- Author: George Lakoff
- Reading Status: #in-progress
- Date Started: [[November 11th, 2022]]
- Date Finished:
Introduction
Supplying an alternative account in which human experience and understanding, rather than objective truth, played the central role
Concepts We Live By
Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action.
The way we act and think, our ordinary conceptual system, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature
Since communication is based on the same conceptual system that we use in thinking and acting, language is an important source of evidence for what that system is like
Conceptual metaphor: "Argument is War"
The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another
So it's not just a matter of "language" but of thought and concept; metaphors in linguistic expressions are possible precisely because they are metaphors in a person's conceptual system.
The Systematicity of Metaphorical Concepts
We can use metaphorical linguistic structures to study the nature of metaphorical concepts and to gain an understanding of the metaphorical nature of our activities.
Categories and subcategories of metaphors contain a coherent system and a corresponding coherent system of metaphorical expressions for those arguments
Highlighting and Hiding
Michael Reddy: Our language about language is structured roughly by the complex metaphor:
Ideas (or meanings) are objects
entails that meanings have an existence independent of people and contexts
Linguistic expressions are containers
Communication is sending
It is important to understand that the metaphorical structuring involved here is partial, not total. If it were total, one concept would actually be the other, not merely understood in terms of it.
So when we say that a concept is structured by a metaphor, we mean that it is partially structured and that it can be extended in some ways but not others.
Orientational Metaphors
not arbitrary, they have a basis in our cultural and physical experience
There is an internal systematically to each spatialization metaphor. (Happy is up, etc)
It is hard to distinguish the physical from the cultural basis of a metaphor since the choice of one physical basis from among many possible ones has to do with cultural coherence.
Metaphor and Cultural Coherence
The priority of "More is Up" vs. "Good is Up" can be seen in examples like "inflation is rising" or "the crime rate is going up"
In general the major orientations up down, in out, central peripheral, active passive, etc seem to cut across all cultures, but which concepts are orientated which way and which orientations are most important vary from culture to culture.
Ontological Metaphors
Understanding our experiences in terms of objects and substances allows us to pick out parts of our experience and treat them as discrete entities or substances of a uniform kind.
Once we can identify our experiences as entities or substances, we can refer to them, categorize them, group them and quantify them -- and by this means, reason about them
Human purposes typically require us to impose artificial boundaries that make physical phenomena discrete just as we are: entities bounded by a surface.
Viewing inflation as an entity, for example, allows us to refer to it, quantify it, see it as a cause and perhaps we even believe that we understand it. Ontological metaphors like this are necessary for even attempting to deal rationally with our experiences.
The Mind as a metaphor
MIND AS A MACHINE: They give us different models for what the mind is and thereby allow us to focus on different aspects of mental experience. Machine metaphor gives us a conception of the mind having an on-off state, a level of efficiency, a productive capacity and internal mechanism, a source of energy and an operating condition.
MIND AS A BRITTLE OBJECT: When a machine breaks down, it ceases to function. When a brittle object shatters, it's pieces go flying with possibly dangerous consequences.
Ontological metaphors are so natural and so pervasive in our thought that they are usually taken as self-evident, direct descriptions of mental phenomena. The fact that they are metaphorical never occurs to most of us.
There are few instincts more basic than territoriality. And such defining of a territory, putting a boundary around it, is an act of quantification. We conceptualize our visual field as a container and conceptualize what we see as being inside it. Even the term "visual field" suggests this.
Metaphors of Containers and Substances in those containers arise naturally because of our field of vision defining a boundary.
Activities in general are viewed metaphorically as substances and therefore containers. Activities are viewed as containers for the actions and other activities that make them up. They are also viewed as containers for energy and materials required for them and for their by-products, which may be viewed as in them or as emerging from them/
Personification
Personification allows us to comprehend a wide variety of experiences with non human entities in terms of human motivations, characteristics and activities.
Metonymy
Using one entitity to refer to another that is related to it: [[metonymy]]
Sometimes we use synecdoche, where the part stands for the whole: "I've got a new set of wheels" (- car, motorcycle, etc)
Metaphor and metonymy are different kinds of processes. Metaphor is principally a way of conceiving of one thing in terms of another, and its primary function is understanding. Metonymy on the other hand, has primarily referential function, that is, it allows us to use one entity to stand for another. But it is not merely a referential device: it also serves the function of providing understanding -- which part we pick out (for the part for the whole metaphor) determines which aspect of the whole we are focusing on.
Metonymy is not just a matter of our language ––they are is a part of the ordinary, everyday we think and act as well as talk.
"Face for the person" metaphor: "she is just a pretty face", "we need new faces around here", etc.
In our culture we look at a persons face, rather than his posture or movements, to get our basic information about what the person is like. We function in terms of a metonymy when we perceive the person in terms of his face and act on those perceptions.
The conceptual systems of cultures and [[religion]]s are metaphorical in nature (dove as a symbol of the holy spirit)
Symbolic metonymies are critical metaphorical systems that characterize religions and cultures. Ones that are grounded in our physical experience provide an essential means of comprehending religious and cultural concepts.
Challenges to Metaphorical Coherence
Time in English is structured in terms of the "Time is a moving object" metaphor.
This metaphor has an internal consistency: depending on the way that we look at it, and our relative position.
There is another metaphor by which we view time: "Time is stationary and we move through it"
So we have two subcases of the metaphor "time passes us"
There is a difference between metahpors that are coherent (that is, "fit together") with eachother and those that are consistent. We have found that the connections between metaphors are more likely to involve coherence than consistency.
For example "Love is a journey" could entail a car trip (long, bumpy, dead-end street), a train trip (off the tracks) or a sea voyage (on the rocks, foundering). There is no single image that the journey metaphor all fits in, though they are specifically different means of travel.
In general, metaphorical concepts are defined not in terms of concrete images (flying, creeping, going down the road, etc), but in terms of more general categories, like passing.
Some further examples
Theories and arguments are buildings
Ideas are food
Ideas are organisms, either people or plants
Ideas are products or commodities
significant is big
seeing is touching, eyes are limbs
physical and emotional states are entities within a person
life is a container
life is a gambling game
Collection of what are called "speech formulas", or "fixed-form expressions" or "phrasal lexical terms"
Using the word as a "construct" is a normal way of talking about theories.
You would not be viewed as speaking metaphorically but as using the normal every day language appropriate to the given situation. Nevertheless, your way of talking about, conceiving and even experiencing your situation would be metaphorically structuted.
Partial Nature of Metaphorical Structuring
Because concepts are metaphorically structured in a systematic way, it is possible for us to use expressions from one domain to talk about corresponding concepts in the metaphorically defined domain. (eg: theories are buildings, and foundation/construction depends on how the metaphorical concept theories are buildings is used to structure the concept)
There are certain "unused" parts of a metaphorical theory, for example rooms and staircases in the theories are buildings metaphor.
They are part of "figurative" or "imaginative" language, while "used" parts of metaphors are sometimes glanced over as metaphors in the first place.
In addition, there are idiosyncratic metaphorical expressions that stand alone and are not used systematically in our language or thought, like expressions such as "foot of the mountain". In normal contexts, we don't speak of the head or shoulders of a mountain.
There are metaphors that are marginal in our culture, and they do not systematically interact with other metaphorical concepts because so little of them is used.
How Is Our Conceptual System Grounded?
Are there any concepts at all that are understood directly without metaphor? If not, how can we understand anything at all?
The prime candidates for concepts that are understood directly are the simple spatial concepts such as "up"
What we call [[direct physical experience]] is never merely a matter of having a body of a certain sort; rather, every experience takes place within a vast background of cultural presuppositions.
[[Culture]] Cultural assumptions, values and attitudes are not a conceptual overlay which we may or many not place upon experience as we choose. It would be more correct to say that all experience is cultural through and through, that we experience our "world" in such a way that our culture is already present in the very experience itself.