spatial vocabulary makes quantitative reasoning feel like navigating terrain.
The Osaka Master Metaphor List notes the physical basis: “If you add more of a substance or of physical objects to a container or pile, the level goes up.” Lakoff and Johnson cite this as one of the clearest cases of experiential grounding.
Where It Breaks
- Not all quantities are stackable — the metaphor works intuitively for substances (water level, pile height) but strains for abstract quantities. “The quality went up” borrows the vertical axis from quantity, but quality is not a substance that accumulates. The metaphor smuggles quantitative thinking into domains that may resist it.
- Circular quantities have no up — temperature has no inherent directionality (Kelvin zero aside), yet the metaphor imposes one. Cyclical measures (seasonal employment, tidal patterns) repeat rather than rise, but the metaphor forces them onto a linear vertical axis, making cycles look like trends.
- The metaphor conflates increase with improvement — because MORE IS UP coexists with GOOD IS UP in the same cognitive system, quantitative increase tends to inherit a positive valence. “Growth is up” feels good. But more pollution, more debt, and more disease are also “up,” and the positive connotation of the vertical axis creates a subtle bias toward treating increase as desirable. The language of “growth” in economics exploits this conflation.
- Logarithmic and exponential quantities break the scale — the metaphor implies a linear relationship between quantity and height. But many real quantities (population growth, compound interest, seismic intensity) are exponential. The vertical metaphor makes it hard to intuit the difference between linear and exponential increase, because both are just “going up.”
- Negative quantities go below ground — the metaphor treats zero as ground level and negative numbers as being “below zero,” “in the red,” “underwater.” This spatial framing makes negative quantities feel abnormal or dangerous when they may be mathematically unremarkable.
Expressions
- “The number of books published each year keeps going up” — quantity increase as vertical ascent
- “My income fell last year” — quantity decrease as vertical descent
- “Stocks rose sharply” — financial increase as upward motion
- “Turn the heat up” — increasing a setting as raising a level
- “Production is at an all-time high” — maximum quantity as peak altitude
- “Crime rates have hit rock bottom” — minimum quantity as lowest possible point
- “Gas prices are through the roof” — extreme increase as breaking through a vertical ceiling
- “The number of errors dropped off” — decrease as falling away
- “Keep your voice down” — reducing volume as lowering position
- “Turn it down a notch” — reducing intensity as descending one step
Origin Story
Lakoff and Johnson introduce MORE IS UP in Chapter 4 of Metaphors We Live By as one of their primary examples of orientational metaphors. They ground it in what they call “a physical basis”: when you add more of a physical substance to a container or a pile, the level goes up. This correlation between quantity and vertical extent is experienced from early infancy — stacking blocks, filling cups — and becomes the default cognitive mapping for all quantitative reasoning.
The metaphor is notable for its near-universality. While some orientational metaphors vary across cultures (the vertical axis for time, for example, runs in different directions in different languages), MORE IS UP appears in virtually every language studied. The physical grounding is too direct and too universal to escape.
References
- Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Metaphors We Live By (1980), Chapter 4
- Lakoff, G., Espenson, J. & Schwartz, A. Master Metaphor List (1991), “Quantity Is Verticality”
- Tversky, B. “Visualizing Thought” in Topics in Cognitive Science (2011) — how spatial metaphors structure data visualization