Human beings have what we call a conceptualizing capacity. That capacity consists in: - The ability to form symbolic structures that correlate with preconceptual structures in our everyday experience. Such symbolic structures are basic-level and image-schematic concepts. - The ability to project metaphorically from structures in the physical domain to structures in abstract domains, constrained by other structural correlations between the physical and abstract domains. This accounts for our capacity to reason about abstract domains such as quantity and purpose. - The ability to form complex concept and general categories using image schemas as structuring devices. This allows us to construct complex event structures and taxonomies with superordinate and subordinate categories.
- Lakoff (1987), Pag. 280

People share a general conceptualizing capacity regardless of what differences they may have in conceptual systems.
- Lakoff (1987), Pag. 311