Properties Are Possessions

conceptual-metaphor Embodied Experience → Event Structure

Categories: cognitive-science linguistics philosophy

What It Brings

You have courage. You possess intelligence. You lack patience. The metaphor maps the concrete experience of owning, holding, and losing physical objects onto the abstract experience of having (or not having) attributes, qualities, and states. Lakoff and Johnson identify this as one of the most pervasive ontological metaphors in English: we cannot talk about properties without the vocabulary of possession.

Key structural parallels:

Having as holding — “She has a lot of talent.” “He has great patience.” Properties are objects that a person holds. The metaphor makes abstract qualities feel tangible — things you can grip, carry, and display. Talent is not a tendency or a capacity; it is a thing you have.
Losing as dropping — “She lost her temper.” “He lost his nerve.” “They lost hope.” Properties can slip away involuntarily, like objects falling from your hands. The metaphor makes the disappearance of a quality feel like a concrete event — a moment when something that was held is no longer held.
Gaining as acquiring — “She gained confidence.” “He acquired a taste for risk.” “They developed a reputation.” Properties arrive the way possessions do: through effort, luck, or gradual accumulation. The metaphor makes personal change feel like shopping — you add qualities to your inventory.
Giving and receiving — “She gave him courage.” “That experience gave me perspective.” “He lent her his confidence.” Properties can be transferred between people like objects. The metaphor enables a transactional model of personal influence: one person’s quality is given to another.
Quantity and degree — “She has a lot of courage.” “He has very little patience.” The possession frame quantifies properties. Qualities are not binary (present or absent) but scalar (much or little), because possessions come in quantities. This is how English turns qualities into measurable stuff.

Where It Breaks

Properties are not separable from persons — you can lose a wallet without ceasing to be yourself. But “losing your mind” or “losing your patience” involves a change in who you are, not just what you have. The possession metaphor treats properties as detachable accessories when they are often constitutive of identity. You do not have courage the way you have a coat; courage is something you are.
The metaphor creates a container problem — if properties are things you have, where are they? Inside you? The possession frame implies a container (the self) that holds qualities (the possessions). But qualities like intelligence or kindness are not located anywhere. The metaphor invents a spatial relationship that does not exist.
Transfer is not how influence works — “She gave him courage” implies that courage moved from her to him, like a baton in a relay race. But inspiration, modeling, and emotional contagion are not transfers. Her courage did not diminish when his increased. The possession metaphor imports a conservation law (what is given is lost by the giver) that does not apply to properties.
The metaphor privileges having over being — “She has intelligence” and “she is intelligent” feel equivalent but frame the person differently. The possession version makes intelligence an asset, like wealth — something that confers advantage and can be accumulated. The being version makes intelligence a mode of existence. The possession frame dominates English, which subtly encourages treating personal qualities as commodities.
Lacking is not the same as not-having — “He lacks courage” is stronger than “he doesn’t have courage.” The possession metaphor creates a normative baseline: there is an expected inventory of properties, and falling short of it is a deficiency. The metaphor pathologizes absence by treating it as loss or deprivation rather than simple difference.

Expressions

“He has a lot of courage” — a character trait as a possessed quantity
“She lost her patience” — the departure of a quality as losing an object
“He lost his temper” — emotional self-control dropped involuntarily
“She gained confidence” — the arrival of a quality as acquisition
“That experience gave me perspective” — personal influence as property transfer
“He lacks imagination” — absence of a quality as a deficiency in inventory
“She possesses great beauty” — an attribute as a held valuable
“He has no shame” — the absence of a moral quality as empty-handedness
“She’s got what it takes” — competence as possessing the required inventory
“He lost his mind” — insanity as the misplacement of a cognitive possession

Origin Story

Lakoff and Johnson discuss ontological metaphors extensively in Chapters 6 and 25 of Metaphors We Live By, and PROPERTIES ARE POSSESSIONS is among the most fundamental. The metaphor is so deeply embedded in English grammar that it is nearly invisible: the verb “to have” is one of the most common words in the language, and a large proportion of its uses are ontological metaphors (having properties, having experiences, having obligations).

The metaphor connects to a broader family of ontological mappings that Lakoff and Johnson identify: STATES ARE LOCATIONS (being in trouble), CHANGES ARE MOVEMENTS (things are looking up), and PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS (I’m aiming for a promotion). Together these form the Event Structure metaphor system, in which the physical world provides the conceptual scaffolding for abstract reasoning. PROPERTIES ARE POSSESSIONS is the ontological anchor of this system: before you can move, change, or arrive anywhere, you must first have qualities that define what you are.

References

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Metaphors We Live By (1980), Chapters 6 and 25
Lakoff, G., Espenson, J. & Schwartz, A. Master Metaphor List (1991), “Attributes Are Possessions”
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), Chapter 11 — the Event Structure metaphor system
Heine, B. Possession: Cognitive Sources, Forces, and Grammaticalization (1997) — cross-linguistic analysis of possession as a cognitive schema