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Thursday 19 January 2012
Metaphors are in the mind

People have known about metaphor for a very long time. Until the end of the 20th century, most everyone agreed on one particular explanation, neatly articulated by Aristotle and carried down through the centuries. Metaphor was seen as a strictly linguistic device—a kind of catchy turn of phrase—in which you call one thing by the name of another thing that it’s similar to. This is probably the definition of metaphor you learned in high school English. On this view, you can metaphorically say that “Juliet is the sun” if and only if Juliet and the sun are similar—for instance, if they are both particularly luminous.

But in their 1980 the book Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson proposed an explanation for metaphorical language that flew in the face of this received wisdom. They reasoned that if metaphor is just a free-floating linguistic device based on similarity, then you should be able to metaphorically describe anything in terms of anything else that it’s similar to. But Lakoff and Johnson observed that real metaphorical language as actually used isn’t haphazard at all. Instead, it’s systematic and coherent.

It’s systematic in that you don’t just metaphorically describe anything as anything else. Instead, it’s mostly abstract things that you describe in terms of concrete things. Morality is more abstract than cleanliness. Understanding is more abstract than seeing. And you can’t reverse the metaphors. While you can say “He’s clean” to mean he has no criminal record, you can’t say “He’s moral” to mean that he bathed recently. Metaphor is unidirectional, from concrete to abstract.

Metaphorical expressions are also coherent with one another. Take the example of understanding and seeing. There are lots of relevant metaphorical expressions, for example “I see what you mean,” and “Let’s shed some light on the issue,” and “Put his idea under a microscope and see if it actually makes sense.” And so on. While these are totally different metaphorical expressions—they use completely different words—they all coherently cast certain aspects of understanding in terms of specific aspects of seeing. You always describe the understander as the seer, the understood idea as the seen object, the act of understanding as seeing, the understandability of the idea as the visibility of the object, and so on. In other words, the aspects of seeing you use to talk about aspects of understanding stand in a fixed mapping to one another.

These observations led Lakoff and Johnson to propose that there was something going on with metaphor that was deeper than just the words. They argued that the metaphorical expressions in language are really only surface phenomena, organized and generated by mappings in people’s minds. For them, the reason metaphorical language exists and the reason why it’s systematic and coherent is that people think metaphorically. You don’t just talk about understanding as seeing; you think about understanding as seeing. You don’t just talk about morality as cleanliness; you think about morality as cleanliness. And it’s because you think metaphorically—because you systematically map certain concepts onto others in your mind—that you talk metaphorically. The metaphorical expressions are merely the visible tip of the iceberg.

30 notes

  1. finow reblogged this from azspot
  2. dataanxiety reblogged this from azspot and added:
    People have known about metaphor for millennia. Until recently,...You don’t metaphorically...
  3. pavlovsstepson reblogged this from azspot
  4. lunaticprophet reblogged this from azspot and added:
    Very interesting
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  6. kylemcqueen reblogged this from maygen
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  8. blueskyscrapers reblogged this from azspot and added:
    this is pretty neat!
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