Unknown Is Up; Known Is Down

conceptual-metaphor Embodied Experience → Intellectual Inquiry

Categories: cognitive-science linguistics philosophy

What It Brings

Unresolved matters float. Settled matters rest on the ground. This orientational metaphor maps the epistemic status of a question — whether it is decided or still open — onto the vertical axis. What is unknown, undecided, or unresolved is “up in the air.” What is known, decided, or established is “settled,” “grounded,” or “nailed down.” The physical grounding draws on the contrast between objects that are airborne (unstable, unpredictable, hard to grasp) and objects that have come to rest on a surface (stable, fixed, available for inspection).

Key structural parallels:

Uncertainty as suspension — “That’s still up in the air.” “The question is hanging.” “It’s floating around without resolution.” Unresolved matters are mapped onto objects that have not yet landed. They are above the ground, subject to currents and forces, and their final resting place is unknown.
Resolution as descent — “The matter is settled.” “Let’s pin that down.” “We need to ground this in evidence.” Reaching a conclusion is mapped onto bringing something down to rest on a stable surface. Knowledge is heavy; it sinks and stays.
Investigation as bringing down — “Let’s get to the bottom of this.” “We need to dig into that.” “Uncover the truth.” The process of finding out is mapped onto downward movement — reaching below the surface to find what is hidden there. This interacts with the UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING metaphor: what is buried or elevated is hard to see; what is at ground level is visible.
Raising questions as upward motion — “She raised an important point.” “That brings up an interesting question.” “New issues have surfaced.” Introducing an unresolved matter into discussion is lifting it up — taking it from the settled ground and putting it back into the air where it must be dealt with.
Establishment as foundation — “Well-established facts.” “Well-grounded theory.” “The foundation of our knowledge.” What is known is at the bottom — not because it is inferior but because it is the base on which other things rest. The metaphor gives knowledge an architectural quality: foundations are low, and what is built on them rises above.

This metaphor is unusual in the UP-is-positive orientational system because here UP carries a negative or at least unsettled valence. Being “up in the air” is not a good thing — it means you do not know yet. This tension with the broader system (where UP is typically good) is one of the most interesting features of Lakoff and Johnson’s catalog.

Where It Breaks

It conflicts with the dominant UP-is-positive system — in most orientational metaphors, UP is good: HAPPY IS UP, HEALTH IS UP, VIRTUE IS UP, HAVING CONTROL IS UP. But UNKNOWN IS UP codes uncertainty as elevated and certainty as grounded, which means the positive state (knowing) is DOWN. This creates cognitive tension that speakers navigate by context-switching between metaphor systems without noticing the contradiction.
Creative uncertainty is valued, but the metaphor codes it as unstable — brainstorming, open-ended exploration, and keeping options open are often desirable. But the metaphor frames them as “up in the air” — unsettled, ungrounded, not yet resolved. The metaphor has no way to express that sometimes the floating state is productive rather than problematic.
“Settled” smuggles in finality — the metaphor maps resolution onto physical rest, which implies permanence. But many “settled” questions get reopened, and much established knowledge gets revised. The metaphor makes it feel unnatural to unsettle what has been settled, because lifting something off the ground requires effort and disrupts stability.
The vertical axis does not capture degrees of uncertainty — a question can be mostly resolved, partially understood, or barely investigated. The metaphor offers only two positions: up (unknown) or down (known). There is no middle altitude for “partially understood” or “provisionally accepted.”
The grounding metaphor privileges certain kinds of knowledge — empirical, concrete, evidence-based knowledge is easily described as “grounded.” Abstract, theoretical, or speculative knowledge is harder to place. The metaphor implicitly favors the concrete over the abstract by making physical grounding the standard for epistemic security.

Expressions

“That’s up in the air” — unresolved matter as airborne object
“The matter is settled” — resolved question as object at rest
“Let’s get to the bottom of this” — investigation as downward movement
“She raised an important point” — introducing uncertainty as upward motion
“We need to pin that down” — resolving ambiguity as fixing to a surface
“The question is still hanging” — unresolved issue as suspended object
“Well-grounded theory” — reliable knowledge as object on solid ground
“That brings up an interesting question” — introducing a topic as lifting
“Nail it down” — achieving certainty as fastening to the ground
“The facts on the ground” — known reality as what rests on the surface

Origin Story

Lakoff and Johnson introduce UNKNOWN IS UP in Chapter 4 of Metaphors We Live By alongside the other orientational metaphors. They note the example “That’s up in the air” and its contrast with “The matter is settled.” The metaphor is distinctive because it breaks the otherwise consistent pattern of UP as positive. In most of the orientational system, being up is desirable. Here, being up means being unresolved, and being down (settled, grounded) is the preferred state.

Lakoff and Johnson suggest the physical basis lies in the contrast between objects in motion (hard to predict, hard to control) and objects at rest (stable, knowable). This connects UNKNOWN IS UP to HAVING CONTROL IS UP through a shared concern with stability, but the two metaphors resolve the vertical axis in opposite directions for the domain of knowledge: control is up, but knowing is down. The tension is productive — it reveals that the orientational metaphor system is not a single consistent mapping but a family of partially overlapping and sometimes contradictory metaphors.

References

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Metaphors We Live By (1980), Chapter 4
Lakoff, G., Espenson, J. & Schwartz, A. Master Metaphor List (1991)
Sweetser, E. From Etymology to Pragmatics (1990) — epistemic metaphors and their spatial grounding