Most of this book will only appeal to serious language geeks, but I'd also recommend it to writers--you'll see why in a moment. The central idea is that metaphor is far more foundational and elemental to our understanding of words and concepts then we realize; in fact according to these authors much of language is metaphor itself.
The authors then broaden this linguistic "theory of metaphor" into a theory of knowledge, showing that we literally think in metaphors and that metaphor is fundamental to how we conceptualize, perceive and navigate reality. Finally, they arrive at what they consider to be a third way of understanding truth, an alternative to the dueling theories of objectivism and subjectivism.
This book is technical but readable even if you're not a linguist. And it got me thinking about how much artistry is in our daily language, how much downright poetic language emerges out of normal conversation.
Which is why I recommend this book to all writers: it takes you up a few levels in thinking on how language can be used, and it gives you different ways to think about the rules of the game of writing. Look at it this way: if linguistics is a system of rules about language, then writers need to know how to follow and violate these rules in ways that readers enjoy. The more rules you know, the more rules you know to break!
One passage of this book that I'd recommend specifically: pages 185-192, which gives a concise history of Western thought and of the key conflicts between objectivist and subjectivist models of thinking. That said, only a linguist or an obsessive nerd (guilty of the second) would find this entire book interesting.
Finally, it's always a good idea to add some genuine randomness to your reading list. It gets you out of mental homeostasis and gets you thinking about things you wouldn't normally think about. You never know what ideas a new subject might trigger in your mind, or in what directions your mind might go after contact with an unusual reading choice.
Note: The After-Afterward at the very end of the book contains a good bullet point summary of the book's key ideas:
* Metaphors are fundamentally conceptual in nature; metaphorical language is secondary.
* Conceptual metaphors are grounded in everyday experience.
* Abstract thought is largely, though not entirely, metaphorical.
* Metaphorical thought is unavoidable, ubiquitous, and mostly unconscious.
* Abstract concepts have a literal core but are extended by metaphors, often by many mutually inconsistent metaphors.
* Abstract concepts are not complete without metaphors. For example, love is not love without metaphors of magic, attraction, madness, union, nurturance, and so on.
* Our conceptual systems are not consistent overall, since the metaphors we use to reason about concepts may be inconsistent.
* We live our lives on the basis of inferences we derive via metaphor.
[As usual, read no further. What follows is just a ridiculously long collection of notes and thoughts from the book. Life is short!]
Notes:
Preface:
1) On metaphor being a matter of central concern in meaning and linguistics and philosophy, "supplying an alternative account in which human experience and understanding, rather than objective truth, played the central role."
2) Linguistic gestalts and experiential gestalts
3) "Our ideas about the relationship between metaphor and ritual derive from the anthropological tradition of Bronislaw Malinowski, Claude Levi-Strauss, Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz, and others."
4) "We also owe a very important debt to those contemporary figures who have worked out in great detail the philosophical ideas we are reacting against. We respect the work of Richard Montague, Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Donald Davidson, and others as important contributions to the traditional Western conceptions of meaning and truth." Interesting that there's no mention of Noam Chomsky either positive or negative, nor among any of the book's references.
Chapter 1: Concepts We Live By
5) "Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature... If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor."
6) The conceptual metaphor argument is war: we don't just talk about arguments in terms of war, we actually win or lose, there are opponents, attacks, defenses; we gain and lose ground, we plan new strategies, etc... If you imagine a culture where arguments were not viewed as using this metaphor, we would probably not view what they were doing as arguing at all; they would be doing something different; "a discourse form structured in terms of battle or a discourse structured in terms of dance."
7) "The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another."
8) "The most important claim we have made so far is... human thought processes are largely metaphorical."
Chapter 2: The Systematicity of Metaphorical Concepts
9) Expressions from the vocabulary of war form a systematic way of talking about the battling aspects of an argument.
10) The conceptual metaphor time is money: how do you spend your time; I don't have time; I need to budget my time; time as a valuable commodity; a limited resource; also you pay interest on loans/hotel room rates, etc., in units of time, these are new practices that "have arisen in modern industrialized societies and structure our basic everyday activities in a very profound way."
Chapter 3: Metaphorical Systematicity: Highlighting and Hiding
11) The systematicity that allows us to comprehend one aspect of a concept in terms of another "will necessarily hide other aspects of the concept." It keeps us from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor. Thus we lose sight of the cooperative aspects of arguing as we use the metaphor argument as war: see for example how "someone who was arguing with you can be viewed as giving you his time, a valuable commodity, in an effort in mutual understanding."
12) Michael Reddy, the "conduit metaphor": "our language about language is structured roughly by the following complex metaphor:
* Ideas (or meanings) are objects.
* Linguistic expressions are containers.
* Communication is sending."
Examples: It's difficult to put my ideas into words; his words carry little meaning; his word seem hollow; in other words "the meaning is right there in the words"... except that is not always true! Sometimes context really matters: see the phrase "please sit in the apple-juice seat" which has no meaning of all except in the context in which it was uttered. Likewise some sentences have different meanings to different people, like "we need new alternative sources of energy."
13) "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."
Chapter 4: Orientational Metaphors
14) Aside from "structural metaphors" where one concept is metaphorically structured in terms of another, there is another kind of metaphorical concept: "orientational metaphors" that organize a whole system of concepts with respect to one another and have to do with spatial orientation; see for example the concept happy is up, leading to the English expression "I'm feeling up today."
15) Examples:
* Happy is up, sad is down
* Conscious is up, unconscious is down (he fell asleep; he dropped off to sleep; he sank into a coma, etc.)
* Health and life are up, sickness and death are down (Lazarus rose from the dead; he fell ill; he came down with the flu; he dropped dead.)
* Various other examples: good is up, bad as down; virtue is up, depravity is down (I wouldn't stoop to that; that was beneath me; that was a lowdown thing to do)
16) Thus we conclude:
* Most of our fundamental concepts are organized in terms of one or more spatialization metaphors
* The spatialization metaphors are coherent
* They are rooted in physical and cultural experience not random
17) [One thing I notice when I'm given a lot of linguistics sentence examples, it freezes my internal "availability heuristic" of thinking of counterexamples that might show the contrary idea; it's interesting to observe this happening in my mind and think about whether there's a rhetoric angle here: is it something that can be used to trap a reader into beliefs that they might more easily falsify under other circumstances?]
Chapter 5: Metaphor and Cultural Coherence
18) On how there can be conflicts among cultural values and thus conflicts among metaphors associated with them.
19) Contrasting bigger is better with saving resources is virtuous for example; we can look at different subcultures and see conflicting metaphors; see also cultures where balance or centrality plays a more important role than an up/down orientation/
Chapter 6: Ontological Metaphors
20) Entity and substance metaphors: One can only do so much with orientation, we want to go beyond it, understanding experience in terms of objects and substances, also ontological (classification based) metaphors, "that is, way of viewing events, activities, emotions, ideas etc., as entities and substances."
21) Viewing inflation as an entity: "inflation makes me sick" which allows us to refer to it, quantify it, see it as a cause, act with respect to it and "even believe that we understand it" [interesting! Metaphorical usage, giving us the illusion of understanding a concept without us knowing it's an illusion.]
22) Note that most of these ontological metaphors are not noticed as being metaphorical (he broke down; he cracked up; both are ontological metaphors that specify the mind as an entity like a machine or a brittle object). "Ontological metaphors like these 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. We take statements like 'He cracked under pressure' as being directly true or false."
23) Container metaphors:
* Land areas; rooms, houses; things we are in or out of; land areas as a sort of container (like "there's a lot of land in Kansas")
* The visual field: this is also conceptualized as a container and things are "in it" or "not in it": "the ship is coming into view" "he's out of sight now" etc)
* Events, actions, activities, and states: A race is a sort of event that is like a container object, with boundaries, participants, a start and finish ("are you in the race?"). Activities are also seen as substances and containers ("how did I get out of washing the car?" "I put a lot of energy into washing the windows") Also certain states can be conceptualized as containers, like "he's in love" or "we're out of trouble now" or "I'm slowly getting into shape."
Chapter 7: Personification
24) "Perhaps the most obvious ontological metaphors are those where the physical object is further specified as being a person. This allows us to comprehend a wide variety of experiences with nonhuman entities in terms of human motivations, characteristics, and activities."
* His theory explained to me
* Life has cheated me
* Inflation is eating up our profits
25) See more specific examples like inflation has attacked the foundation of our economy, where inflation is personified not just as a person but more specifically as an adversary; thinking of inflation as an adversary gives us political and economic justification to take certain actions. The point here is personification is a general category that covers a wide range of metaphors, each picking out different aspects of a person or ways of looking at a person.
Chapter 8: Metonymy
26) [Metonymy is when a word associated with something is used to refer to the thing itself. Kind of like a reverse personification] "The ham sandwich is waiting for his check": this refers to the person who ordered a ham sandwich, as waitresses are speaking to each other about a customer.
27) Other metonymy examples:
* Acrylic is taking over the art world (acrylic is used to describe the use of acrylic paint)
* He's in dance (dance as referring to the dancing profession)
28) See also the specific case of metonymy which is synecdoche, where a part stands for the whole (I've got a new set of wheels, we need some new blood).
29) Metaphor versus metonymy, "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 a referential function, that is, it allows us to use one entity to stand for another." Note also that metonymy serves the function of providing understanding: "we need good heads" refers to an aspect of a person not a total person but an intelligent person. Also:
* She's just a pretty face
* We need some new faces around here
30) See also how in portraits it would be weird to show a picture of someone without a their head, but if you show a picture of their face then another person knows what they look like, as if that's sufficient for a portrait. Thus the face is a metonymy for the person and it is how we get basic information about what the person is like.
31) Other metonymy examples:
* The place for the institution (The White House isn't saying anything; The Kremlin threatened to boycott the talks, Wall Street is in a panic)
* The place for the event (Remember the Alamo; Let's not let Thailand become another Vietnam)
32) When we think of "a Picasso" we think in a range of terms in relation to the artist; this is a producer for a product metonymy: see also the controller for controlled metonomy (like "Nixon bombed Hanoi" thus the phrase holds Nixon responsible, not that Nixon literally did the bombing). Thus these metonyms structure our thoughts, attitudes, and actions, and "the
grounding of metonymic concepts is in general more obvious than is the case with metaphoric concepts, since it
usually involves direct physical or causal associations."
33) See also the Christian metonymy dove for holy spirit: the dove flies in the sky which stands for heaven, it's graceful, beautiful, gentle, peaceful.
Chapter 9: Challenges to Metaphorical Coherence
34) It's easy to find apparent incoherences in metaphorical expressions but they turn out not to be incoherent at all. Two examples: in the first example we have "The future is in front and the past is behind" (examples include: in the weeks ahead of us; that's all behind us now). However the second example is "the future is behind and the past and front" (examples: in the following weeks; in the preceding weeks). This appears to be a metaphorical organization of time that's contradictory, even worse we can mix these metaphors: we're looking ahead to the following weeks.
35) We resolve the incoherence by thinking of front and back as the "direction of motion of the object" (as if it were a car or a train). Also we tend to think of time in terms of a "time is a moving object" metaphor (time flies), so we now see that the front-back orientation. Thus next week and the week following it indicate time "following" further into the future in the direction of the motion of time.
36) We can also conceptualize time as stationary and we "move through it" as in "we go through the years." So the way to think about it is from our point of view time goes "past" us from front to back, thus these apparently incoherent metaphors do fit together after all; thus the metaphorical concept is something more like "an object passing."
Chapter 10: Some Further Examples
37) Theories (and arguments) are buildings: What is the foundation for your theory; Your argument is shaky; We need to construct an argument.
38) Ideas are food: What he said left a bad taste in my mouth; Half-baked ideas; Warmed-over theories; I just can't swallow that claim; He's a voracious reader.
39) Ideas are organisms (either people or plants): His theory gave birth to a number of ideas; He is the father of modern biology; Look at what his ideas have spawned; His ideas have come to fruition; That's a budding theory.
40) Ideas are products, commodities, resources, money: Let me put in my two cents worth, He has a wealth of ideas.
41) Seeing is touching, eyes are limbs: I can't take my eyes off her; Their eyes met.
42) She also "speech formulas" or "phrasal lexical items" like:
* The odds are against me
* Where is he when the chips are down
* He's bluffing
* Let's up the ante
* Maybe we need to sweeten the pot
These last examples are examples of the "life is a gambling game" metaphor, but "They are normal ways of talking about life situations" and are "literal expression structured by metaphorical concepts. If you say 'The odds are against us' or 'We'll have to take our chances,' you would not be viewed as speaking metaphorically (!) but as using the normal everyday language appropriate to the situation. Nevertheless your way of talking about, conceiving, and even experiencing your situation would be metaphorically structured."
Chapter 11: The Partial Nature of Metaphorical Structuring
43) The authors distinguish between "used" and "un-used" parts of of a metaphorical expression: Construct and foundation are examples of our ordinary literal language about theories (construct a theory; your theory has no foundation) and in these cases "construct" and "foundation" are "used" to structure the concept "theory." But what about "unused" parts of the metaphor? Thus the metaphor theories are buildings has a "used" part (foundation, outer shell) and also an "unused" part (room, staircases: as in "his theory has thousands of little rooms and long, winding corridors."). In other words a metaphor can be extended to its "unused" part when coining novel metaphorical expressions or making jokes.
Chapter 12: How Is Our Conceptual System Grounded?
44) If the authors claim that most of our normal conceptual system is metaphorically structured then: "Are there any concepts that can be understood directly without metaphor? And if not how can we understand anything at all?"
45) Examples of concepts that are understood directly, like simple spatial concepts such as up: ironically up is not understood in its own terms, it only emerges in a relative sense from motor functions, our position, gravity, etc. The authors go on to argue that "every experience takes place within a vast background of cultural presuppositions."
46) Also "we typically conceptualize the non-physical in terms of the physical--that is, we conceptualize the less clearly delineated in terms of the more clearly delineated. Consider the following examples:
Harry is in the kitchen.
Harry is in the Elks.
Harry is in love.
47) These sentences refer to three different domains of experience: spatial, social, and emotional. ... But with respect to conceptual structuring there is a difference." The first sentence is literal not metaphorical; the other two instances are metaphorical concepts. The second example uses the social groups are containers metaphor, for example; the third is love is a container or an emotional state is a container. Each of these uses the same word in with the same meaning: they don't have different concepts, they have the same emergent concept, using one word for it but two metaphorical concepts (that define social groups and emotional states).
Chapter 13: The Grounding of Structural Metaphors
48) Taking the rational argument is war metaphor and seeing how it is grounded; part of being a rational animal involves getting what you want without the risks of physical conflict, thus we have the social institution of verbal argument. note also there are various forms and levels of rationality in verbal argument as well; the argument is war metaphor is built on a conceptual system of the culture in which we live.
49) Note that various types of intimidation, threats, insults or belittling can happen in the highest level of rational argument: see for example words like "Clearly" and "Obviously..." (which the authors calls a form of intimidation); or "This work lacks the necessary rigor" (which the author considers an insult), etc. [One gets the feeling while reading this chapter that neither of these authors has ever been in an actual fight...]
50) The authors argue that a metaphors such as labor is a resource or time is a resource are grounded in experience, and thus are structural metaphors--even though we do not tend to see them as metaphors at all. Both use the metaphor that time and labor are "substances" that can be measured, used up, assigned value, etc.
Chapter 14: Causation: Partly Emergent and Partly Metaphorical
51) [The book is beginning to use more and more technical and difficult language at this point] Directly emergent concepts would be up-down, in-out, object, substance; emergent metaphorical concepts would be something like the visual field is a container, an activity is a container.
52) "Even a concept as basic as 'causation' is not purely emergent or purely metaphorical. Rather, it appears to have a directly emergent
core that is elaborated metaphorically."
53) "Standard theories of meaning assume that all of our complex concepts can be analyzed into
undecomposable primitives. Such primitives are taken to be the ultimate 'building blocks' of
meaning. The concept of causation is often taken to be such an ultimate building block. We
believe that the standard theories are fundamentally mistaken in assuming that basic
concepts are undecomposable primitives."
54) Causation "is a basic human concept" but not "an undecomposable primitive," instead "causation is best understood as an experiential gestalt" (meaning here a whole that is more basic than its parts).
55) Yet causation has certain prototypical qualities (examples: the agent has a goal of some change of state on the thing acted on; there's a plan; the agent is in control; the change is perceptible; etc.); this all follows the prototypical sense in Eleanor Rosch's work on human categorization, where people categorize objects in terms of prototypes and family resemblances: see for example "prototypical birds" which would be small flying or singing birds like sparrows or robins, whereas chickens, ostriches and penguins are birds too, just not central members of this category--they are non-prototypical.
56) The authors make this same argument about causation: that it has a set of prototypical qualities, but we experience them collectively in a gestalt experience that is more basic than the various qualities themselves. Note the category of causation also has fuzzy boundaries.
57) See also the category of causation that we call "making a paper airplane" (or a snowball or sand castle). It's causation with an extra characteristic, where the object becomes a different kind of thing; here the metaphor would be "the object comes out of the substance"; for example, you make ice out of water by freezing it. You can also conceptualize it by saying the "substance goes into the object": thus "I made a sheet of newspaper into an airplane."
58) See also creation is birth as a general metaphor, which is a special case of causation conceptualized metaphorically: he hatched a scheme, he conceived a theory, etc.
59) In the next chapter the authors take this further, questioning the theory that meaning can be broken down into "ultimate building blocks" that can be understood in one and only one way. They argue that "experiential gestalts" explain certain things better.
Chapter 15: The Coherent Structuring of Experience
60) Once again, "metaphorical concepts are ways of partially structuring one experience in terms of another" such as "an argument is a conversation that is partially structured by the concept war (thus giving us the argument is war metaphor)." But what if you're having a conversation and you suddenly realize it has turned into an argument? "What is it that makes the conversation an argument, and what does that have to do with war?" So now the authors have to see "what it means to be engaged in a conversation": essentially six dimensions of structure (although many details could be added that characterize it more precisely): participants, parts, stages (starting with hello!), linear sequence, causation, purpose.
61) If the conversation becomes an argument what is it that you perceive over and above it being a conversation? The authors map aspects of war to these six general characteristics of a conversation, e.g.: the participants are adversaries; the parts are various forms of attack or defense or maneuvering; the stages involve taking turns and ending in victory or loss, etc.
62) Essentially we're superimposing the concept war on top of the corresponding structure of conversation, thus it is a "multidimensional structure" that the authors characterize as an "experiential gestalt." "Experiential gestalts are multidimensional structured wholes."
63) What does it mean for a concept to fit an experience? "...we classify particular experiences in terms of experiential gestalts in our conceptual system... There is a correlation, dimension by dimension, between the concept conversation and the aspects of the actual activity of conversing. This is what we mean when we say that a concept fits an experience. It is by means of conceptualizing our experiences in this manner that we pick out the 'important' aspects of an experience. And by picking out what is 'important' in the experience, we can categorize the experience, understand it, and remember it."
64) Note that an argument is a kind of conversation, a subcategory; the authors argue that subcategorization and metaphor are endpoints on a continuum.
65) Some gestalts are simple (like conversation) and some are elaborate (like war), and then there are complex gestalts that are structured partially in terms of other gestalts; "these are what we have been calling metaphorically structured concepts. Certain concepts are structured almost entirely metaphorically. The concept love which is mostly structured in metaphorical terms" (love is a journey, love is madness, etc).
66) The next chapter covers other aspects of coherence of different metaphorical structurings that fit together.
Chapter 16: Metaphorical Coherence
67) Specialized aspects of a concept: Example: the concept of "rational argument" has subexamples like "an academic argument," or further specialization of "written discourse written to hypothetical adversaries" or a "one-party rational argument."
68) Also re: the process of an argument: in other words, "arguing" versus an argument as a product (what has been written or said in the course of arguing).
69) To lead us to other metaphorical concepts which are not the "argument is war" type concepts: Here for example, illustrations of the "an argument is a journey" metaphor:
* We have arrived at a disturbing conclusion
* We will proceed in a step-by-step fashion
70) Or: "an argument is a container" metaphor:
* Your argument has holes in it
* Your argument doesn't hold water
71) There is an "overlap of entailments" between these metaphors, there is coherence but they are not completely consistent: the authors use this example to address the difference between coherence and consistency: this helps get at why certain mixed metaphors are permissible and others are not: for example you can't say the direction of the argument has no substance or we can now follow the path of the core of the argument.
Chapter 17: Complex Coherences across Metaphors
72) More complex examples of coherency and consistency, including overlap of metaphors where we use concepts that are themselves understood in metaphorical terms.
73) Aspects of an argument that various "argument metaphors" help explain: content, progress, structure, strength, obviousness, directness, clarity. See how the journey, container, and building metaphors for an argument collectively illustrate these characteristics of an argument itself. Thus:
* This is a roundabout argument (directness, via the journey metaphor)
74) See also how the metaphor understanding is seeing overlaps with the various argument metaphors:
* "Having come this far, we can now see how Hegel went wrong."
* I didn't see that point in your argument.
* I can see right through your argument (understanding is seeing mixed with the argument is container metaphor)
75) Or, examples of the more is better metaphor overlapping with various argument metaphors:
* That's not much of an argument
* Your argument is too weak to support your claims
76) "What may at first appear to be random, isolated metaphorical expressions--for example, cover those points, buttress your argument, get to the core, dig deeper, attack a position, and shoot down--turn out to be not random at all. Rather, they are part of whole metaphorical systems that together serve the complex purpose of characterizing the concept of an argument in all of its aspects, as we conceive them."
Chapter 18: Some Consequences for Theories of Conceptual Structure
77) We "look at two major strategies that linguists and logicians have used to handle, without any reference to metaphor, what we have called metaphorical concepts": abstraction and homonymy.
78) The phrase "he buttressed his argument" uses the concept "buttress" as part of the building gestalt and the metaphor "an argument is a building"... The abstraction view claims, however, that there is a single general abstract concept "buttress" while the homonymy view [use of the same word for different concepts] claims that there are two different and independent concepts, "buttress1" and "buttress2," that are different: one referring to physical objects like a building part, and the other to the abstract concept "part of an argument." Note also the notions of "strong homonymy" vs "weak homonymy" which refers to the lack or allowance of similarities between these two sub-uses of the word.
79) See for example the surprising internal consistency of the "time as a moving object" cases something that would never have existed in the abstraction view.
80) The strong homonymy view is inadequate because it's unlikely that words like "in" which (under this view) would have dozens of unrelated and separate concepts and would have accidental internally systematic qualities about them: this would be an amazing coincidence. The weak homonymy view is more robust here because it allows for some of these internally systemic relationships, just not without the use of metaphorical structuring. Likewise we can't understand the concept buttress a building in terms of the concept buttress an argument, weak homonymy just claims that these have an abstract similarity, but it's a coincidence or an accident. Note also that the hononymy view has no predictive power, it gives no account of why all these similarities should be there. [The strong homonymy position sounds quite a lot like the strong form efficient markets hypothesis, another "view" that no one actually holds, so it serves as a sort of "strawman starting point" to allow you to posit your alternative theory.]
Chapter 19: Definition and Understanding
81) "We have seen that metaphor pervades our normal conceptual system" yet "students of meaning and
dictionary makers have not found it important to try to give a general account of how people
understand normal concepts in terms of systematic metaphors" (like love is a journey, time is money, etc.). Note that dictionary makers or other students of meaning may have different goals: instead they want to define concepts that are inherent in the concept itself. Essentially what the authors are doing and what a dictionary publisher would do are different concepts of definition. "What gets defined and what does the defining?" This is the next issue the authors turn to.
82) The authors suggest that "definition is at the level of basic domains of experience" (like love, time, and argument) but then ask "what constitutes a 'basic domain of experience'? This is they call an experiential gestalt; these are "natural kinds of experience" per the authors, products of human nature, that require metaphorical definition because they're not clearly enough delineated in their own terms.
83) They take another step and argue that some natural kinds of experience are partly metaphorical in nature: "argument is an obvious example," likewise, time is experienced almost entirely in metaphorical terms.
84) On the definition of a definition: "Our concern with the way we understand our experience has led us to a view of definition
that is very different from the standard view." The objectivist would say that "experiences and objects have inherent properties and that human beings understand them solely in terms of these properties." The authors claim this doesn't go far enough: that we only understand words like love partly in terms of such inherent properties and that "for the most part are comprehension of love is metaphorical, and we understand it primarily in terms of concepts for other natural kinds of experience: journeys, madness, war, health, etc.," and in this way love is understood in terms of its "interactional properties" with these other concepts.
85) Take the expression "this is a fake gun" which preserves certain kinds of the properties of a gun (looks like a gun, handles like a gun, serve certain purposes of a gun) but negates others (doesn't have the functional properties of a gun). From this the authors conclude that "we conceptualize a gun in terms of a multidimensional gestalt of properties where the dimensions are perceptual, motor activity, propulsive, functional, etc." Basically these are interactional properties that emerge naturally from our experience in the world.
86) Also, on how we tend to categorize things in terms of prototypes. Note that a beanbag chair shares certain properties with a prototype of a chair, despite not having any fixed definitive core of properties between the two.
Chapter 20: How Metaphor Can Give Meaning to Form
87) On how certain spatial metaphors can apply directly to the form of a sentence.
88) On certain syntactical nuances that change subtly the meaning of a sentence, like the difference between "Harry is not happy" versus "Harry is unhappy," or "I taught Greek to Harry" versus "I taught Harry Greek" or "Sam killed Harry" versus "Sam caused Harry to die."
89) In these cases the closer the syntax between the two forms the stronger the causal link is. [Interesting nuance here] Thus we arrive at a metaphor "closeness is strength of effect" which is a form-based structural metaphor that borrows from a metaphorical meaning of the word "close" in the sense of a sentence like "Who are the men closest to Khomeini?" Which refers to "the men that have the strongest effect on Khomeini"... In other words we are linking form to meaning, a metaphor that is in our conceptual system that applies naturally to the form of the language.
90) "Is paraphase possible?" Almost any change in a sentence will alter the meaning. Thus it's impossible to paraphrase: two different sentences cannot mean exactly the same thing, there will be a subtle variation and meaning, and we can now see why this is so because "we conceptualize sentences metaphorically in spatial terms"
91) Question sentences also contain structural metaphor, a form-based metaphor unknown is up/known is down, you could argue that the rising intonation of a question is an example of this.
92) The whole point of all this stuff is to show that "regularities of linguistic form cannot be explained in formal [logical] terms alone. Many such regularities make sense only when they are seen in terms of the application of conceptual metaphors to our spatial conceptualization of linguistic form."
Chapter 21: New Meaning
93) Turning from conceptual metaphors to "metaphors that are outside our conventional conceptual system, metaphors that are imaginative and creative." "New metaphors"
94) Exploring the entailments of the metaphor "Love is a collaborative work of art"
95) On the Iranian student who believed the phrase "the solution of my problems" carried a metaphor of a chemical solution with precipitates, different reactions, etc., that "contained" all of his problems: the "chemical" metaphor had a different reality for him than for English speakers: this is an interesting example of how a metaphor can create a reality, not just give us a way of conceptualizing a pre-existing reality. Basically it creates a new way of dealing with problems with a new metaphor.
96) See also how the Westernization of cultures throughout the world has introduced the time is money metaphor into those cultures.
97) "The idea that metaphors can create realities goes against most traditional views of metaphor. The reason is that metaphor has traditionally been viewed as a matter of mere language rather than primarily as a means of structuring our conceptual system..." Purely objective views of reality would reject this, but human aspects of reality depend on our perceptions and our conceptualizations and motivations. Thus "metaphor plays a very significant role in determining what is real for us."
Chapter 22: The Creation of Similarity
98) "We have seen that many of our experiences and activities are metaphorical in nature and that much of our conceptual system is structured by metaphor. Since we see similarities in terms of the categories of our conceptual system and in terms of the natural kinds of experiences we have (both of which may be metaphorical), it follows that many of the similarities that we perceive are a result of conventional metaphors that are part of our conceptual system."
99) Orientational metaphors: happy is up, more is up
100) Ontological metaphors also makes similarities possible: for example time and labor are thought of metaphorically as uniform substances, this allows us to view both as similar to physical resources and hence similar to each other. Metaphors like time is a substance, labor is a substance allows us to quantify both, assign each value per unit, use them up progressively, etc.
101) Structural metaphors, like the ideas are food metaphor, thus ideas can be digested, swallowed, devoured, warmed over, they can nourish you, etc. "The concept of swallowing food is independent of the metaphor, but the concept of swallowing ideas arises only by virtue of the metaphor." It also that the ideas are food metaphor is based on still more basic metaphors--ideas are objects, also the mind is a container--thus we use the conduit metaphor to get to the complex metaphor ideas are objects that come into the mind. This is metaphorically similar to food as objects that come into the body. [This is pretty cool]
102) "These food concepts give us a way of understanding psychological processes that we have no direct and well-defined way of conceptualizing."
103) Note that the view that metaphors can create similarities runs counter to the classical and widely held theory of metaphor, the comparison theory of metaphor, which says:
* There is no such thing as metaphorical thought or action, metaphors are matters of language.
* A metaphor of the form "A is B" is a linguistic expression thus it has isolated similarities,
* Therefore a metaphor can only describe pre-existing similarities, it cannot create similarities
104) [A lot of the authors' views are predicated on an anti-objectivist framework, or looking at reality through human perception, which by definition cannot be objective; language would thus be much less objective too, and much more metaphorical, in part because much of our experience, are direct experience, is also metaphorical. Therefore you can't say there's much objectivity describing reality perceived through imperfect and far-from-objective humans!]
Chapter 23: Metaphor, Truth, and Action
105) "Metaphors can be self-fulfilling prophecies" in the sense that they create certain realities for us, especially social realities, they thus guide our future action, and that action will of course fit the metaphor, therefore reinforcing the power of that metaphor to make experience coherent.
106) "People in power get to impose their metaphors." [Interesting tangent here on the energy crisis during the Carter era and ways of thinking about it, also interesting that when linguists talk about energy solutions we have the problem of not understanding thermodynamics! I'm reminded of C.P. Snow's "metaphor of the two cultures here.]
107) "New metaphors, like conventional metaphors, can have the power to define reality. They do this through a coherent network of entailments that highlight some features of reality and hide others." Acceptance of the metaphor leads us to view the entailments as true.
108) Thus if Carter announces a major energy victory, is this claim true or false? Only to the extent you accept the metaphor. "In most cases, what is at issue is not the truth or falsity of the metaphor but the perceptions and inferences that follow from it and the actions that are sanctioned by it."
Chapter 24: Truth
109) Philosophy has not properly grappled with metaphor, despite it playing a "central role in the construction of social and
political reality". Metaphors are "typically viewed within philosophy as matters of 'mere
language,' and philosophical discussions of metaphor have not centered on their conceptual
nature, their contribution to understanding, or their function in cultural reality." "The typical philosophical conclusion is that metaphors cannot directly state truths."
110) The authors don't believe there is such a thing as objective (or absolute and unconditional) truth, despite the longstanding presumption in Western culture that there is. Instead they believe it "is always relative to a conceptual system defined in large part by metaphor."
111) The role of projection in truth, specifically the projection of mental categories onto reality: we project categories onto aspects of the physical world. Categorizing is "a natural way of identifying a kind of object or experience by highlighting certain properties, downplaying others, and hiding still others." [It makes you wonder what these guys would have to say about Heisenberg's principles where we literally impact reality by observing it.]
112) "It follows from this that true statements made in terms of human categories typically do not predicate properties of objects in themselves but rather interactional properties that make sense only relative to human functioning."
113) The authors extend this idea of "truth by metaphor" into deciding whether a conventional metaphor itself is actually true or not.
114) A summary of the nature of understanding: Direct immediate understanding vs indirect understanding (human emotions, abstract concepts, mental activity, time, etc, things which cannot be fully comprehended on their own terms but must be understood in terms of other entities and experiences);
115) "Truth is therefore a function of our conceptual system. It is because many of our concepts are metaphorical in nature, and because we understand situations in terms of those concepts, that metaphors can be true or false." This leads to what the author's call an "experientialist" account of truth:
116) The Nature of the Experientialist Account of
Truth: "We understand as a statement as being true in a given situation when our understanding of the statement fits our understanding of the situation closely enough for our purposes."
117) Finally they show how even prominent contemporary approaches to the problem of absolute truth build in aspects of human understanding, which they claim to exclude. "A theory of truth based on understanding is obviously not a theory of 'purely objective
truth.' We do not believe that there is such a thing as absolute truth, and we think that it is
pointless to try to give a theory of it. However, it is traditional in Western philosophy to
assume that absolute truth is possible and to undertake to give an account of it. We would
like to point out how the most prominent contemporary approaches to the problem build in
aspects of human understanding, which they claim to exclude."
118) "Metaphors are basically devices for understanding and have little to do with objective reality, if there is such a thing. The fact that our conceptual system is inherently metaphorical, the fact that we understand the world, think, and function in metaphorical terms, and the fact that metaphors can not merely be understood but can be meaningful and true as well--these facts all suggest that an adequate account of meaning and truth can only be based on understanding."
Chapter 25: The Myths of Objectivism and Subjectivism
119) On the false paradigm that there's a choice between total objectivism or total subjectivism and no other option.
120) Note that while these guys call these myths "the myths of objectivism and subjectivism" but they don't mean "myth" in a derogatory sense: they actually consider a myth a way of comprehending experience, so they even fit this metaconcept into their model. [Nicely done!] "Like metaphors, myths are necessary for making sense of what goes on around us. All cultures have myths, and people cannot function without myth any more then they can function without metaphor."
121) On how the myth of objectivism is insidious in that it purports not to be a myth but also scorns myths and metaphors. "As we will see, the myth of objectivism is itself not objectively true." [Again, very nicely played right there.]
122) Pages 186-192 offer a good explanation of the myths of and problems with objectivism and subjectivism here, also a good history of Western thought.
123) Note that "Plato viewed poetry and rhetoric with suspicion and banned poetry from his utopian Republic because it gives no truth of its own." Aristotle on the other hand praised metaphor as useful to "induce insight" but his view here "was never carried over into modern philosophical thought." See Hobbes and Locke, both in the empiricist tradition showing contempt for figurative and metaphorical speech.
124) Per the authors: "The fear of metaphor and rhetoric in the empiricist tradition is a fear of subjectivism--a fear of emotion and the imagination."
125) On the development of the romantic tradition: "Wordsworth and Coleridge gladly left reason, science, and objectivity to the dehumanized empiricists."
126) An experientialist account of understanding and truth as a third choice, a third way: denying that subjectivity and objectivity are our only choices. The authors argue that metaphor is "imaginative rationality." "Ordinary rationality is imaginative by its very nature"
Chapter 26: The Myth of Objectivism in Western Philosophy and Linguistics
127) The rationalist school of thought versus the empiricist school of thought of objectivism, see also Kant who synthesized these two sub schools of objectivism, saying that we can have universally valid knowledge, this survives today in the form of logical positivism (like Husserl) and neo-rationalism from the Chomsky tradition.
128) On the myth of objectivism and how influential it is in Western culture, in ways we don't even notice. [This is analogous to the domain of economics, we're presented with a false paradigm: either Keynesianism or Monetarism and nobody or everybody pretends there any other alternative beyond these two schools--when in fact there's a whole set of choices beyond them!]
129) How standard theories of meaning are rooted in the myth of objectivism: meaning is objective, meaning is disembodied, it is independent of use, the building block theory of meaning is compositional, linguistic expressions are objects (this is the premise of objectivist linguistics--see the Chomsky-Whorf-Sapir view that language has a mental reality with linguistic expressions as mentally real objects), grammar is independent of meaning and understanding (which suggests that grammar can be studied independently of meaning or human understanding, this is standard Noam Chomsky tradition, the grammar is a matter of pure form independent of meaning).
130) The authors do something creative here: they use the objectivist theory of communication in terms of their own metaphorical concept of the conduit metaphor: language is a conduit or a container ("the meaning is right there in the words")
131) On the speaker's meaning or the utterer's words' meaning: "he's a real genius" said in a sarcastic tone is different from the "objective" meaning of the sentence; the objectivist would apply two objective meanings to the sentence; this also applies in the case of metaphor.
132) There are four automatic consequences of the objectivist account of metaphor:
1) There can be no such thing as a metaphorical concept or metaphorical meaning
2) Since metaphor is not a matter of meaning it is only a matter of language
3) There can be no such thing as a literal metaphor, it's a contradiction in terms
4) Metaphor only contributes to understanding by making us see objective similarities
Chapter 27: How Metaphor Reveals the Limitations of the Myth of Objectivism
133) First, the authors address how objectivists give an entirely different interpretation of metaphors: they are matters of mere language; they are technically nonexistent. For example in the phrase I can't digest all those facts an objectivist would argue that there are two words, homonyms, digest1 and digest2, one for food and one for ideas (likewise the word bank of a river versus bank for money).
134) To an objectivist the phrase digest an idea is a "dead metaphor" that now has its own literal meaning because it uses one of the objective definitions of digest.
135) Now the authors quickly review arguments against the abstraction, homonym and similarity views as they pertain to the objectivist account of a conventional metaphor, this is in order to prove that the entire objective is program is based on erroneous assumptions.
136) The "it's not our job" default of the objectivist: understanding similarities and systematic connections between words as "not our job," rather it's a matter for the psychologist or the philologist or someone else; thus we separate off the sense of a word from its idea, or separate its abstract semantics from psychological or sociological meaning; furthermore, the objectivist would argue that objective truth or absolute truth are entirely independent of anything having to do with human functioning or understanding. (Again this supposes the author's perspective that we can only give an account of truth and meaning relative to the way people function in the world and understand it. "We are simply in a different philosophical universe from such objectivists.")
137) Exceptions: see for example classical mathematics, which is an objectivist universe. See also formal semantics, which developed out of mathematical logic. "But the real world is not an objectivist universe."
138) The authors give an interesting corollary to their views here on "whether a computer could ever understand things the way people do. The answer we give is no--simply because understanding requires experience, and computers don't have bodies and don't have human experiences." Interesting.
Chapter 28: Some Inadequacies of the Myth of Subjectivism
139) Note again the dichotomy that "either it's objectivity or radical subjectivity"... this is a false dichotomy.
140) Some subjectivist positions flow mainly from the romantic tradition and are found in contemporary interpretations (or misinterpretations, probably) of the traditions of phenomenology and existentialism--what the authors call cafe phenomenology:
* Meaning is private
* Experience is purely holistic
* Meanings have no natural structure, etc.
141) These subjectivist positions all hinge on one basic assumption, that "experience has no natural structure" and "there can be no natural external constraints upon meaning and truth."
142) In contrast we can use metaphors to convey much experience although not necessarily everything fully and adequately, but "metaphor
provides a way of partially communicating unshared experiences.
Chapter 29: The Experientialist Alternative: Giving New Meaning to the Old Myths
143) On a new theory of knowledge, "experientialism," that preserves aspects behind both objectivism and subjectivism. "The fact that the myths of subjectivism and objectivism have stood for so long in Western culture indicates that each serves some important function."
144) Experientialism says that "truth is always relative to understanding, which is based on a non-universal conceptual system." This doesn't mean that we can't be as objective as we possibly can, but also it means to be humble about the putative objectivity of science, which often hides as much as it uncovers; we have to be honest about the limitations of scientific method.
145) Likewise with subjectivism: meaning is always meaning to a person. "Meaning is not cut and dried; it is a matter of imagination and a matter of constructing coherence."
146) [It's also interesting to treat objectivism and subjectivism as myths: kind of treating them literally as metaphors of meta-understanding or meta-metaphors you could say!]
Chapter 30: Understanding
147) Objectivism as a myth with a perspective of man separate from his environment; where successful functioning is conceived as mastery over the environment. Subjectivism as a perspective of overcoming the alienation that results from man being separate from his environment; in other words in using the objectivist view as well as from other men.
148) The experientialist myth takes the perspective of man as part of his environment, not separate; it attempts to unify or at least show that the objectivist and subjectivist myths are not opposed, or that both their perspectives can be met. Further the experientialist account of understanding involves mutual understanding, interpersonal communication, self understanding, ritual, other aspects that can help provide a richer perspective on many areas of experience in our everyday lives. At the same time objectivism and subjectivism provide "impoverished" views of all these areas because they miss "the motivating concerns of the other."
149) When dealing with someone with a completely different cultural background for example, "meaning is negotiated," you slowly figure out what you have in common, how you can communicate unshared experience and create a shared vision.
150) On the virtue of developing an experiential flexibility, and engaging in a process of viewing your life through new alternative metaphors.
151) On the role of ritual, which is preserved in the metaphors we live by, also our cultural metaphors are propagated by ritual, and per the authors "ritual forms an indispensable part of the experiential basis for our cultural metaphorical systems. There can be no culture without ritual."
Afterward
152) "But metaphors are not nearly things to be seen beyond. In fact, one can see beyond them only by using other metaphors. It is as though the ability to comprehend experience through metaphor were a sense, like seeing or touching or hearing, with metaphors providing the only ways to proceed and experience much of the world. Metaphor is as much a part of our functioning as our sense of touch, and as precious."
Afterward, 2003:
153) Here the author's talk about how their "small book" brought about a rethinking of many domains and many fields,"not just linguistics, cognitive science, and philosophy but also literary studies, politics, law, clinical psychology, religion, and even mathematics and the philosophy of science."
154) Four persistent false or fallacious views of metaphor. "The first fallacy is that metaphor is a matter of words, not concepts.
The second is that metaphor is based on similarity. The third is that all concepts are literal and that
none can be metaphorical. The fourth is that rational thought is in no way shaped by the nature of our
brains and bodies."
155) The fallacy that metaphor is nothing but a linguistic expression or a matter of words has kept many readers from grasping the idea that we think metaphorically; it's not about the way we talk it's the way we conceptualize and reason.
156) Note in the early 1990s a new level of metaphor analysis was discovered that the authors called deep analysis, that our most fundamental ideas: time, events, causation, morality, the self, "were almost entirely structured by elaborate systems of conceptual metaphor."
157) On metaphors for metaphor [meta-metaphor!!]:
158) On the Neural Theory of Language, which is a working theory to help incorporate the mind's use of metaphor; on how metaphors are neural phenomena where multiple parts of the brain are firing neurons as they're dealing with different subjects brought together in a metaphor.
159) Other broad theories of language: for example, the Blending Theory, which is concerned with conceptual integration, how conceptual structures are combined for use, especially in imaginative language uses.
160) Some corrections and clarifications in the original edition: They got certain primary metaphors backwards, like the argument is war metaphor is actually more primary in the form argument is struggle; people learn about argument before they learn about war; also on nuances between metaphor and metonymy.
161) Application of metaphor theory in other domains like literary analysis also in law; see Steven Winter's book A Clearing in the Forest, which is about the central role of metaphor in legal reasoning, starting with the corporation as a person; it's also common for the Supreme Court to use metaphor to extend legal categories developed in previous decisions; see also mathematics, which is taken to be literal and objective: in reality "mathematics too is metaphorical through and through."
162) "As we discuss in the final chapters of this book, the facts of conceptual metaphor theory are incompatible with many major assumptions of Western philosophy: it is just not true that all thought is conscious, literal, and disembodied."
To Read:
Dwight Bolinger: Meaning and Form
Ann Borkin: Problems in Form and Function
Amory B. Lovins: Soft Energy Paths
Richard Montague: Formal Philosophy
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson: Philosophy in the Flesh
***Mark Turner: Death Is the Mother of Beauty
Mark Turner: The Literary Mind
***Steven Winter: A Clearing in the Forest: Law, Life, and Mind
Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr.: The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding