Metaphors are "grounded" by Gestalts recognized in worldly experience, be that experience social or physical.
Causation is usually taken to be a primitive, but it can be considered to be a conceptual elaboration on doing things with objects in the world, like a baby repeatedly dropping a spoon as their brain learns how to interact with a world. So causation has *experiential* properties like:
* a goal is involved (dropping the spoon) * there is an object that's the target. * the goal is reached by direct contact with the target. * the target changes state in a perceptible way * etc.
If there's enough Family Resemblance between two acts (each has enough of the properties, without necessarily sharing any single property), they will each count as an example of causation. Thus the *gestalt* of the properties is more basic to how we perceive the world than any of the properties.
Not every example of causation will be a *great* example; it just has to be good enough. See Prototypes for Concepts.
See Structured Experience for another example.
--- This experiential understanding of causation can assist in the understanding of metaphor, as in "Harry raised our morale by telling jokes." Even though morale is not a physical object like a spoon, it can still be "raised."
But more than just helping with understanding, experiential gestalts assist us in Defining Experienced Reality. Sometimes Argument Is War feels *true*.