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Metaphors We Live By
The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by", metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them.
In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.
In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.
276 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
About the author
George Lakoff
53 books778 followersGeorge Lakoff is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at UC Berkeley and is one of the founders of the field of cognitive science.
He is author of The New York Times bestseller Don't Think of an Elephant!, as well as Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, Whose Freedom?, and many other books and articles on cognitive science and linguistics.
He is author of The New York Times bestseller Don't Think of an Elephant!, as well as Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, Whose Freedom?, and many other books and articles on cognitive science and linguistics.
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December 29, 2020
Understanding One’s Native Tongue
It turns out there were really good existential reasons for paying attention in primary school English. All that business about grammar and figures of speech is actually essential for getting on in the world quite apart from speaking proper. This classic from the 1970’s shows why this is so in an entertaining and convincing way.
Language is a odd thing. It looks like something neutral, a tool for doing things, some good, some not so good depending on its user. But language is crafty; it seems to have its own interests more than ours at heart. The conspiracy of language becomes obvious as soon as one recognizes the fact that words are defined solely in terms of other words, never in terms of things outside of language. This is a difficult idea to hold onto, mainly because it suggests that none of us really knows what we might be talking about.
The way this works in daily life is by our inevitable and pervasive use of metaphors to describe the world and what we’re doing in it. We fall in love, offer food for thought, try not to waste time, and build theories. We don’t even notice that these sorts of activities are metaphorical. And “the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.” Of course, the ‘things’ in question are always other words. So language fools us into thinking its not even there.
Metaphors have their own agendas. For example we conduct an argument like we’re engaging in a war. We make defensible claims so that our thesis is not demolished by an attack by our opponents. These expressions are not without content or effect. Through them, at least in our Western European culture, we know that there are winners and losers in an argument just as in war. There are certainly other ways to consider argument - let’s say as leading to consensus in the culture of the North American Plains Indians for example - but not for us. We’re stuck with argumentative combat.
The pervasiveness of metaphors really can’t be overstated. They are literally in almost every sentence we utter. Our brains are effectively hardwired (!) by them. Metaphors We Live By documents (!) hundreds of what might be called root (!) metaphors which ramify (!) uncontrollably throughout the language. From Time is Money to Happy is Up to a sight which Fills our Field of Vision, without a shared grasp (!) of these metaphors, communication would be impossible.
And then things get even more complicated. Metaphors not only morph, they also breed. So Love is a physical force, but it is also a patient to be cared for, a madness to be overcome, a form of magic which entrances, and even a war within ourselves and with the beloved. So-called Conduit metaphors form composites which may hide their origins in language rather than real things. Thus ideas or meanings are metaphorically physical objects; and linguistic expressions are metaphorical containers for these objects; and we communicate these containers by sending them from person to person as if they were parcels. This last step, ‘sending’ may not look metaphorical but it is indeed so, just in disguise as something that is actually done.
The idea of rationality itself, Reason as the philosophers call it, starts to look just a tad unreasonable when considered in terms of the metaphors involved. Look at the ambiguity of what we think of as reason sufficient to compel intellectual assent:
“... because I'm bigger than you. (intimidation)
... because if you don't, I'll... (threat)
... because I'm the boss, (authority)
... because you're stupid, (insult)
... because you usually do it wrong, (belittling)
... because I have as much right as you do. (challenging authority)
... because I love you. (evading the issue) ...
... because if you will..., I'll... (bargaining)
... because you're so much better at it. (flattery)”
Whether one agrees with the linguistic and philosophical foundations of Metaphors We Live By, the book is essential reading for any educated person. It is direct, understandable, and immense fun. It is also revelatory. Give it a go, metaphorically speaking.
It turns out there were really good existential reasons for paying attention in primary school English. All that business about grammar and figures of speech is actually essential for getting on in the world quite apart from speaking proper. This classic from the 1970’s shows why this is so in an entertaining and convincing way.
Language is a odd thing. It looks like something neutral, a tool for doing things, some good, some not so good depending on its user. But language is crafty; it seems to have its own interests more than ours at heart. The conspiracy of language becomes obvious as soon as one recognizes the fact that words are defined solely in terms of other words, never in terms of things outside of language. This is a difficult idea to hold onto, mainly because it suggests that none of us really knows what we might be talking about.
The way this works in daily life is by our inevitable and pervasive use of metaphors to describe the world and what we’re doing in it. We fall in love, offer food for thought, try not to waste time, and build theories. We don’t even notice that these sorts of activities are metaphorical. And “the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.” Of course, the ‘things’ in question are always other words. So language fools us into thinking its not even there.
Metaphors have their own agendas. For example we conduct an argument like we’re engaging in a war. We make defensible claims so that our thesis is not demolished by an attack by our opponents. These expressions are not without content or effect. Through them, at least in our Western European culture, we know that there are winners and losers in an argument just as in war. There are certainly other ways to consider argument - let’s say as leading to consensus in the culture of the North American Plains Indians for example - but not for us. We’re stuck with argumentative combat.
The pervasiveness of metaphors really can’t be overstated. They are literally in almost every sentence we utter. Our brains are effectively hardwired (!) by them. Metaphors We Live By documents (!) hundreds of what might be called root (!) metaphors which ramify (!) uncontrollably throughout the language. From Time is Money to Happy is Up to a sight which Fills our Field of Vision, without a shared grasp (!) of these metaphors, communication would be impossible.
And then things get even more complicated. Metaphors not only morph, they also breed. So Love is a physical force, but it is also a patient to be cared for, a madness to be overcome, a form of magic which entrances, and even a war within ourselves and with the beloved. So-called Conduit metaphors form composites which may hide their origins in language rather than real things. Thus ideas or meanings are metaphorically physical objects; and linguistic expressions are metaphorical containers for these objects; and we communicate these containers by sending them from person to person as if they were parcels. This last step, ‘sending’ may not look metaphorical but it is indeed so, just in disguise as something that is actually done.
The idea of rationality itself, Reason as the philosophers call it, starts to look just a tad unreasonable when considered in terms of the metaphors involved. Look at the ambiguity of what we think of as reason sufficient to compel intellectual assent:
“... because I'm bigger than you. (intimidation)
... because if you don't, I'll... (threat)
... because I'm the boss, (authority)
... because you're stupid, (insult)
... because you usually do it wrong, (belittling)
... because I have as much right as you do. (challenging authority)
... because I love you. (evading the issue) ...
... because if you will..., I'll... (bargaining)
... because you're so much better at it. (flattery)”
Whether one agrees with the linguistic and philosophical foundations of Metaphors We Live By, the book is essential reading for any educated person. It is direct, understandable, and immense fun. It is also revelatory. Give it a go, metaphorically speaking.
March 9, 2011
I first read parts of this book nearly 20 years ago. I meant to get my hands on the whole thing back then too and read it from cover to cover, but for one reason or another I never seemed to get around to it. This is a pity, as it is the sort of book I really ought to have read in full back then and perhaps again a couple of times since. This really is an interesting book.
The main idea is that rather than metaphors being curious literary devices, that they in fact are central to how we understand the world. Many of the conclusions proposed in this book are fairly standard theory now. V.S. Ramachandran makes it clear that metaphors play a central role in our understanding how the brain works, although he goes somewhat further than Lakoff and Johnson in putting a lot of the reason why we use them in the first place down to synaesthesia. Lakoff and Johnson are concerned to stress that we would not be able to understand the world at all without our ability to create, understand and deploy metaphors.
Metaphor is distinguished from metonymy (where the part takes the place of the whole – as in, he’s in dance or the ham sandwich on two also wants a coke). They make the interesting point that when we say things like ‘we need some new faces around here’ this is partly because faces are the most important distinguishing feature people have and that, foe instance, handing someone a photo of your son which shows all of his body from the neck down is really not showing someone a photo of your son.
The key idea is that metaphors structure how we think about the world. The best examples of this are those around love and arguments.
In our culture we talk about arguing as if it was about war. We dig in to our positions, we take sides, we prepare for someone’s onslaught, we shoot down their arguments, we make tactical retreats and we defend our ground. In particularly acrimonious arguments we may even hurt the feelings of some of those around us and (in these days of military euphemism) we may refer to these people as collateral-damage.
As the authors say, just what would it mean if we changed our metaphors about arguments? What if arguments were no longer wars, but rather dances? Dances where someone leads and the other follows, where arguments have a certain pace and rhythm, where both parties are concerned with maintaining the flow of the argument and do what they can to help the other carry the tune and stay in time.
Whatever ‘argument as war’ means it could not be further from what ‘argument as dance’ means. This is such a fundamental shift in paradigm, as Kuhn would say, that really there is virtually no common ground between the two kinds of ‘arguments’.
The only time this book comes close to being a self-help book – which, I have to admit, the title almost does sound like – is when they discuss changing metaphors to change the nature of love.
They make the very interesting point that virtually all (that might actually be all, by the way) of the metaphors we use are used to help us understand something abstract (like love) in terms that have a concrete awareness for us, (like war – love is a battlefield, or a journey – the course of true love never ran smooth or a container – my heart is bursting open with love for you). They talk of how we might trasform our notions of love by discussing love in terms of a jointly constructed and collaborative work of art.
Imagine how such as notion moves our understanding of love from something that either is or isn’t, from something that happens to us beyond our control – towards love being something that needs to be worked on and created and composed and jointly constructed. Love then becomes something that is never actually completed, but rather is always a work in progress. I really like this idea. And notice, beyond the idea itself, that what is really happening here is that in changing the structure of the metaphor we get a series of consistent baby metaphors that each say something different and interesting about the nature of love. A metaphor family on a consistent theme.
And that is, in part, the point of this book. The person who introduced me to this book was a teacher. She said that once she had read this book she couldn’t help thinking about metaphors and what they said, how they were like a window into the souls of what people actually believed.
In Orwell’s Politics and the English Language he says that if people use mixed metaphors it shows they aren’t paying attention to what they are saying. And if they aren’t paying attention to what they are saying, that probably means what they are saying contains some kind of barbarism their ‘blind words’ (blind to the images their words create) display. The authors here point out that this works in reverse too. It is not so much that we choose our metaphors, it is rather that our metaphors choose us and tell us important things about what we think. Our metaphors cohere. They cluster together in like groups and in ways that Kuhn, referred to, in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, with the metaphor ‘to accrete’ - like barnacles on the bottom of a boat, if I remember rightly.
The teacher who introduced this book to me spoke of how once people in her profession had been referred to as teachers. There were problems with this name, of course. It implies a master/servant relationship between teacher and learner that anyone who has spent any time at all being one or the other would know is hardly accurate. Then they were called facilitators – which has nice implications (a bit like the word ‘catalyst’ in chemistry, something that must be present for the reaction to take place, but isn’t actually involved in the reaction itself in any way) – but perhaps this goes too far the other way, in that if teacher is too bold a term, facilitator is simply too humble. But at the time she was working in TAFE and this was a time when accountants had only just taken over – philistines with eyes directed towards the bottom line and with a tape measure always in one hand to ensure everything is appropriately calibrated. It was then that she stopped being a teacher and facilitator only to became a package delivery officer.
Notice the metaphor here is virtually indistinguishable from a postal worker. Notice too that education is literally about the transfer of ‘knowledge’ (I guess that is what fills the packages) from one head (full to overflowing with the stuff) to the other head (empty and ready for the receiving). This is the perfect example of what Freire called the ‘banking model’ of education, in yet another beautifully turned metaphor.
They make the interesting point that many of our metaphors are ontological – in that they are born from our lived experience. So, the reason why so many positive emotions are spatial where good = up, is because we experience standing tall and upright as being positive and healthy. Therefore we rise to the challenge, reach for the sky, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps or jump in the air when we are happy, but are brought down low, feel crushed under a terrible burden, shrink into the ground and so on when bad things happen. The consistency of metaphors really is interesting.
I’ve gone on for too long – but want to end with something quite different. This really is a book overflowing with interesting ideas, but one that I particularly liked was their saying that not only is it impossible to truly paraphrase any sentence in English, but they even explain why.
If I say Jack killed Tom – that is as strong a way as I can say that idea. Any other permutation of how to say it will only make it a weaker statement. Watch – ‘It is clear that Tom had been made a victim of Jack for one final time. These two sentences say almost the same thing – but all of the words between the subject of the sentence, the verb and the object make us wonder about the causal relationship between Jack and Tom dying. Even the sentence ‘Jack definitely killed Tom’ is weaker than ‘Jack killed Tom’. We think adverbs will ‘add to the verb’, but what they actually do is almost invariably take away from a naked verb’s power. The rule they suggest, is that the further away in words you make the cause from the effect, the weaker appears the causal relationship between the two.
There is a long discussion in this book regarding Objectivism and Subjectivism and how they see the need for what they call an experientialist reconciliation between these two extreme positions (not unlike Kant’s reconciliation of rationalism and empiricism). This isn’t nearly as interesting as the first 24 chapters had been– nonetheless, the last five or so chapters didn’t take away from the power of the ideas contained here. A wonderful book I highly recommend.
The main idea is that rather than metaphors being curious literary devices, that they in fact are central to how we understand the world. Many of the conclusions proposed in this book are fairly standard theory now. V.S. Ramachandran makes it clear that metaphors play a central role in our understanding how the brain works, although he goes somewhat further than Lakoff and Johnson in putting a lot of the reason why we use them in the first place down to synaesthesia. Lakoff and Johnson are concerned to stress that we would not be able to understand the world at all without our ability to create, understand and deploy metaphors.
Metaphor is distinguished from metonymy (where the part takes the place of the whole – as in, he’s in dance or the ham sandwich on two also wants a coke). They make the interesting point that when we say things like ‘we need some new faces around here’ this is partly because faces are the most important distinguishing feature people have and that, foe instance, handing someone a photo of your son which shows all of his body from the neck down is really not showing someone a photo of your son.
The key idea is that metaphors structure how we think about the world. The best examples of this are those around love and arguments.
In our culture we talk about arguing as if it was about war. We dig in to our positions, we take sides, we prepare for someone’s onslaught, we shoot down their arguments, we make tactical retreats and we defend our ground. In particularly acrimonious arguments we may even hurt the feelings of some of those around us and (in these days of military euphemism) we may refer to these people as collateral-damage.
As the authors say, just what would it mean if we changed our metaphors about arguments? What if arguments were no longer wars, but rather dances? Dances where someone leads and the other follows, where arguments have a certain pace and rhythm, where both parties are concerned with maintaining the flow of the argument and do what they can to help the other carry the tune and stay in time.
Whatever ‘argument as war’ means it could not be further from what ‘argument as dance’ means. This is such a fundamental shift in paradigm, as Kuhn would say, that really there is virtually no common ground between the two kinds of ‘arguments’.
The only time this book comes close to being a self-help book – which, I have to admit, the title almost does sound like – is when they discuss changing metaphors to change the nature of love.
They make the very interesting point that virtually all (that might actually be all, by the way) of the metaphors we use are used to help us understand something abstract (like love) in terms that have a concrete awareness for us, (like war – love is a battlefield, or a journey – the course of true love never ran smooth or a container – my heart is bursting open with love for you). They talk of how we might trasform our notions of love by discussing love in terms of a jointly constructed and collaborative work of art.
Imagine how such as notion moves our understanding of love from something that either is or isn’t, from something that happens to us beyond our control – towards love being something that needs to be worked on and created and composed and jointly constructed. Love then becomes something that is never actually completed, but rather is always a work in progress. I really like this idea. And notice, beyond the idea itself, that what is really happening here is that in changing the structure of the metaphor we get a series of consistent baby metaphors that each say something different and interesting about the nature of love. A metaphor family on a consistent theme.
And that is, in part, the point of this book. The person who introduced me to this book was a teacher. She said that once she had read this book she couldn’t help thinking about metaphors and what they said, how they were like a window into the souls of what people actually believed.
In Orwell’s Politics and the English Language he says that if people use mixed metaphors it shows they aren’t paying attention to what they are saying. And if they aren’t paying attention to what they are saying, that probably means what they are saying contains some kind of barbarism their ‘blind words’ (blind to the images their words create) display. The authors here point out that this works in reverse too. It is not so much that we choose our metaphors, it is rather that our metaphors choose us and tell us important things about what we think. Our metaphors cohere. They cluster together in like groups and in ways that Kuhn, referred to, in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, with the metaphor ‘to accrete’ - like barnacles on the bottom of a boat, if I remember rightly.
The teacher who introduced this book to me spoke of how once people in her profession had been referred to as teachers. There were problems with this name, of course. It implies a master/servant relationship between teacher and learner that anyone who has spent any time at all being one or the other would know is hardly accurate. Then they were called facilitators – which has nice implications (a bit like the word ‘catalyst’ in chemistry, something that must be present for the reaction to take place, but isn’t actually involved in the reaction itself in any way) – but perhaps this goes too far the other way, in that if teacher is too bold a term, facilitator is simply too humble. But at the time she was working in TAFE and this was a time when accountants had only just taken over – philistines with eyes directed towards the bottom line and with a tape measure always in one hand to ensure everything is appropriately calibrated. It was then that she stopped being a teacher and facilitator only to became a package delivery officer.
Notice the metaphor here is virtually indistinguishable from a postal worker. Notice too that education is literally about the transfer of ‘knowledge’ (I guess that is what fills the packages) from one head (full to overflowing with the stuff) to the other head (empty and ready for the receiving). This is the perfect example of what Freire called the ‘banking model’ of education, in yet another beautifully turned metaphor.
They make the interesting point that many of our metaphors are ontological – in that they are born from our lived experience. So, the reason why so many positive emotions are spatial where good = up, is because we experience standing tall and upright as being positive and healthy. Therefore we rise to the challenge, reach for the sky, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps or jump in the air when we are happy, but are brought down low, feel crushed under a terrible burden, shrink into the ground and so on when bad things happen. The consistency of metaphors really is interesting.
I’ve gone on for too long – but want to end with something quite different. This really is a book overflowing with interesting ideas, but one that I particularly liked was their saying that not only is it impossible to truly paraphrase any sentence in English, but they even explain why.
If I say Jack killed Tom – that is as strong a way as I can say that idea. Any other permutation of how to say it will only make it a weaker statement. Watch – ‘It is clear that Tom had been made a victim of Jack for one final time. These two sentences say almost the same thing – but all of the words between the subject of the sentence, the verb and the object make us wonder about the causal relationship between Jack and Tom dying. Even the sentence ‘Jack definitely killed Tom’ is weaker than ‘Jack killed Tom’. We think adverbs will ‘add to the verb’, but what they actually do is almost invariably take away from a naked verb’s power. The rule they suggest, is that the further away in words you make the cause from the effect, the weaker appears the causal relationship between the two.
There is a long discussion in this book regarding Objectivism and Subjectivism and how they see the need for what they call an experientialist reconciliation between these two extreme positions (not unlike Kant’s reconciliation of rationalism and empiricism). This isn’t nearly as interesting as the first 24 chapters had been– nonetheless, the last five or so chapters didn’t take away from the power of the ideas contained here. A wonderful book I highly recommend.
January 2, 2010
This book is very frequently quoted by linguists - I just looked it up on Google Scholar, and found a staggering 13517 citations. Nearly everyone has at least glanced through it, and the ideas have permeated the field.
There was a nice Lakoff-related moment during one of the invited talks at a conference I attended during the summer. The speaker, who was giving an excellent presentation on loan-words related to food, hadn't been able to resist putting in a slide where he glanced at an interesting side issue. "By the way", he said, "this is a good example of the WOMAN-AS-DESSERT metaphor". Many people nodded appreciatively.
If you aren't familiar with Lakoff's work, just think about that for a moment. Though it may temporarily stop you calling your loved one "honey" or "sweetie".
There was a nice Lakoff-related moment during one of the invited talks at a conference I attended during the summer. The speaker, who was giving an excellent presentation on loan-words related to food, hadn't been able to resist putting in a slide where he glanced at an interesting side issue. "By the way", he said, "this is a good example of the WOMAN-AS-DESSERT metaphor". Many people nodded appreciatively.
If you aren't familiar with Lakoff's work, just think about that for a moment. Though it may temporarily stop you calling your loved one "honey" or "sweetie".
July 7, 2012
Here are my reading notes. I thought the book was fine. Mostly interesting in the first half. The rest of the book contains a lot of repetitive statements and circular phrases.
# The metaphor as a concept
The way we talk is peppered with metaphors. For instance, we talk of debates the way we talk of warfare.
These metaphors often extend beyond a simple idiom and define a whole system of thought. For instance, we think of time as money -- as a commodity -- and so we use a slew of expressions like "budgeting one's time" or "using up one's time".
# The opportunity cost of metaphors
This view on concepts is opinionated and necessarily hides alternative views. For instance, language about language contains the following metaphors (quoting Michael Reddy):
- Ideas are objects
- Linguistic expressions are containers
- Communication is sending
All these points can be summarized as the "conduit" metaphor. We put ideas in containers and send them down the conduit. The listener then extracts the ideas out of the containers. This way of thinking about language makes sense most of the time. But it breaks down sometimes. For instance, if context is required to extract the ideas, then the ideas cannot be seen as self-contained objects.
These metaphors we use are only partial matches for the underlying concepts they represent.
# Higher-level metaphors
Some higher-level metaphors also exist. For instance, the idea of up and down can be used to talk about good and bad, or healthy and sick, or sleepy and awake. These metaphors are consistent and coherent across. For instance, down is always sad and down is always negative across concepts (sad/sick/sleeping).
These higher-level metaphors are based on experience and therefore vary from culture to culture. These higher-level metaphors always originate from a physical experience.
Sometimes these higher-level metaphors will clash. Good is up, but a rising crime rate is not. These clashes can be explained by assigning priorities to the higher-level metaphors. More is up wins over good is up. So we say that the crime rate is up without thinking that it is a good thing.
These higher-level metaphors might be orientational (up/down/far/near/left/right). Or ontological, for instance when we personify concepts (debt is killing me), quantify concepts (I need a lot of patience), assign cause (out of anger), or single out aspects of a concept (the brutality of war).
Other metaphors are also shaped by our biases and experiences:
- Personification: when we attribute human characteristics to objects, we are constrained by the set of human characteristics we experience.
- Metonymy: when we choose to represent an object through only a part of that object, we choose the part that makes the most sense in the given context.
# Metaphorical concepts as partial matches
These metaphorical concepts only partially match to the underlying concept. In this case, multiple metaphorical concepts can describe the same thing. Ideas are both food that we might "eat up" or valuable objects that we "steal".
To talk about a concept outside the realm of our normal metaphorical concepts, we might also use an actual imaginative, creative, metaphor. A metaphor that does not stem from our regular use of the language.
# Grounding
Our language seems to emerge from immediately felt experiences. From the physical to the figurative. For instance:
- Harry is in the kitchen
- Harry is in the Elks
- Harry is in love
These three uses of 'in' (physical, social, emotional) are quite basic. But it is clear that the first statement is the most immediate. The other two are thin metaphors based on the meaning of being 'in'.
# Causation
Causation is often seen as an undivisible concept. But it can be developed from a physical experience: direct physical manipulation. Following physical manipulation, an object might move, change, evaporate, etc, and we can then develop causation as a metaphorical concept from that initial experience. So one thing might:
- turn into another
- grow into another
- give birth to another
- father another
All these metaphorical concepts are ways for us to talk about causation. The direct experience of manipulation can be called a prototype. An indivisible concept that we use to classify other concepts. A foreign concept that closely resembles direct manipulation will be classified as such (e.g. using a stick to kick the cue ball).
# Experiences
We can structure our experiences along different dimensions. Usually we perceive:
- Participants
- Parts
- Stages
- A linear sequence
- A purpose
All these dimensions come together to form a gestalt. Two gestalts sharing the same descriptions for most of these dimensions will likely share metaphorical concepts.
# Coherence and consistency
Two metaphorical concepts might be consistent: they can be mixed together to describe a concept. But usually two metaphorical concepts will be merely coherent: they will both cover a different aspect of the concept without disagreeing with each other.
# Giving meaning to form
The form can also alter the meaning of the content:
- More form leads to more content: if we repeat a word, we are emphasizing its content.
- Closeness brings strength: if two metaphors are related to each other, the closer they are in the sentence the stronger the link is between the two.
- Me-first orientation: people are considered as erect, forward moving, active beings. Thus these concepts will usually come first in expressions like up and down, front and back, or active and passive.
It follows from these principles that a true paraphrase is impossible to achieve. Different turns of phrase will yield subtle variations in meaning.
# Truth
We then view truth as built up through metaphors that are themselves built up from other metaphors built up from the most immediate experiences. "We understand 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." (loc:3055)
This view of truth clashes with both objectivism and subjectivism. It inserts itself in some middle ground. This view of truth claims that there is no objective truth, as long as there is no universal metaphorical universe. And it clashes with subjectivism in that truth is not individual, but rather shared by all the individuals that share similar metaphorical concepts.
# The metaphor as a concept
The way we talk is peppered with metaphors. For instance, we talk of debates the way we talk of warfare.
These metaphors often extend beyond a simple idiom and define a whole system of thought. For instance, we think of time as money -- as a commodity -- and so we use a slew of expressions like "budgeting one's time" or "using up one's time".
# The opportunity cost of metaphors
This view on concepts is opinionated and necessarily hides alternative views. For instance, language about language contains the following metaphors (quoting Michael Reddy):
- Ideas are objects
- Linguistic expressions are containers
- Communication is sending
All these points can be summarized as the "conduit" metaphor. We put ideas in containers and send them down the conduit. The listener then extracts the ideas out of the containers. This way of thinking about language makes sense most of the time. But it breaks down sometimes. For instance, if context is required to extract the ideas, then the ideas cannot be seen as self-contained objects.
These metaphors we use are only partial matches for the underlying concepts they represent.
# Higher-level metaphors
Some higher-level metaphors also exist. For instance, the idea of up and down can be used to talk about good and bad, or healthy and sick, or sleepy and awake. These metaphors are consistent and coherent across. For instance, down is always sad and down is always negative across concepts (sad/sick/sleeping).
These higher-level metaphors are based on experience and therefore vary from culture to culture. These higher-level metaphors always originate from a physical experience.
Sometimes these higher-level metaphors will clash. Good is up, but a rising crime rate is not. These clashes can be explained by assigning priorities to the higher-level metaphors. More is up wins over good is up. So we say that the crime rate is up without thinking that it is a good thing.
These higher-level metaphors might be orientational (up/down/far/near/left/right). Or ontological, for instance when we personify concepts (debt is killing me), quantify concepts (I need a lot of patience), assign cause (out of anger), or single out aspects of a concept (the brutality of war).
Other metaphors are also shaped by our biases and experiences:
- Personification: when we attribute human characteristics to objects, we are constrained by the set of human characteristics we experience.
- Metonymy: when we choose to represent an object through only a part of that object, we choose the part that makes the most sense in the given context.
# Metaphorical concepts as partial matches
These metaphorical concepts only partially match to the underlying concept. In this case, multiple metaphorical concepts can describe the same thing. Ideas are both food that we might "eat up" or valuable objects that we "steal".
To talk about a concept outside the realm of our normal metaphorical concepts, we might also use an actual imaginative, creative, metaphor. A metaphor that does not stem from our regular use of the language.
# Grounding
Our language seems to emerge from immediately felt experiences. From the physical to the figurative. For instance:
- Harry is in the kitchen
- Harry is in the Elks
- Harry is in love
These three uses of 'in' (physical, social, emotional) are quite basic. But it is clear that the first statement is the most immediate. The other two are thin metaphors based on the meaning of being 'in'.
# Causation
Causation is often seen as an undivisible concept. But it can be developed from a physical experience: direct physical manipulation. Following physical manipulation, an object might move, change, evaporate, etc, and we can then develop causation as a metaphorical concept from that initial experience. So one thing might:
- turn into another
- grow into another
- give birth to another
- father another
All these metaphorical concepts are ways for us to talk about causation. The direct experience of manipulation can be called a prototype. An indivisible concept that we use to classify other concepts. A foreign concept that closely resembles direct manipulation will be classified as such (e.g. using a stick to kick the cue ball).
# Experiences
We can structure our experiences along different dimensions. Usually we perceive:
- Participants
- Parts
- Stages
- A linear sequence
- A purpose
All these dimensions come together to form a gestalt. Two gestalts sharing the same descriptions for most of these dimensions will likely share metaphorical concepts.
# Coherence and consistency
Two metaphorical concepts might be consistent: they can be mixed together to describe a concept. But usually two metaphorical concepts will be merely coherent: they will both cover a different aspect of the concept without disagreeing with each other.
# Giving meaning to form
The form can also alter the meaning of the content:
- More form leads to more content: if we repeat a word, we are emphasizing its content.
- Closeness brings strength: if two metaphors are related to each other, the closer they are in the sentence the stronger the link is between the two.
- Me-first orientation: people are considered as erect, forward moving, active beings. Thus these concepts will usually come first in expressions like up and down, front and back, or active and passive.
It follows from these principles that a true paraphrase is impossible to achieve. Different turns of phrase will yield subtle variations in meaning.
# Truth
We then view truth as built up through metaphors that are themselves built up from other metaphors built up from the most immediate experiences. "We understand 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." (loc:3055)
This view of truth clashes with both objectivism and subjectivism. It inserts itself in some middle ground. This view of truth claims that there is no objective truth, as long as there is no universal metaphorical universe. And it clashes with subjectivism in that truth is not individual, but rather shared by all the individuals that share similar metaphorical concepts.
December 30, 2020
This is one of the most important books I've had the privilege of reading.
It changed me.
It's like a lightbulb went on, and a bomb went off.
It's profound magic for real.
It changed me.
It's like a lightbulb went on, and a bomb went off.
It's profound magic for real.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 10, 2017
كيف نحيا بها؟
التصور الشائع عن الاستعارة أنها مظهر لغوي، زخرف من القول، ليست وسيلة نفهم ��ها العالم.
وهذا ما يعارضه لايكوف وجونسون!
فجوهر الاستعارة أنها تجعلنا نفهم شيء من خلال شيء آخر، الاستعارة هنا تعني التصور الاستعاري
تجعلنا نقبض على أشياء ملموسة بصورة غير واضحة (كالعواطف - التجريدات - الأفكار...إلخ) من خلال أشياء أكثر وضوحا في تجربتنا
مثلا، استعارة "الجدال حرب" فنحن نقول (هدمت حجته، دافع عن ادعاءه، أصبت الهدف، سقطت براهينه) فهنا
نحن نفم "الجدال" من خلال تصور الحرب
ليس الأمر لغويًا فقط متعلق بحديثنا عن الجدال.
بل هو في الكيفية التي نفهم بها الجدال ونتصوره بها
التصور الاستعاري نسقي، فهو غير عشوائي، مبنين
(Structuration)
من خلال جشطلتات تجريبية منبثقة من تجربتنا الفيزيائية والثقافية
وهو أيضا يُبنين تصورنا وتفكيرنا بصورة جزئية
فجلّ تصوراتنا تفهم جزئيا من خلال استعارات/تصورات أخرى
___
دايمًا باستغرب من تعاملنا مع الأفكار كـ "أكل"، فبنقول مثلا نهضم الأفكار، قارئ نهم، أفكار مسمومة، غذاء العقل، كتاب دسم...إلخ. تصور الأفكار كطعام، موجود في الإنجليزية بردو زي:
I just can't swallow that claim = مش عارف أبلع هذا الادعاء،
أو مثلا
That argument smells fishy = هذه الحجة رائحتها نتنة، وأمثلة كتير على كده،
وأظن إن مش الإنجليزية والعربية بس مشتركين في استعارة "الأفكار طعام
وفيه استعارات تانية لتصور الأفكار، زي إنها أشخاص (ستظل حيّة، الفكرة وليدة، لها أب زي "أبو اللسانيات، ماتت الفكرة في مهدها) أو إن الأفكار نباتات (تعطي ثمار، تنمو، تزدهر/تزهر، لها فروع وجذور)، أو إنها مال (ثروة، غنى، كنز)، أو أدوات باترة، حاسمة جريئة حادة، وممكن قاتلة بردو.
-------
نفهم الحب مثلا من خلال تصورات استعارية أخرى، كـ الحب سفر/الحب جنون/الحب سحر/الحب جاذبية
نقبض على هذا المفهوم الغامض من خلال تصورات أخرى أكثر وضوحا، فنفهمه من خلالها
كل تصور/استعارة تقبض جزئيا على جانب من المفهوم
--------
الاستعارات البنيوية، تجعلنا نبنين تصورا استعاريا ما من خلال تصور آخر
مثلا، الجدال حرب، الزمن مال (فلا يكون لدينا وقت - ونخسر الوقت - ونكسبه أيضا)
الاستعارات الاتجاهية، هي نسق كامل من تصورات متعالقة، مرتبطة بمحيطنا الفضائي
فمهومنا لـ فوق-تحت
فنفهم السعادة مثلا على انها فوق (ترفع معنوياتي- يحلق في السماء) وبالعكس فالشقاء تحت، فنسقط في الهاوية وتنخفض معناويتنا...إلخ
كذا، فالأكثر فوق والأقل تحت، والهيمنة فوق والخضوع تحت.
الاستعارة الانطلوجية، من خلالها يتم مقولة الأشياء غير المحددة/الغامضة وتعينها وتكميمها
فنصنع من خلالها طرقا للنظر، مؤسسة على تجربتنا الفيزيائية/الجسدية.
نعامل أشياء غامضة ككيانات، كمادة . . نصنع حدودا ونعين مظاهرا وأسبابا
=====
- يجدال لايكوف وجونسون، النزعة الموضوعية والذاتية، تلك الثنائية الشهيرة، يقترحان سبيلا ثالثا، تجريبيا مؤسس على "الفهم"، كيف نفهم العالم ونعيش تجربتنا، يجادلان بتبيان بنية الاستعارة المنسجمة، داخليا وخارجيا، يجادلان بنسقيتها، بكيفية خلقها للمعنى وصنعها للحقيقة.
July 22, 2018
I got quite a nutritious repast out of this, though the didactic presentation and excessive repeating of elements of their arguments stuck in my throat sometimes. Already you may detect me using a metaphor of reading as a meal of food. Which builds on another metaphor of ideas as objects that can be conveyed as through a conduit (a throat). I can’t think without metaphors, so some of the edifice here is often preaching to the choir (to lean on another metaphor). Yet I was inspired how the authors pushed so hard beyond the objectivist agenda in linguistics to convince me by the end that metaphor is a foundation for understanding in general. It was also reassuring in their 2003 afterword to this 1980 publication to learn how this work spawned a large enterprise of research building on its floorplan (to use both birth and building metaphors).
Both the title and blurb for this book caught my interest by pointing to the importance of metaphor beyond the common presumption that its uses just reflect poetical thinking and colorful ways of communicating human experience. I was recently impressed how one of oldest written epics, “The Iliad”, brims with metaphors in almost every line. The very arrows of war were hungry for their targets, and the whole shebang was kicked off with “Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles.” “The Odyssey” builds its story out of a “life as a journey” allegory while strangely almost devoid of simple metaphors or similes. I also still impressed from reading Joyce’s “Ulysses” with his compression of a life journey to a single day while seeming to exercise the English language (and Irish variants) for its inherent content of metaphors. With such priming I was ripe for a serious look at metaphor (to use a mixed metaphor).
The philosophers over the ages have tended to seek rigorous language to convey their truths, and scientists, insecure over the limitations of language in capturing their principles, have pursued mathematical models whenever possible. Metaphor, which essentially compares one thing or system with another, would thus seem like a lie to them from the getgo. Step by step the authors walk you beyond that simplified outlook. They work their way through a number of metaphorical systems and demonstrate how they are often a natural extension of our bodies (such as “grasp an idea” to parallel physical holding and handling) or of the three-dimensional space of our perceptual framework (such as many ideas framed in the up-down dimension, as in “his mood was up” and “the stock market is down”).
Other metaphorical systems, such as “argument as war” or “love as a journey”, can be so rich in their parallels that the metaphors can take on a life of its own and even contribute to forging new modes of understanding and frames for action. For example, like war, an argument can be seen as involving planning of the weapons and ammunition to use, scouting out and engaging an enemy, frontal assaults and retreats, bluffs and intimidations, feints and ambushes, etc. No one can doubt the scheme is useful for understanding the meanings of argument from a non-diplomatic perspective. It is also easy to appreciate how true believers in the metaphor might act on the basis of that perspective and pursue the analogized skills of war to win arguments. There is enough richness to the metaphorical scheme that you can use it in reverse to generate new insights about the subject being modeled. At a mention by the authors of children fighting with the tyrannical logic of their parents as prime adopters of the metaphor, I am inspired to imagine what the counterpart in behavior would be for the nuclear option for escalating a battle over going to bed. :-)
Another common metaphor to depict the realities of an argument, a thesis, or any complex plan uses elements from building and architecture. In this case the metaphorical elements only cohere in limited ways to real systems. For example, we garnish some understanding in talk of foundations and frameworks for an argument or plans, and we can even get some mileage with analogies to roofs and windows to metaphorically shelter the dwellers in a logical edifice from rain and to let in light from outside, but few would push the parallels into details like cupboards and staircases.
As a potent example of metaphors generating new aspects of knowledge, they cite the example of one of their graduate students from Iran who took the phrase “solutions to a problem” as part of a chemical metaphor. She imagined the effort to deal with problems as like dissolving them in water, deriving meaning from the insight that one’s problems can be hidden by immersion in other issues but they never really go away, as shown when the substances solubilized emerge again by precipitation. Most other people in our society take recourse to the problems-as-puzzles metaphor and thereby operate on the presumption that they can be resolved with the correct solutions.
So much of our languages lend themselves to these kinds of metaphors that you can’t avoid using them. Think of our use of “I see” for “I understand.” But the authors point out that many scholars of linguistics would say the connection with vision is simply an accident and that the word applied to vision and to understanding are homonyms. The authors spend a lot of time attacking this outlook, much in the vein of reduction ad absurdum. Thus, it seems patently unlikely that the apparent container metaphor implied through the myriad uses of the prepositional dimension of in versus out (“in the doghouse”, “in a clearing”, “in love”; “out of the loop”, “outside help”) can be disputed by speaking of effectively different words as homonyms in each case. And the simple example of “buttressing an argument” to convey provision of additional support demonstrates it ridiculous to imagine that the same word would be separately adopted for both the building context and that of contentious discourse.
The objectivist tradition places much emphasis on developing a system and method for using language to express truth. But the authors take great pains to demonstrate how assessing the truth of statements requires understanding from human perceptual and cultural perspectives. To parse the truth out of a statement like “inflation is going up” or “the fog lies in front of the mountain” is possible only by taking into account our metaphorical understanding of rising for increasing and imposing entity boundaries and orientations perceptual data from the world that is continuously variable. Metaphor shines best as a means to understanding truth when it highlights parallels between more abstract or conceptual realities and more concrete ones from the physical world, our perceptions, and emotions. For example, just think of the illuminating power of the metaphor of “love as a mutual journey” or of “love is a kind of madness.”
As another example, the metaphor of “life as a story” can convey a lot of meaning to us from the elements characters, roles, causal influences, stages etc. That new insights can emerge from using such a scheme is illustrated when the authors take up Shakespeare’s variant of the metaphor: “Life’s … a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It highlights how under certain conditions the presumption of meaning from thinking life as a story can be false.
Against what he calls the dominating myth of objectivism and almost defeated myth of subjectivism, the authors subsume their conceptual theory of metaphor under the roof of a new “myth of experientalism”. From my limited knowledge of the history of philosophy, I can see some borrowing from epistemology approaches of phenomenology and of the structuralism of Piaget and similarities to the interactional approaches to the nature-nurture problem in psychology and preformation versus epigenesis in developmental biology. In order for you to appreciate the thrust and scope of this work, I share some concluding statements, which are pretty accessible:
We see a single human motivation behind the myths of both objectivism and subjectivism, namely, a concern for understanding. The myth of objectivism reflects the human need to understand the external world in order to be able to function successfully in it. The myth of subjectivism is focused on internal aspects of understanding—what the individual finds meaningful and what makes life worth living. The experientalist myth suggests that these are not opposing concerns. It offers a perspective from which both concerns can be met at once. …
Within the experientalist myth, understanding emerges from interaction, with constant negotiation with the environment and other people. It emerges in the following way: the nature of our bodies and our physical and cultural environment imposes a structure on our experience, in terms of natural dimensions of the sort we have discussed. Recurrent experience leads to the formation of categories, which are experiental gestalts with those natural dimensions. Such gestalts define coherence in our experience. We understand our experience directly when we see it as being structured coherently in terms of gestalts that have emerged directly from interaction with and in our environment. We understand experience metaphorically when we use a gestalt from one domain of experience to structure experience in another domain.
From the experientalist perspective, truth depends on understanding, which emerges from functioning in the world. It is through such understanding that the experientalist alternative meets the objectivist’s need for an account of truth. It is through the coherent structuring of experience that the experientalist alternative satisfies the subjectivist’s need for personal meaning and significance.
From the Wiki entry on Lakoff (Link), I learn how he was ensconced as a profession of linguistics at UC Berkeley for 40 years and advanced his cognitive theory of metaphor into the realms of political and economic science, neurolinguistics, and, even more boldly, of mathematics, which he found rife with reliance on metaphors from top to bottom. I enjoyed the bits in the piece which reveal him weathering vicious attacks from Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker.
Both the title and blurb for this book caught my interest by pointing to the importance of metaphor beyond the common presumption that its uses just reflect poetical thinking and colorful ways of communicating human experience. I was recently impressed how one of oldest written epics, “The Iliad”, brims with metaphors in almost every line. The very arrows of war were hungry for their targets, and the whole shebang was kicked off with “Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles.” “The Odyssey” builds its story out of a “life as a journey” allegory while strangely almost devoid of simple metaphors or similes. I also still impressed from reading Joyce’s “Ulysses” with his compression of a life journey to a single day while seeming to exercise the English language (and Irish variants) for its inherent content of metaphors. With such priming I was ripe for a serious look at metaphor (to use a mixed metaphor).
The philosophers over the ages have tended to seek rigorous language to convey their truths, and scientists, insecure over the limitations of language in capturing their principles, have pursued mathematical models whenever possible. Metaphor, which essentially compares one thing or system with another, would thus seem like a lie to them from the getgo. Step by step the authors walk you beyond that simplified outlook. They work their way through a number of metaphorical systems and demonstrate how they are often a natural extension of our bodies (such as “grasp an idea” to parallel physical holding and handling) or of the three-dimensional space of our perceptual framework (such as many ideas framed in the up-down dimension, as in “his mood was up” and “the stock market is down”).
Other metaphorical systems, such as “argument as war” or “love as a journey”, can be so rich in their parallels that the metaphors can take on a life of its own and even contribute to forging new modes of understanding and frames for action. For example, like war, an argument can be seen as involving planning of the weapons and ammunition to use, scouting out and engaging an enemy, frontal assaults and retreats, bluffs and intimidations, feints and ambushes, etc. No one can doubt the scheme is useful for understanding the meanings of argument from a non-diplomatic perspective. It is also easy to appreciate how true believers in the metaphor might act on the basis of that perspective and pursue the analogized skills of war to win arguments. There is enough richness to the metaphorical scheme that you can use it in reverse to generate new insights about the subject being modeled. At a mention by the authors of children fighting with the tyrannical logic of their parents as prime adopters of the metaphor, I am inspired to imagine what the counterpart in behavior would be for the nuclear option for escalating a battle over going to bed. :-)
Another common metaphor to depict the realities of an argument, a thesis, or any complex plan uses elements from building and architecture. In this case the metaphorical elements only cohere in limited ways to real systems. For example, we garnish some understanding in talk of foundations and frameworks for an argument or plans, and we can even get some mileage with analogies to roofs and windows to metaphorically shelter the dwellers in a logical edifice from rain and to let in light from outside, but few would push the parallels into details like cupboards and staircases.
As a potent example of metaphors generating new aspects of knowledge, they cite the example of one of their graduate students from Iran who took the phrase “solutions to a problem” as part of a chemical metaphor. She imagined the effort to deal with problems as like dissolving them in water, deriving meaning from the insight that one’s problems can be hidden by immersion in other issues but they never really go away, as shown when the substances solubilized emerge again by precipitation. Most other people in our society take recourse to the problems-as-puzzles metaphor and thereby operate on the presumption that they can be resolved with the correct solutions.
So much of our languages lend themselves to these kinds of metaphors that you can’t avoid using them. Think of our use of “I see” for “I understand.” But the authors point out that many scholars of linguistics would say the connection with vision is simply an accident and that the word applied to vision and to understanding are homonyms. The authors spend a lot of time attacking this outlook, much in the vein of reduction ad absurdum. Thus, it seems patently unlikely that the apparent container metaphor implied through the myriad uses of the prepositional dimension of in versus out (“in the doghouse”, “in a clearing”, “in love”; “out of the loop”, “outside help”) can be disputed by speaking of effectively different words as homonyms in each case. And the simple example of “buttressing an argument” to convey provision of additional support demonstrates it ridiculous to imagine that the same word would be separately adopted for both the building context and that of contentious discourse.
The objectivist tradition places much emphasis on developing a system and method for using language to express truth. But the authors take great pains to demonstrate how assessing the truth of statements requires understanding from human perceptual and cultural perspectives. To parse the truth out of a statement like “inflation is going up” or “the fog lies in front of the mountain” is possible only by taking into account our metaphorical understanding of rising for increasing and imposing entity boundaries and orientations perceptual data from the world that is continuously variable. Metaphor shines best as a means to understanding truth when it highlights parallels between more abstract or conceptual realities and more concrete ones from the physical world, our perceptions, and emotions. For example, just think of the illuminating power of the metaphor of “love as a mutual journey” or of “love is a kind of madness.”
As another example, the metaphor of “life as a story” can convey a lot of meaning to us from the elements characters, roles, causal influences, stages etc. That new insights can emerge from using such a scheme is illustrated when the authors take up Shakespeare’s variant of the metaphor: “Life’s … a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It highlights how under certain conditions the presumption of meaning from thinking life as a story can be false.
Against what he calls the dominating myth of objectivism and almost defeated myth of subjectivism, the authors subsume their conceptual theory of metaphor under the roof of a new “myth of experientalism”. From my limited knowledge of the history of philosophy, I can see some borrowing from epistemology approaches of phenomenology and of the structuralism of Piaget and similarities to the interactional approaches to the nature-nurture problem in psychology and preformation versus epigenesis in developmental biology. In order for you to appreciate the thrust and scope of this work, I share some concluding statements, which are pretty accessible:
We see a single human motivation behind the myths of both objectivism and subjectivism, namely, a concern for understanding. The myth of objectivism reflects the human need to understand the external world in order to be able to function successfully in it. The myth of subjectivism is focused on internal aspects of understanding—what the individual finds meaningful and what makes life worth living. The experientalist myth suggests that these are not opposing concerns. It offers a perspective from which both concerns can be met at once. …
Within the experientalist myth, understanding emerges from interaction, with constant negotiation with the environment and other people. It emerges in the following way: the nature of our bodies and our physical and cultural environment imposes a structure on our experience, in terms of natural dimensions of the sort we have discussed. Recurrent experience leads to the formation of categories, which are experiental gestalts with those natural dimensions. Such gestalts define coherence in our experience. We understand our experience directly when we see it as being structured coherently in terms of gestalts that have emerged directly from interaction with and in our environment. We understand experience metaphorically when we use a gestalt from one domain of experience to structure experience in another domain.
From the experientalist perspective, truth depends on understanding, which emerges from functioning in the world. It is through such understanding that the experientalist alternative meets the objectivist’s need for an account of truth. It is through the coherent structuring of experience that the experientalist alternative satisfies the subjectivist’s need for personal meaning and significance.
From the Wiki entry on Lakoff (Link), I learn how he was ensconced as a profession of linguistics at UC Berkeley for 40 years and advanced his cognitive theory of metaphor into the realms of political and economic science, neurolinguistics, and, even more boldly, of mathematics, which he found rife with reliance on metaphors from top to bottom. I enjoyed the bits in the piece which reveal him weathering vicious attacks from Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker.
February 10, 2019
This is a book that is going to shed a new light on the seemingly trivial subject of metaphors. The beginning of the book wasn’t exciting to me, so I almost put it down. It felt too basic and uninspiring. Luckily, the authors were probably just warming up the reader before getting into some serious matters. As the book progressed, things like conceptualization, linguistics and psychology started to intervene, and it eventually became a very interesting read.
The way most of us think about metaphors would fall into linguistic perspectives, giving us an incomplete picture about the phenomena of metaphors. This book is written for an audience from many years ago, but the ideas are still valid. It has the power to enrich our understanding of how we actually live by metaphors while providing a completer and more fundamental picture about what metaphors actually are and their workings on us. I have learned one interesting thing (among many others): it is virtually impossible to comprehend totalities like our feelings or spiritual concepts without mentally (and if needed, verbally) breaking them down into partial metaphorical subsystems.
One of the examples of what this book is capable of revealing can be about how metaphors are used in different life situations. For instance, when we argue with someone, in most cases, we use war metaphors. We defend our position, we prepare ammunition to shoot at the weak parts of our counterpart’s argument, we don’t give up easily, we gain or lose ground, and finally, we win or lose. As the authors suggest, try a little experiment where you approach an argument as you would a dance. How would this alter the situation and the way of thinking and talking? This would be a completely different culture of thinking and conversation, where aesthetics, lead and follow, balance, timing, and the need to complete a dance in a gracious manner would be the primary concerns. The kind of metaphors we employ in our thinking and conversations have a tremendous impact on how we experience things (like arguments), carry them out, and talk about them. In the case of an argument, we would actually experience arguing with the help of dance metaphors as something very different as compared to a conversation that employs war metaphors. It would probably be a rather pleasant experience where people would part as friends, as opposed to revenge-seeking losers of war.
Metaphors actually are more than literally structures. They structure virtually everything in regards to how we think about the world, how we perceive and respond to other humans (and other creatures), how we communicate, and even how we feel! Besides, I’ve now learned, that metaphors have tremendous power. They enable us to manipulate others and be manipulated (though, not so easily after you have read this book!). By choosing an appropriate metaphor for your conversation, you might set the stage for it and conduct your communication in a way you wish, instead of giving the opportunity to your counterpart to disturb the harmony of it (notice the influence from the book here).
It was really interesting to see the authors’ hard quest against how the objectivists and the subjectivists view the world of metaphors. Their view is basically grounded in trivializing the essence, the mechanics, the significance, and the benefits of metaphors in human life. There’s a bunch of very good arguments on what those philosophies miss out on regarding subject matter.
The authors succeeded in installing a completely new feature into my brain. Now, when I catch myself using a metaphor, I see those extra dimensions in my thinking and language use, and I understand much better why I chose a particular metaphor or how or in what ways my understating of the world was conceptualized. This is really exciting!
This book revealed in what ways metaphors are the essential part of the human conceptualization apparatus. This deeper level of understanding is one of the keys to understanding the psychology of our speaking and writing, as well as the line of thinking of our counterparts. Metaphors are really powerful and essential tools in our cognitive toolbox, and if someone lacks a deeper understanding of their workings and how we actually understand the world around us, this book is a great place to discover it. (Can a book be a place?)
The way most of us think about metaphors would fall into linguistic perspectives, giving us an incomplete picture about the phenomena of metaphors. This book is written for an audience from many years ago, but the ideas are still valid. It has the power to enrich our understanding of how we actually live by metaphors while providing a completer and more fundamental picture about what metaphors actually are and their workings on us. I have learned one interesting thing (among many others): it is virtually impossible to comprehend totalities like our feelings or spiritual concepts without mentally (and if needed, verbally) breaking them down into partial metaphorical subsystems.
One of the examples of what this book is capable of revealing can be about how metaphors are used in different life situations. For instance, when we argue with someone, in most cases, we use war metaphors. We defend our position, we prepare ammunition to shoot at the weak parts of our counterpart’s argument, we don’t give up easily, we gain or lose ground, and finally, we win or lose. As the authors suggest, try a little experiment where you approach an argument as you would a dance. How would this alter the situation and the way of thinking and talking? This would be a completely different culture of thinking and conversation, where aesthetics, lead and follow, balance, timing, and the need to complete a dance in a gracious manner would be the primary concerns. The kind of metaphors we employ in our thinking and conversations have a tremendous impact on how we experience things (like arguments), carry them out, and talk about them. In the case of an argument, we would actually experience arguing with the help of dance metaphors as something very different as compared to a conversation that employs war metaphors. It would probably be a rather pleasant experience where people would part as friends, as opposed to revenge-seeking losers of war.
Metaphors actually are more than literally structures. They structure virtually everything in regards to how we think about the world, how we perceive and respond to other humans (and other creatures), how we communicate, and even how we feel! Besides, I’ve now learned, that metaphors have tremendous power. They enable us to manipulate others and be manipulated (though, not so easily after you have read this book!). By choosing an appropriate metaphor for your conversation, you might set the stage for it and conduct your communication in a way you wish, instead of giving the opportunity to your counterpart to disturb the harmony of it (notice the influence from the book here).
It was really interesting to see the authors’ hard quest against how the objectivists and the subjectivists view the world of metaphors. Their view is basically grounded in trivializing the essence, the mechanics, the significance, and the benefits of metaphors in human life. There’s a bunch of very good arguments on what those philosophies miss out on regarding subject matter.
The authors succeeded in installing a completely new feature into my brain. Now, when I catch myself using a metaphor, I see those extra dimensions in my thinking and language use, and I understand much better why I chose a particular metaphor or how or in what ways my understating of the world was conceptualized. This is really exciting!
This book revealed in what ways metaphors are the essential part of the human conceptualization apparatus. This deeper level of understanding is one of the keys to understanding the psychology of our speaking and writing, as well as the line of thinking of our counterparts. Metaphors are really powerful and essential tools in our cognitive toolbox, and if someone lacks a deeper understanding of their workings and how we actually understand the world around us, this book is a great place to discover it. (Can a book be a place?)
August 6, 2007
This book changed my life. It has short chapters, 5-10 pages. you can get most of what you need from chapters 1-3 and the epilogue.
It explains the structure of metaphor. Turns out, at least for me, that theory is metaphorical, language is metaphorical, life itself is metaphorical.
So what does that do for us? It makes it possible to realize the perspectivism is not an ideal to shoot for in some pristine Kantian space, but the very quantum material of social life.
In this recognition, I found a way to calm down, to converse with my enemy, to find the overlap between anger and peace, laughter and crying, life and death. Or rather, I am finding it.
(Lakhoff's work on metaphor and war was good in the 1990s -- first invasion of Iraq. But his more recent stuff strikes me as a bit jingoistic. I emailed him about this -- since I took him to be a hero of mine. But he never wrote back.)
It explains the structure of metaphor. Turns out, at least for me, that theory is metaphorical, language is metaphorical, life itself is metaphorical.
So what does that do for us? It makes it possible to realize the perspectivism is not an ideal to shoot for in some pristine Kantian space, but the very quantum material of social life.
In this recognition, I found a way to calm down, to converse with my enemy, to find the overlap between anger and peace, laughter and crying, life and death. Or rather, I am finding it.
(Lakhoff's work on metaphor and war was good in the 1990s -- first invasion of Iraq. But his more recent stuff strikes me as a bit jingoistic. I emailed him about this -- since I took him to be a hero of mine. But he never wrote back.)
June 3, 2020
Reći da živimo u metafori, samo je po sebi metafora.
Štaviše, jezik je bez metafora nemoguć, budući da su one neizostavni činilac poimanja sveta.
Suština metafore jeste razumevanje i doživljaj jednog pojma posredstvom drugog – pojednostavljeno rečeno, ukrštaj značenja. I on ima svoju, veoma zanimljivu logiku koju retko kad primećujemo. Tako možemo reći da smo napunili godine, iako nema nikakvog govora o punjenju, već je posredi takozvana metafora kontejnera – gde apstraktne pojmove, poput vremena, konkretizujemo zamišljajući ih kao sadržaoce u prostoru. Tako ćemo reći za nekoga da je imao „ispunjen život” ili da hoće da „ispuni svoje snove”, kao da tu ima nešto zaista da se napuni. Nešto iz iskustvene sfere, nešto vidljivo i opipljivo primenjujemo za ono neuhvatljivo. Tako vreme može da bude doživljeno kao linija – npr. „niz godina”, „prvo/poslednje vreme”, ili čak kao put – „IZA nas je tužna prošlost, ISPRED nas svetla budućnost”. Veoma je interesantno kako se jezici razlikuju u odnosu na pojmovne metafore – u engleskom je, na primer, daleko češća metafora vremena kao novca nego u srpskom. Mi kažemo na primer kako ne želimo da neko „troši” naše vreme, ali u engleskom sasvim prirodno zvuče rečenice: „I’ve invested a lot of time in her,”, „Is that worth your while?”, „That flat tire cost me an hour”. Vreme se, dakle, može doživeti i kao vredna roba, koju možemo IMATI. Mada, pitanje je kako. Kada o njoj razmislimo kao o raščlanjenoj konceptualnoj metafori, sintagma „ubijanje vremena” uopšte ne deluje fino. A tek šta bismo radili ako bismo doslovno s „skraćivanje vremena”. Nema makaza koje bi to štricnule.
S tim u vezi, metafore su neraskidivo povezane sa kulturom govornika nekog jezika. Tako su u engleskom dominantne metafore vezane za raspravu, gde se ona rasprava doživljava kao rat – „I demolished his argument.”; „Your claims are indefensible”, „He attacked every weak point in my argument”. Iako i u srpskom ima dosta ovakvih mesta, zanimljivo je da mi kažemo ne kako smo „pobedili u raspavi” (kao da se nalazmo u nečemu), dok će u engleskom rasprava biti objekat („He won the argument.”), ali ljubav će, slično raspravi u srpskom, biti vezana za predlog – „She is IN love”. Iako se Lejkof i Džonson ne bave detaljno antropološkim posledicama različitog metaforičkog mišljenja, indikativna je hipoteza s početka studije – gde se autori pitaju – a šta ako bismo raspravu doživeli ne kao takmičenje, rat, već kao ples. U tom plesu svi bi bili pobednici, a sagovornici bi se uzajamno poštovali i pratili. Diskurs premoći ucrtan je u naše poimanje (raz)govora, što nimalo nije zanimarljiva činjenica.
Kao što nije niz jezičkih fenomena vezanih za ovo vanredno stanje, pre svega za novu metaforu – bolesti kao rata. Na primer – mi se tako „borimo protiv nevidljivog neprijatelja”, „proglašavamo rat virusu”, a pojavljivanja virusa konceptualizujemo kao talase.
(Svetlana Slijepčević Bjelivuk dala je zanimljiv intervju na tu temu. https://nova.rs/lifestyle/strmoglavi-...)
U nekom od Zabavnika pročitao sam kako u jednom indijanskom jeziku ne može da se pojmi da neživi objekat utiče na živo stvorenje. Nemoguće je da kola udare čoveka. Umesto toga, konstatuju se kako je čovek udario kola i pošto ih je udario, umro. Mogu samo misliti kakvi su tek puteljci njihovih konceptualnih metafora. Za nas poezija – za njih poznata nužnost.
Štaviše, jezik je bez metafora nemoguć, budući da su one neizostavni činilac poimanja sveta.
Suština metafore jeste razumevanje i doživljaj jednog pojma posredstvom drugog – pojednostavljeno rečeno, ukrštaj značenja. I on ima svoju, veoma zanimljivu logiku koju retko kad primećujemo. Tako možemo reći da smo napunili godine, iako nema nikakvog govora o punjenju, već je posredi takozvana metafora kontejnera – gde apstraktne pojmove, poput vremena, konkretizujemo zamišljajući ih kao sadržaoce u prostoru. Tako ćemo reći za nekoga da je imao „ispunjen život” ili da hoće da „ispuni svoje snove”, kao da tu ima nešto zaista da se napuni. Nešto iz iskustvene sfere, nešto vidljivo i opipljivo primenjujemo za ono neuhvatljivo. Tako vreme može da bude doživljeno kao linija – npr. „niz godina”, „prvo/poslednje vreme”, ili čak kao put – „IZA nas je tužna prošlost, ISPRED nas svetla budućnost”. Veoma je interesantno kako se jezici razlikuju u odnosu na pojmovne metafore – u engleskom je, na primer, daleko češća metafora vremena kao novca nego u srpskom. Mi kažemo na primer kako ne želimo da neko „troši” naše vreme, ali u engleskom sasvim prirodno zvuče rečenice: „I’ve invested a lot of time in her,”, „Is that worth your while?”, „That flat tire cost me an hour”. Vreme se, dakle, može doživeti i kao vredna roba, koju možemo IMATI. Mada, pitanje je kako. Kada o njoj razmislimo kao o raščlanjenoj konceptualnoj metafori, sintagma „ubijanje vremena” uopšte ne deluje fino. A tek šta bismo radili ako bismo doslovno s „skraćivanje vremena”. Nema makaza koje bi to štricnule.
S tim u vezi, metafore su neraskidivo povezane sa kulturom govornika nekog jezika. Tako su u engleskom dominantne metafore vezane za raspravu, gde se ona rasprava doživljava kao rat – „I demolished his argument.”; „Your claims are indefensible”, „He attacked every weak point in my argument”. Iako i u srpskom ima dosta ovakvih mesta, zanimljivo je da mi kažemo ne kako smo „pobedili u raspavi” (kao da se nalazmo u nečemu), dok će u engleskom rasprava biti objekat („He won the argument.”), ali ljubav će, slično raspravi u srpskom, biti vezana za predlog – „She is IN love”. Iako se Lejkof i Džonson ne bave detaljno antropološkim posledicama različitog metaforičkog mišljenja, indikativna je hipoteza s početka studije – gde se autori pitaju – a šta ako bismo raspravu doživeli ne kao takmičenje, rat, već kao ples. U tom plesu svi bi bili pobednici, a sagovornici bi se uzajamno poštovali i pratili. Diskurs premoći ucrtan je u naše poimanje (raz)govora, što nimalo nije zanimarljiva činjenica.
Kao što nije niz jezičkih fenomena vezanih za ovo vanredno stanje, pre svega za novu metaforu – bolesti kao rata. Na primer – mi se tako „borimo protiv nevidljivog neprijatelja”, „proglašavamo rat virusu”, a pojavljivanja virusa konceptualizujemo kao talase.
(Svetlana Slijepčević Bjelivuk dala je zanimljiv intervju na tu temu. https://nova.rs/lifestyle/strmoglavi-...)
U nekom od Zabavnika pročitao sam kako u jednom indijanskom jeziku ne može da se pojmi da neživi objekat utiče na živo stvorenje. Nemoguće je da kola udare čoveka. Umesto toga, konstatuju se kako je čovek udario kola i pošto ih je udario, umro. Mogu samo misliti kakvi su tek puteljci njihovih konceptualnih metafora. Za nas poezija – za njih poznata nužnost.
December 26, 2021
In "How Emotions are Made", Lisa Feldman Barrett wrote how concepts, goals, words all help the brain frame any new stimulus it receives and that by reframing concepts and looking at them more objectively, we can reshape what emotions are surfaced, and thus exercise free will. But how does one go about that? In the vast scope of "Metaphors we live by", we get an answer to that too.
Metaphorical concepts are so ubiquitous in our thoughts and deeds that we don't even realise they exist, let alone their effect on how we think about everything from business and ethics to marriage and poetry. Conceptual metaphors allow us to use the inferences in domains we can sense (space, objects etc) on other domains of subjective judgment. In a way, this is how we are able to transmit ideas and create a shared understanding. We often ascribe this to language, but it actually begins with metaphorical concepts.
The light bulb goes off in the first few pages, when the authors use "Argument is war" as an example. It's because war is the metaphor we have used at a concept level, that the words we used to describe it are about winning/losing it, or "your claims are indefensible" or 'He demolished my arguments" or "I attacked his weak points" and so on. Another example to think of is "time is money" - you use spend/save/run out of/invest to describe time.
In addition to the structural metaphors above, there are oriental metaphors, which provide a spatial orientation, and are based on our physical and cultural experiences. For instance, happy (spirits rose), consciousness (woke up), control (top of the situation), more (numbers went up), future events (what's up), good things (looking up), virtue (high standards) are all "up", while their opposites are down.
A thing to note is that a concept can have multiple metaphors e.g. Ideas are food (half- baked), people (father of modern physics), plants (fertile imagination) and many more. Another interest part is the grounding of concepts. For instance, how we conceptualise the non-physical in terms of the physical. Harry is in the kitchen (which is spatial), in the army (social), in love (emotional).
The book further talks about the structuring of our experiences - experiential gestalts, as well as coherence of metaphors (including overlaps of metaphors, how they affect form, and how they can ultimately create realities. It also gets into very interesting territories - the nature of truth, objectivism and subjectivism. It points out how both miss the part that we understand the world through our interactions with it, and proposes an Experientialist alternative.
Since I started reading the book, I have been watching the words I use (" I am running late", "I don't think we should spend more time on this") and imagining different metaphors. Because by changing the metaphors we live by, we can change our everyday life, and our future. This is far from an easy read, but even (more than) 40 years after it was first published, it is still pathbreaking.
Metaphorical concepts are so ubiquitous in our thoughts and deeds that we don't even realise they exist, let alone their effect on how we think about everything from business and ethics to marriage and poetry. Conceptual metaphors allow us to use the inferences in domains we can sense (space, objects etc) on other domains of subjective judgment. In a way, this is how we are able to transmit ideas and create a shared understanding. We often ascribe this to language, but it actually begins with metaphorical concepts.
The light bulb goes off in the first few pages, when the authors use "Argument is war" as an example. It's because war is the metaphor we have used at a concept level, that the words we used to describe it are about winning/losing it, or "your claims are indefensible" or 'He demolished my arguments" or "I attacked his weak points" and so on. Another example to think of is "time is money" - you use spend/save/run out of/invest to describe time.
In addition to the structural metaphors above, there are oriental metaphors, which provide a spatial orientation, and are based on our physical and cultural experiences. For instance, happy (spirits rose), consciousness (woke up), control (top of the situation), more (numbers went up), future events (what's up), good things (looking up), virtue (high standards) are all "up", while their opposites are down.
A thing to note is that a concept can have multiple metaphors e.g. Ideas are food (half- baked), people (father of modern physics), plants (fertile imagination) and many more. Another interest part is the grounding of concepts. For instance, how we conceptualise the non-physical in terms of the physical. Harry is in the kitchen (which is spatial), in the army (social), in love (emotional).
The book further talks about the structuring of our experiences - experiential gestalts, as well as coherence of metaphors (including overlaps of metaphors, how they affect form, and how they can ultimately create realities. It also gets into very interesting territories - the nature of truth, objectivism and subjectivism. It points out how both miss the part that we understand the world through our interactions with it, and proposes an Experientialist alternative.
Since I started reading the book, I have been watching the words I use (" I am running late", "I don't think we should spend more time on this") and imagining different metaphors. Because by changing the metaphors we live by, we can change our everyday life, and our future. This is far from an easy read, but even (more than) 40 years after it was first published, it is still pathbreaking.
March 6, 2010
I probably wouldn't have picked up this book on my own. I was assigned it in college and hated it so much I never got beyond chapter 4 or so. (The margins of these early pages are so filled with embarrassing personal notes and stream of consciousness ramblings that I would be too embarrassed to sell it or give it away.) Whereupon it sat on a shelf until, lo all these years later, I decided to give it another shot.
If you're interested in the intersection between linguistics and philosophy, you ought to read this book. My 3-star rating is due to the fact that the first 20 or so chapters are (still) terminally, numbingly boring. They consist almost entirely of examples of metaphors. What Lakoff and Johnson are doing is laying the foundation for their argument (expounded upon in the last several chapters) that neither objectivism (as exemplified by classic rationalist and classic empiricist philosophy) nor subjectivism (as exemplified by romanticism) are up to the task of explaining meaning and that there is a third path to understanding truth - an experiential synthesis. We understand the world through our interaction with it. Metaphors do not merely describe reality, they structure it.
If you're interested in the intersection between linguistics and philosophy, you ought to read this book. My 3-star rating is due to the fact that the first 20 or so chapters are (still) terminally, numbingly boring. They consist almost entirely of examples of metaphors. What Lakoff and Johnson are doing is laying the foundation for their argument (expounded upon in the last several chapters) that neither objectivism (as exemplified by classic rationalist and classic empiricist philosophy) nor subjectivism (as exemplified by romanticism) are up to the task of explaining meaning and that there is a third path to understanding truth - an experiential synthesis. We understand the world through our interaction with it. Metaphors do not merely describe reality, they structure it.
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July 10, 2019Gather 'round kids, it's time for a true story. When I was 20 or so, I ate a couple grams of magic mushrooms at my friend's apartment in the middle of a blizzard, and thought "hey man, it's all metaphors. When people talk about physics or the stock market or whatever, that's like learning a system of metaphors."
This remains the nearest thing I've had to a psychonautic breakthrough, and it remains one I actually believe to this day.
George Lakoff had similar ideas, presumably sans psilocybin. And they're extremely, extremely applicable, complete with large-scale schema showing types of metaphor in the English language. For those who wonder why they just called someone "a total snack."
This remains the nearest thing I've had to a psychonautic breakthrough, and it remains one I actually believe to this day.
George Lakoff had similar ideas, presumably sans psilocybin. And they're extremely, extremely applicable, complete with large-scale schema showing types of metaphor in the English language. For those who wonder why they just called someone "a total snack."
April 10, 2023
Bu kitabı okuduğum süreç içerisinde depremleri yaşadım. 6 Şubat 2023'ten aylar sonra kitabı elime alma gücüne eriştiğimde kitap aynı kitaptı. Fakat ne İskenderun aynı İskenderun, ne de ben aynı insanım.
August 6, 2016
A classic still very much relevant today—
This very much readable volume is written with an admirable clarity that at the same time doesn't sacrifice academic rigor. To be sure, the authors have a penchant for repeating things, but the repetition is part of what makes this so accessible to anyone interested in the topic of metaphor.
Lakoff and Johnson's argument is simple but far-reaching: metaphor isn't just a literary technique you study (and get bored by) in class. It's a powerful conceptual tool we use to make sense of the world and ourselves. In fact, metaphor is everywhere, even in our common parlance where we least expect it to be: "The argument needs more support" (Arguments are Buildings metaphor), "I just can't swallow that claim" (Ideas are Food metaphor), "I see what you're saying, but it looks different from his point of view" (Understanding as Seeing metaphor), "Their marriage is dead—it can't be revived" (Love is Patient metaphor), and "I've had a full life. Life is not empty" (Life is a Container metaphor).
Metaphor is a conceptual system because different metaphors are related to each other in a coherent manner. To take the example they give, the Argument as a Container and Argument as a Journey metaphors both have the common feature of "more argument = more surface covered" (because the metaphors entail: "as we make more of a journey, more of a path/surface is created" and "as we make more of a container, more surface is created"). This common structure allows us to mix them: "In what we've done so far, we have provided the core of our argument," which highlights the progress aspect of the Journey metaphor and the amount aspect of the Container metaphor.
And this conceptual system is grounded in our sensory-motor experience. That is our concepts, however abstract, are grounded in our body. Because we see ourselves as bounded entities, we see things in the world to be also bounded entities (ontological metaphor), and because we operate in our environment relative to certain orientations such as up-down, front-back, on-off, we see things as functioning in similar orientations (orientational metaphor), etc.
We categorize things in prototypes, not in rigid definitions. Here too, our concepts are informed by (or arise from) our interactions with the world. What I found was cool about their account of categorization/classification is that conceptual prototypes form multidimensional gestalts with interactional—as opposed to inherent—properties, such as purposive, functional, and motor-activity properties. This dovetails perfectly with Leo Katz’s analysis of murder in his Bad Acts and Guilty Mind: Conundrums of the Criminal Law, where he argues for a position that gauges the degree of guilt by how close the committed act resembles the prototype of murder.
To explain this whole prototype business in more detail, take the famous example of "fake gun." Is it a gun? In order for fake guns to be fake, they need to preserve certain aspects of a real gun, such as its appearance (perceptual; it has to look real), manipulative features (motor-activity; you can handle it like a gun, like holding it in a certain way), and purposes (serving some of the purposes of a real gun, like threatening or being on display). It's "fake" insofar as it cannot function like a real gun (can't shoot) and it was not made to function like a gun (history of function: a broken gun is not a fake gun). As you can see, we conceptualize a gun in terms of different properties (i.e. multidimensional) that are interactional, that is, based on how we interact with a gun (esp. perceptual, motor-activity, functional, and purposive properties). Our conceptual categories are flexible and open-ended because when we classify, what we require that things bear a sufficient "family resemblance" (Wittgenstein). A quick example: beanbag chairs. They don't look like a regular chair, but because they bear a family resemblance to what the authors call “experiential gestalt” of a chair (in terms of purpose, function, and history, probably), we classify them as chairs. What I appreciate about this analysis is that I have always been skeptical of any insistence on rigid, clear-cut classifications and definitions because reality, to me at least, is fuzzy, way more complicated than we can fathom, and full of shades and gradients. And so are our sense of self and the world. We are always in the world, in an interdependent relationship to our environment and others around us. I think Merleau Ponty said it best (and I quote from memory): we are in the world like milk mixed in tea; we just can’t separate them.
Some of the crucial points and implications of this book include:
1) Our understanding of the world is metaphorical and therefore highlights some aspects and hides others (which very much reminds me of Nietzsche's perspectivism à la Nehamas). We often forget the latter, that any understanding of the world is partial, and insist on what Lakoff and Johnson aptly call the myth of objectivism. One simple example suffices to illustrate this: "The fog is in front of the mountain." Even this simple sentence fails to capture the world as it is, apart from human understanding. In the real world, there are no well-defined entities called "fog" and "mountain"—where does a fog end and start? And a mountain? It's us who are imposing artificial boundaries on physical phenomena to make them discrete. Or take the concept of being "in front of" the mountain. Notice mountains don't have inherent "front" and "back." In other words, it is the human understanding that superimposes the entity structure and front-back orientation to the things in the world.
2) New, nonconventional metaphors can, if they convince us to be true, can show us a new way to understand the world and ourselves. Any view of the world is bound to be partial and incomplete (which reminds me of the scientific problem of modeling—a model gets more and more complicated as it approximates reality more accurately until, well, it becomes too complicated to be of any use to us). So any new metaphor about reality can give us new perspective, new understanding. It’s sort of like me trying to describe to you a friend of mine you’ve never met. Maybe I can give you simple descriptions (he’s tall, he likes to play basketball, etc.), personality traits (shy, kind of withdrawn but smart as hell), and anecdotes (he’s the kind of guy who reads a book at a party), but no matter how many descriptions and stories I tell you, your understanding of my friend won’t be complete until you actually meet him. The actual meeting is the reality you try to approximate and grasp with metaphors (in this example descriptions and anecdotes). So the risk of embracing the myth of objectivism as truth is, while it’s extremely comforting to have a consistent view of the world (no contradictions or conflicts about what you should think and do), it can blind you to other facets of this super complicated thing called reality. Or in the words of Lakoff and Johnson, “To operate only in terms of a consistent set of metaphors is to hide many aspects of reality” (221)
3) The Myth of Experientialism as the middle way between myths of objectivism and subjectivism. The myth of objectivism claims that it is the only truth, rejecting metaphors and myths out of hand as “irrational” or “meaningless.” This is so ingrained in Western culture especially in the US, that most people don’t even question its premises (critics of this myth, such as Wittgenstein and Nietzsche among others, call it scientific materialism and scientism). That there are objective truths apart from human beings is exactly what Lakoff and Johnson question and ultimately debunk with their analysis of metaphor as our fundamental conceptual system in understanding the world.
They can do this because they establish that truth and meaning can be true or meaningful relative to our conceptual system that is rooted in our experience of the world. As shown above with the fake gun example, objects are classified not by objective, inherent properties but by interactional properties that are informed by what kind of relationship we have with those objects. Further, a statement is true in a given situation, according to this view, when “our understanding of the statement fits our understanding of the situation closely enough for our purposes” (179). An example that illustrate this point is: “The earth is a sphere.” These are true for certain purposes, in certain contexts. It’s surely true for most of us, but not for physicists who need to calculate the precise orbit of, say, a satellite. In other words, whether a statement is true or not depends not on some objective, inherent properties of the statement, but on how it fits our purposes and aspects of context (and this “fitting” is where experiential gestalts come in).
My favorite example that illustrates how context/situation matters in assessing the truth value of a statement: If I tell you that we’re having a get-together and need a few more chairs, and if you bring three beanbags and say to me, “I brought a few chairs you wanted,” this statement is true in this situation. But if I told you we’re having a formal dinner and if you bring the same beanbags and report to me with the same statement, that statement is either misleading or false because beanbags are not the kind of chair I want in this given situation. (p.164)
The myth of subjectivism, on the other hand, claims that our imagination, in the form of art and poetry, transcends rationality and objectivity and put us in touch with our deep-seated feelings and intuitions that should be valued more than any objective truth or things that are abstract, universal, or impersonal.
The myth of experientialism (I love their humility and honesty in calling it a myth and not pretending to be proclaiming THE truth) is the middle way between the two: truths are not completely objective nor subjective because they depend on our conceptual system grounded in our experience functioning successfully in our social, cultural, and physical milieu. Imagination is not some fancy mental faculty that has nothing to do with reason, rationality, or objectivity because it consists of metaphorical thinking—thinking of one thing in terms of something completely different—and that requires metaphorical entailments and inferences. Metaphor is, as they call it beautifully, “imaginative rationality.” Because the categories of our ordinary thought are mostly metaphorical and our ordinary reasoning involves metaphorical reasoning, our ordinary rationality is metaphorical in nature. So pace objectivism because there is no objective truth or meaning apart from human understanding (based on metaphor and our experience in the world). Pace subjectivism because even the wildest act of imagination involves rationality.
One caveat worth mentioning here is that experientialism doesn’t entail total subjectivity because our conceptual system is always being tested by our experience and revised. So while we can’t reach mythical objectivity, we can rise above individual biases and misunderstandings (hence the importance of a community correcting the mistakes of its members, like the community of mathematicians—individuals are prone to calculation and logical errors, and it is by testing their ideas by the scrutiny of the rest of the community that they reach truth).
Long review, but it was worth writing it. Overall, highly recommended if you’re curious about any of this stuff.
This very much readable volume is written with an admirable clarity that at the same time doesn't sacrifice academic rigor. To be sure, the authors have a penchant for repeating things, but the repetition is part of what makes this so accessible to anyone interested in the topic of metaphor.
Lakoff and Johnson's argument is simple but far-reaching: metaphor isn't just a literary technique you study (and get bored by) in class. It's a powerful conceptual tool we use to make sense of the world and ourselves. In fact, metaphor is everywhere, even in our common parlance where we least expect it to be: "The argument needs more support" (Arguments are Buildings metaphor), "I just can't swallow that claim" (Ideas are Food metaphor), "I see what you're saying, but it looks different from his point of view" (Understanding as Seeing metaphor), "Their marriage is dead—it can't be revived" (Love is Patient metaphor), and "I've had a full life. Life is not empty" (Life is a Container metaphor).
Metaphor is a conceptual system because different metaphors are related to each other in a coherent manner. To take the example they give, the Argument as a Container and Argument as a Journey metaphors both have the common feature of "more argument = more surface covered" (because the metaphors entail: "as we make more of a journey, more of a path/surface is created" and "as we make more of a container, more surface is created"). This common structure allows us to mix them: "In what we've done so far, we have provided the core of our argument," which highlights the progress aspect of the Journey metaphor and the amount aspect of the Container metaphor.
And this conceptual system is grounded in our sensory-motor experience. That is our concepts, however abstract, are grounded in our body. Because we see ourselves as bounded entities, we see things in the world to be also bounded entities (ontological metaphor), and because we operate in our environment relative to certain orientations such as up-down, front-back, on-off, we see things as functioning in similar orientations (orientational metaphor), etc.
We categorize things in prototypes, not in rigid definitions. Here too, our concepts are informed by (or arise from) our interactions with the world. What I found was cool about their account of categorization/classification is that conceptual prototypes form multidimensional gestalts with interactional—as opposed to inherent—properties, such as purposive, functional, and motor-activity properties. This dovetails perfectly with Leo Katz’s analysis of murder in his Bad Acts and Guilty Mind: Conundrums of the Criminal Law, where he argues for a position that gauges the degree of guilt by how close the committed act resembles the prototype of murder.
To explain this whole prototype business in more detail, take the famous example of "fake gun." Is it a gun? In order for fake guns to be fake, they need to preserve certain aspects of a real gun, such as its appearance (perceptual; it has to look real), manipulative features (motor-activity; you can handle it like a gun, like holding it in a certain way), and purposes (serving some of the purposes of a real gun, like threatening or being on display). It's "fake" insofar as it cannot function like a real gun (can't shoot) and it was not made to function like a gun (history of function: a broken gun is not a fake gun). As you can see, we conceptualize a gun in terms of different properties (i.e. multidimensional) that are interactional, that is, based on how we interact with a gun (esp. perceptual, motor-activity, functional, and purposive properties). Our conceptual categories are flexible and open-ended because when we classify, what we require that things bear a sufficient "family resemblance" (Wittgenstein). A quick example: beanbag chairs. They don't look like a regular chair, but because they bear a family resemblance to what the authors call “experiential gestalt” of a chair (in terms of purpose, function, and history, probably), we classify them as chairs. What I appreciate about this analysis is that I have always been skeptical of any insistence on rigid, clear-cut classifications and definitions because reality, to me at least, is fuzzy, way more complicated than we can fathom, and full of shades and gradients. And so are our sense of self and the world. We are always in the world, in an interdependent relationship to our environment and others around us. I think Merleau Ponty said it best (and I quote from memory): we are in the world like milk mixed in tea; we just can’t separate them.
Some of the crucial points and implications of this book include:
1) Our understanding of the world is metaphorical and therefore highlights some aspects and hides others (which very much reminds me of Nietzsche's perspectivism à la Nehamas). We often forget the latter, that any understanding of the world is partial, and insist on what Lakoff and Johnson aptly call the myth of objectivism. One simple example suffices to illustrate this: "The fog is in front of the mountain." Even this simple sentence fails to capture the world as it is, apart from human understanding. In the real world, there are no well-defined entities called "fog" and "mountain"—where does a fog end and start? And a mountain? It's us who are imposing artificial boundaries on physical phenomena to make them discrete. Or take the concept of being "in front of" the mountain. Notice mountains don't have inherent "front" and "back." In other words, it is the human understanding that superimposes the entity structure and front-back orientation to the things in the world.
2) New, nonconventional metaphors can, if they convince us to be true, can show us a new way to understand the world and ourselves. Any view of the world is bound to be partial and incomplete (which reminds me of the scientific problem of modeling—a model gets more and more complicated as it approximates reality more accurately until, well, it becomes too complicated to be of any use to us). So any new metaphor about reality can give us new perspective, new understanding. It’s sort of like me trying to describe to you a friend of mine you’ve never met. Maybe I can give you simple descriptions (he’s tall, he likes to play basketball, etc.), personality traits (shy, kind of withdrawn but smart as hell), and anecdotes (he’s the kind of guy who reads a book at a party), but no matter how many descriptions and stories I tell you, your understanding of my friend won’t be complete until you actually meet him. The actual meeting is the reality you try to approximate and grasp with metaphors (in this example descriptions and anecdotes). So the risk of embracing the myth of objectivism as truth is, while it’s extremely comforting to have a consistent view of the world (no contradictions or conflicts about what you should think and do), it can blind you to other facets of this super complicated thing called reality. Or in the words of Lakoff and Johnson, “To operate only in terms of a consistent set of metaphors is to hide many aspects of reality” (221)
3) The Myth of Experientialism as the middle way between myths of objectivism and subjectivism. The myth of objectivism claims that it is the only truth, rejecting metaphors and myths out of hand as “irrational” or “meaningless.” This is so ingrained in Western culture especially in the US, that most people don’t even question its premises (critics of this myth, such as Wittgenstein and Nietzsche among others, call it scientific materialism and scientism). That there are objective truths apart from human beings is exactly what Lakoff and Johnson question and ultimately debunk with their analysis of metaphor as our fundamental conceptual system in understanding the world.
They can do this because they establish that truth and meaning can be true or meaningful relative to our conceptual system that is rooted in our experience of the world. As shown above with the fake gun example, objects are classified not by objective, inherent properties but by interactional properties that are informed by what kind of relationship we have with those objects. Further, a statement is true in a given situation, according to this view, when “our understanding of the statement fits our understanding of the situation closely enough for our purposes” (179). An example that illustrate this point is: “The earth is a sphere.” These are true for certain purposes, in certain contexts. It’s surely true for most of us, but not for physicists who need to calculate the precise orbit of, say, a satellite. In other words, whether a statement is true or not depends not on some objective, inherent properties of the statement, but on how it fits our purposes and aspects of context (and this “fitting” is where experiential gestalts come in).
My favorite example that illustrates how context/situation matters in assessing the truth value of a statement: If I tell you that we’re having a get-together and need a few more chairs, and if you bring three beanbags and say to me, “I brought a few chairs you wanted,” this statement is true in this situation. But if I told you we’re having a formal dinner and if you bring the same beanbags and report to me with the same statement, that statement is either misleading or false because beanbags are not the kind of chair I want in this given situation. (p.164)
The myth of subjectivism, on the other hand, claims that our imagination, in the form of art and poetry, transcends rationality and objectivity and put us in touch with our deep-seated feelings and intuitions that should be valued more than any objective truth or things that are abstract, universal, or impersonal.
The myth of experientialism (I love their humility and honesty in calling it a myth and not pretending to be proclaiming THE truth) is the middle way between the two: truths are not completely objective nor subjective because they depend on our conceptual system grounded in our experience functioning successfully in our social, cultural, and physical milieu. Imagination is not some fancy mental faculty that has nothing to do with reason, rationality, or objectivity because it consists of metaphorical thinking—thinking of one thing in terms of something completely different—and that requires metaphorical entailments and inferences. Metaphor is, as they call it beautifully, “imaginative rationality.” Because the categories of our ordinary thought are mostly metaphorical and our ordinary reasoning involves metaphorical reasoning, our ordinary rationality is metaphorical in nature. So pace objectivism because there is no objective truth or meaning apart from human understanding (based on metaphor and our experience in the world). Pace subjectivism because even the wildest act of imagination involves rationality.
One caveat worth mentioning here is that experientialism doesn’t entail total subjectivity because our conceptual system is always being tested by our experience and revised. So while we can’t reach mythical objectivity, we can rise above individual biases and misunderstandings (hence the importance of a community correcting the mistakes of its members, like the community of mathematicians—individuals are prone to calculation and logical errors, and it is by testing their ideas by the scrutiny of the rest of the community that they reach truth).
Long review, but it was worth writing it. Overall, highly recommended if you’re curious about any of this stuff.
January 11, 2021
When I first read this book about 25 years ago, I read it with an amateur’s interest in linguistics, and found it very satisfying. Now, rereading as a fledgling author of fiction, I find new opportunities for thought in it that its authors might not even have intended.
In describing the “metaphors we live by,” Lakoff and Johnson present a theory of understanding by which humans comprehend certain concepts by mapping them onto other, more basic concepts. The basic sensory metaphors are based in the situation of our bodies in space, defining relations such as up/down, in/out, and front back. This allows us to conceptualize metaphors such as MORE IS UP, or HAPPY IS UP, or CONTROL IS UP. Building on our experiences with objects and substances, we also have ontological metaphors that give substance to abstract concepts like time, or conceive of them as containers (you can be “in a race” that takes place “in an hour,” and of course you can be “in love”.) The authors use these blocks to build a theory (note that A THEORY IS A BUILDING) of more complex metaphors like ARGUMENT IS WAR, showing that these metaphors arise through the overlap of the set of entailments implied by more basic metaphors. And they point out that such metaphors both vary from culture to culture, and inform the way we think about concepts by highlighting some properties of concepts while hiding other properties. (Think of the WAR ON DRUGS to get a sense of how conceptualizing society’s relationship with drugs as a war has profound effects on which drug policies are carried out versus which are rejected.)
So there is the linguistic content, which is already pretty interesting. What is exciting to me as a writer is the light that Lakoff and Johnson’s analysis sheds on why some creative metaphors work so evocatively while others feel strained. Recently, I was talking with another writer about her use of the common expression “the anger in the room was palpable,” followed by “it darkened the room.” It seemed to me that the two expressions did not play well together, and the reason, I analyzed, was that both were metaphors. My friend might not have analyzed “anger is palpable” as a metaphor, because it has been so frequently used as to become a stock expression, a metaphor we live by. But it is one, and in Lakoff and Johnson’s language, it is not entirely coherent with the metaphor “anger is dark.” The tension between competing metaphors made the passage weaker than it would have been with either one or the other.
Lakoff and Johnson’s notion of coherence between different metaphorical conceptions—such as the coherences between AN ARGUMENT IS A JOURNEY and AN ARGUMENT IS A CONTAINER—provide insights I can use as a writer in deciding whether to stand by an arresting metaphor or cut it entirely. I can look for deep coherences between novel metaphors and familiar ones, and use these as inputs to that decision, according to the kind of correspondences Lakoff and Johnson identify.
The richness of thought inspired by this text dries out for me in the final quarter of the book, which ventures into philosophical territory, constructing a theory of truth and theory of understanding that is supposedly a compromise between objectivist and subjectivist theories. Such philosophical categorization tends to make my eyes glaze over, and I find this portion of the book much less stimulating and much more of a slog. I don’t know enough about the philosophical theories to tell whether Lakoff and Johnson’s presentations of objectivism and subjectivism, which certainly do seem incomplete and inadequate to explain human understanding, are fair characterizations or reductive straw men.
In describing the “metaphors we live by,” Lakoff and Johnson present a theory of understanding by which humans comprehend certain concepts by mapping them onto other, more basic concepts. The basic sensory metaphors are based in the situation of our bodies in space, defining relations such as up/down, in/out, and front back. This allows us to conceptualize metaphors such as MORE IS UP, or HAPPY IS UP, or CONTROL IS UP. Building on our experiences with objects and substances, we also have ontological metaphors that give substance to abstract concepts like time, or conceive of them as containers (you can be “in a race” that takes place “in an hour,” and of course you can be “in love”.) The authors use these blocks to build a theory (note that A THEORY IS A BUILDING) of more complex metaphors like ARGUMENT IS WAR, showing that these metaphors arise through the overlap of the set of entailments implied by more basic metaphors. And they point out that such metaphors both vary from culture to culture, and inform the way we think about concepts by highlighting some properties of concepts while hiding other properties. (Think of the WAR ON DRUGS to get a sense of how conceptualizing society’s relationship with drugs as a war has profound effects on which drug policies are carried out versus which are rejected.)
So there is the linguistic content, which is already pretty interesting. What is exciting to me as a writer is the light that Lakoff and Johnson’s analysis sheds on why some creative metaphors work so evocatively while others feel strained. Recently, I was talking with another writer about her use of the common expression “the anger in the room was palpable,” followed by “it darkened the room.” It seemed to me that the two expressions did not play well together, and the reason, I analyzed, was that both were metaphors. My friend might not have analyzed “anger is palpable” as a metaphor, because it has been so frequently used as to become a stock expression, a metaphor we live by. But it is one, and in Lakoff and Johnson’s language, it is not entirely coherent with the metaphor “anger is dark.” The tension between competing metaphors made the passage weaker than it would have been with either one or the other.
Lakoff and Johnson’s notion of coherence between different metaphorical conceptions—such as the coherences between AN ARGUMENT IS A JOURNEY and AN ARGUMENT IS A CONTAINER—provide insights I can use as a writer in deciding whether to stand by an arresting metaphor or cut it entirely. I can look for deep coherences between novel metaphors and familiar ones, and use these as inputs to that decision, according to the kind of correspondences Lakoff and Johnson identify.
The richness of thought inspired by this text dries out for me in the final quarter of the book, which ventures into philosophical territory, constructing a theory of truth and theory of understanding that is supposedly a compromise between objectivist and subjectivist theories. Such philosophical categorization tends to make my eyes glaze over, and I find this portion of the book much less stimulating and much more of a slog. I don’t know enough about the philosophical theories to tell whether Lakoff and Johnson’s presentations of objectivism and subjectivism, which certainly do seem incomplete and inadequate to explain human understanding, are fair characterizations or reductive straw men.
December 19, 2016
In a science fiction story by Ursula Le Guin a nonconformist ant writes, "Up with the Queen!" The fictional translators add an annotation that the proper English translation is probably "Down with the Queen!" In English, gaining power is associated with the up direction, and losing it with the down direction, though it might be the opposite in the fictional ant language; "Down with the Queen!" means "Let the Queen lose power!" Lakoff and Johnson argue that such metaphors, or "understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another" are absolutely essential to language and thinking. The preposition "in" literally means being contained inside an object: a raisin is in the pudding. The saying "The proof of the pudding is in eating" substitutes a process for an object. Someone or something can be in a state (in love, in shambles) or in an organization or a collective (in the army, in American politics). Language is full of such expressions. In fact, the previous sentence is metaphorical: a glass can be full of tea, but how can a language be full of expressions? People make sense of the abstract by tying it metaphorically to the concrete; abstract relations to spatial orientation; causation to manipulation. In a corporate hierarchy, an ordinary employee may be seven levels below the CEO, who sits on the same floor in the same building, and who built the company as his grandchild built a sandcastle.
All this is clear, but I am less convinced by the later chapters of the book, which switch from linguistics to philosophy and tie meaning to metaphors. People usually distinguish between the literal and the metaphorical meaning, even if they use the latter in speech and writing. In an exercise in a textbook of Russian by an American Slavist, a trolleybus fare collector thinks, "I understand old trolleybusses and old trolleybusses understand me," but the textbook writer adds that the fare collector is "a very bad philosopher. Trolleybusses don't understand anything. As is well-known, trolleybusses are not people, but machines."
All this is clear, but I am less convinced by the later chapters of the book, which switch from linguistics to philosophy and tie meaning to metaphors. People usually distinguish between the literal and the metaphorical meaning, even if they use the latter in speech and writing. In an exercise in a textbook of Russian by an American Slavist, a trolleybus fare collector thinks, "I understand old trolleybusses and old trolleybusses understand me," but the textbook writer adds that the fare collector is "a very bad philosopher. Trolleybusses don't understand anything. As is well-known, trolleybusses are not people, but machines."
June 28, 2019
I like the premise - that metaphors structure our understandings of the world - but this book kinda beat it to death (if you’ll excuse the metaphor). Too deep in the philosophy weeds for my liking. I wouldn’t recommend reading the whole thing unless you’re interested in philosophy or linguistics in an academic context.
February 20, 2022
Boring!!
November 25, 2020
Metaphors We Live By is that rare beast of an unmistakeably academic text, pretty strict and rigid, devoid of the tricks and baubles often used in today's science-for-the-masses books, but which somehow keeps you hooked. (Or at least it kept me hooked, and my attention span is pretty feeble these days.)
Lakoff starts with a few examples of metaphorical structures which organize our understanding of abstract concepts ("argument are war", "love is a journey", "ideas are food"), and goes extremely deep into the theory, explaining:
- how the overarching metaphor manifests itself in common language (if "arguments are war", of course we talk about "winning" or "losing" a debate, about "mustering up" counterarguments, or "defending" our point of view)
- how metaphors highlight some aspects of an abstract concept while downplaying others ("love is madness" emphasizes its consuming, uncontrollable aspect, but hides its equally valid dimension of actively choosing to build and maintain it - which a less common metaphor like "love is a house" would show more clearly)
- why most "classical" metaphors (meaning, those deeply embedded into a language and culture, rather than the very specific ones devised by this one poet) are not random, but form a logical system by building on core human experiences ("happy is up" and "the future is ahead" make sense for bipedal animals with eyes on the front of their face)
- how metaphors interact, overlap or contradict each other ("arguments are war" to be "won", but also "journeys" where you "cover enough of the distance to your conclusion").
And then around halfway through the book, he reaches the thing I'd thought of from the first few pages, because, you know, I'm incredibly smart:
Mic drop. We're born into a culture, learn its language, and that ends up shaping how we think of typical experiences, and then we act accordingly. Someone socialized into an "arguments are war" society will approach discussions differently than someone from a (hypothetical?) "an argument is a dance between the two partners" culture. And that made me think that recognizing the metaphor you're living by might help with changing your thoughs and behavior - if you so wanted. And that made me think of a bunch of things which I'm saving for my therapy sessions.
It's an unexpectedly captivating book. I don't remember how I came across it, but I'm very glad I did.
Lakoff starts with a few examples of metaphorical structures which organize our understanding of abstract concepts ("argument are war", "love is a journey", "ideas are food"), and goes extremely deep into the theory, explaining:
- how the overarching metaphor manifests itself in common language (if "arguments are war", of course we talk about "winning" or "losing" a debate, about "mustering up" counterarguments, or "defending" our point of view)
- how metaphors highlight some aspects of an abstract concept while downplaying others ("love is madness" emphasizes its consuming, uncontrollable aspect, but hides its equally valid dimension of actively choosing to build and maintain it - which a less common metaphor like "love is a house" would show more clearly)
- why most "classical" metaphors (meaning, those deeply embedded into a language and culture, rather than the very specific ones devised by this one poet) are not random, but form a logical system by building on core human experiences ("happy is up" and "the future is ahead" make sense for bipedal animals with eyes on the front of their face)
- how metaphors interact, overlap or contradict each other ("arguments are war" to be "won", but also "journeys" where you "cover enough of the distance to your conclusion").
And then around halfway through the book, he reaches the thing I'd thought of from the first few pages, because, you know, I'm incredibly smart:
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 conceputal system and the kinds of everyday activities we perform. It is reasonable enough ot assume that words alone don't change reality. But changes in our conceptual system do change what is real for us and affect how we perceive the world and act upon those perceptions.
Mic drop. We're born into a culture, learn its language, and that ends up shaping how we think of typical experiences, and then we act accordingly. Someone socialized into an "arguments are war" society will approach discussions differently than someone from a (hypothetical?) "an argument is a dance between the two partners" culture. And that made me think that recognizing the metaphor you're living by might help with changing your thoughs and behavior - if you so wanted. And that made me think of a bunch of things which I'm saving for my therapy sessions.
It's an unexpectedly captivating book. I don't remember how I came across it, but I'm very glad I did.
April 6, 2013
This book makes a crucial basic point: We can't help but think in metaphors and we live by the metaphors by which we think, and that's okay. It engages in a tremendous amount of definition, categorization, and exemplification that struck me, as a non-linguist, as overkill. Indeed, in the Afterword, the authors retract some of their earlier categorizations as excessive. And, frankly, the take-away for me was limited.
I expect the book is more important than I can appreciate. (The authors certainly seem to think so!) It seems to me that they in fact are rather vague about their mediating position between naive objectivist realism and what they refer to as postmodern subjectivist skepticism, sometimes leaning pretty hard away from the former while insisting that they don't succumb to the latter. I'm sympathetic with that positioning (since I adopt it myself), but I don't see (yet) a clearly established position that amounts to anything more than a generic and implicit critical realism, despite their insistence that their views are not realist....
Anyhow, the opening chapters are the most crucial--and you'll never look at argument the same way, once they point out that "AN ARGUMENT IS A WAR" could be revised to "AN ARGUMENT IS A DANCE." I plan to apply that idea to my next faculty meeting.
I expect the book is more important than I can appreciate. (The authors certainly seem to think so!) It seems to me that they in fact are rather vague about their mediating position between naive objectivist realism and what they refer to as postmodern subjectivist skepticism, sometimes leaning pretty hard away from the former while insisting that they don't succumb to the latter. I'm sympathetic with that positioning (since I adopt it myself), but I don't see (yet) a clearly established position that amounts to anything more than a generic and implicit critical realism, despite their insistence that their views are not realist....
Anyhow, the opening chapters are the most crucial--and you'll never look at argument the same way, once they point out that "AN ARGUMENT IS A WAR" could be revised to "AN ARGUMENT IS A DANCE." I plan to apply that idea to my next faculty meeting.
May 30, 2018
The main insight here is that we use metaphors constantly, but some are so ingrained we don't even acknowledge them. For example, "FUTURE IS AHEAD." We think of the future in front of us, but in some cultures and languages, they use "back" and "behind" to describe the future. We think of "POSITIVE IS UP," so that if you're talking about an "upswing" it's usually a good thing. These metaphors are all around us in what verbs and adverbs we use day-to-day. I was hoping it'd go more into how metaphors stick, develop, and phase out, but it's largely centered around metaphors that are so ingrained in language that we don't even explicitly acknowledge them anymore. That wasn't interesting enough to carry me 300 pages, so I read the first 100 pages or so, and then largely skimmed to see if I could find anything else that stood out. Probably just too nerdy in linguistics for me to be more interesting than a length article.
November 23, 2015
Soul crushingly boring and repetitive.
January 1, 2023
Ideen in diesem Buch haben Konsequenzen für fast jeden Bereich der Theologie. Definitiv eine Leseempfehlung für Bibelwissenschaftler, Systematiker, PTler und MWler.
February 12, 2010
The point is that everything we think or say is a metaphor. This seems obvious, but the authors' examples constantly catch me off-guard. The afterword, written a few years ago, is important.
The book begins with the metaphors of "time is money" and "arguement is war". Respective examples are: "Is it worth your while?" and "Disagree? Go ahead, shoot". Lakoff and Johnson make the point that societies exist in which time is not a resource- sitting on a hammock is not "wasting time". Also there are cultures in which arguements are not war-like. If I described such an argument to you, you might say "that's not arguing, that's something else". This situation illustrates perfectly the importance of metaphor. Change metaphor, and you effectively change reality. That is, that other society cannot be described in our language without missing the essentials. The metaphors of time and arguement are joined by the recognition that in arguing against me, you are giving me some of your time- your valuable resource. This cooperative aspect of argument is usually lost, overwhelmed by the war metaphor.
An example of a more subtle metaphor is "In washing the window, I splashed water all over the floor". In this case, "washing the window" is a container, in which I sat(?) splashing water on the floor like a two-year-old. From here (metaphorically) the authors deconstruct every verb, adjective, adverb and non-physical noun, demonstrating its metaphoricalism. They also make categories for metaphors.
The authors do not criticise society for our metaphors, though they do suggest that we might like to know when someone, e.g. a war monger, is using deliberate metaphors to mess with our heads. There is value in being aware of metaphors when they are used against you. For instance, the speaker in a television advertisement featuring a cow named Kristen just told me to "follow Kristen online". I don't want to follow a stinkin' cow!
The afterword, written in 2003, explains the whole rest of the book in terms of neurobiology. We say that affection is warm because the first affection we received, from our mother or nurse, was in the form of a, literally, warm embrace. The heat-sensing part of the brain was lit up at the same time as the (more complicated) hug-sensor, and the two were linked. That makes sense.
The most interesting part of the book for me is the junction between the higher-level metaphor analysis and the physical basis for metaphor. The authors give many examples of more = higher, happy = up metaphors: "my spirits rose", "he came down with the flu". L&J describe the physical reason for these ubiquitous metaphors as our experiences with plentitudes piling up. For instance, a higher level of milk in a glass means more milk. Of course, these physical metaphors are not just based on the physical body in which our brain resides, but the laws of physics themselves. If we lived in a zero-gravity field, more milk would not necessarily be manifest as a higher level in a glass, higher temperatures would not show up as a higher level of mercury in a thermometer, etc. Instead, more would be a bigger sphere, or else more would be more units, since, without gravity to push things in a direction, we might just contain everything in units and not care so much about how we pile them. We may use cubical money and then stack it into larger cubes.
There is a fun game in metaphysics, played even by real physicists, in which one asks "what if?". What if the weak force were 10 percent stronger? What if the neutron binding energy were 1 percent weaker? The answers to these questions are used to probe the sensitivity of the state of the universe to these apparently-fixed conditions. The ultimate question is usually: could life exist in a slightly-different universe? These games become boring since they are only academic. But it is probable that people will live in new environments: higher or lower gravity, zero gravity, with individual respirators (not "breathing the same air"), where colors change (green not life) etc. It would be fun to figure out how these new physical realities will change our metaphors, our minds and our societies. This has been done well by science-fiction and fantasty writers, and it may be pursued even further by keeping in mind the deep awareness of metaphor described in this book. If some of these societal changes would be benefitial, maybe we could induce them by tweaking the physical world.
The book begins with the metaphors of "time is money" and "arguement is war". Respective examples are: "Is it worth your while?" and "Disagree? Go ahead, shoot". Lakoff and Johnson make the point that societies exist in which time is not a resource- sitting on a hammock is not "wasting time". Also there are cultures in which arguements are not war-like. If I described such an argument to you, you might say "that's not arguing, that's something else". This situation illustrates perfectly the importance of metaphor. Change metaphor, and you effectively change reality. That is, that other society cannot be described in our language without missing the essentials. The metaphors of time and arguement are joined by the recognition that in arguing against me, you are giving me some of your time- your valuable resource. This cooperative aspect of argument is usually lost, overwhelmed by the war metaphor.
An example of a more subtle metaphor is "In washing the window, I splashed water all over the floor". In this case, "washing the window" is a container, in which I sat(?) splashing water on the floor like a two-year-old. From here (metaphorically) the authors deconstruct every verb, adjective, adverb and non-physical noun, demonstrating its metaphoricalism. They also make categories for metaphors.
The authors do not criticise society for our metaphors, though they do suggest that we might like to know when someone, e.g. a war monger, is using deliberate metaphors to mess with our heads. There is value in being aware of metaphors when they are used against you. For instance, the speaker in a television advertisement featuring a cow named Kristen just told me to "follow Kristen online". I don't want to follow a stinkin' cow!
The afterword, written in 2003, explains the whole rest of the book in terms of neurobiology. We say that affection is warm because the first affection we received, from our mother or nurse, was in the form of a, literally, warm embrace. The heat-sensing part of the brain was lit up at the same time as the (more complicated) hug-sensor, and the two were linked. That makes sense.
The most interesting part of the book for me is the junction between the higher-level metaphor analysis and the physical basis for metaphor. The authors give many examples of more = higher, happy = up metaphors: "my spirits rose", "he came down with the flu". L&J describe the physical reason for these ubiquitous metaphors as our experiences with plentitudes piling up. For instance, a higher level of milk in a glass means more milk. Of course, these physical metaphors are not just based on the physical body in which our brain resides, but the laws of physics themselves. If we lived in a zero-gravity field, more milk would not necessarily be manifest as a higher level in a glass, higher temperatures would not show up as a higher level of mercury in a thermometer, etc. Instead, more would be a bigger sphere, or else more would be more units, since, without gravity to push things in a direction, we might just contain everything in units and not care so much about how we pile them. We may use cubical money and then stack it into larger cubes.
There is a fun game in metaphysics, played even by real physicists, in which one asks "what if?". What if the weak force were 10 percent stronger? What if the neutron binding energy were 1 percent weaker? The answers to these questions are used to probe the sensitivity of the state of the universe to these apparently-fixed conditions. The ultimate question is usually: could life exist in a slightly-different universe? These games become boring since they are only academic. But it is probable that people will live in new environments: higher or lower gravity, zero gravity, with individual respirators (not "breathing the same air"), where colors change (green not life) etc. It would be fun to figure out how these new physical realities will change our metaphors, our minds and our societies. This has been done well by science-fiction and fantasty writers, and it may be pursued even further by keeping in mind the deep awareness of metaphor described in this book. If some of these societal changes would be benefitial, maybe we could induce them by tweaking the physical world.
November 19, 2023
So dense, technically DNF as of now. I get it's a linguistics textbook about the meaning of meaning, but it took me forever to get through. You have to be on your top mental game to understand it. The topic is interesting, and I appreciate the care taken with it, but dang. I need this off my currently reading list lol.
October 4, 2014
This amazing book will have you questioning everything that comes out of your mouth. A simple statement like, "My friend is "in" the race or "in" love will have a completely different meaning. In so far as the human mind can not understand things like events or emotions in concrete terms. It has a difficult time understanding abstract concepts. So in order to make sense of a friend that is "in" love or "in" a race we turn the event or the emotion into a contain with boundaries.
We see love as a container that someone can get into. We see an event that actually has no sides or walls, and turn it into a container that our friend can be "inside" of.
We experience the world in terms of our physical selves. We are a being that is contained inside a body. We have an inside and an outside. We have directions in relation to ourselves. We have an up and a down. Down is always what our feet are on. Even if we are upside down with our feet on the ceiling, our feet are "on" the ceiling. The ceiling is "down" below us.
We turn things like time, a very abstract topic, and define it with metaphors such as "time is money" so we can understand it. We can "spend" time and money. We can "save" time and money. We can "waste" time and money, etc.
This is by far one of the most "eye opening" books (notice the metaphor: eye opening to help us understand that the ability to "see" is a metaphor for understanding) that I have ever read.
This book took me a while to get through and it was worth it. I am going to reread it again in a few months.
If you want to raise our consciousness a few points and "wake up" a little more, read this book. It will definitely change you.
Nick Arkesteyn
We see love as a container that someone can get into. We see an event that actually has no sides or walls, and turn it into a container that our friend can be "inside" of.
We experience the world in terms of our physical selves. We are a being that is contained inside a body. We have an inside and an outside. We have directions in relation to ourselves. We have an up and a down. Down is always what our feet are on. Even if we are upside down with our feet on the ceiling, our feet are "on" the ceiling. The ceiling is "down" below us.
We turn things like time, a very abstract topic, and define it with metaphors such as "time is money" so we can understand it. We can "spend" time and money. We can "save" time and money. We can "waste" time and money, etc.
This is by far one of the most "eye opening" books (notice the metaphor: eye opening to help us understand that the ability to "see" is a metaphor for understanding) that I have ever read.
This book took me a while to get through and it was worth it. I am going to reread it again in a few months.
If you want to raise our consciousness a few points and "wake up" a little more, read this book. It will definitely change you.
Nick Arkesteyn
April 10, 2009
This book was published in the early 70s but is still a relevant, compact and powerful attack on Cartesian dualism, the proposed split between mind and body that has plagued us for centuries.
(Not all Descartes's fault as I understand. Socrates came up with the idea of the soul as some pure realm of ideas. Then the Christian's picked it up once it became obvious that the end was not quite as nigh as they were hoping so the preservation of body promised by Paul in Corinthians seemed more and more remote. What Descartes did was take this concept of the soul and transform it into a concept of mind. That's my understanding at least.)
In any case, Lakoff and Johnson pile up evidence that the very idea of separating the mind from the body is ludicrous and impossible. Brain science has advanced a lot since then but their arguments are wonderful and eye-opening for anyone wanting to get a taste in this area of thinking.
(Not all Descartes's fault as I understand. Socrates came up with the idea of the soul as some pure realm of ideas. Then the Christian's picked it up once it became obvious that the end was not quite as nigh as they were hoping so the preservation of body promised by Paul in Corinthians seemed more and more remote. What Descartes did was take this concept of the soul and transform it into a concept of mind. That's my understanding at least.)
In any case, Lakoff and Johnson pile up evidence that the very idea of separating the mind from the body is ludicrous and impossible. Brain science has advanced a lot since then but their arguments are wonderful and eye-opening for anyone wanting to get a taste in this area of thinking.
July 15, 2016
This book was recommended to me originally by my Yoda, my o captain my captain, and part of what enamoured me was just that: the sensation of 'assigned reading'. I often miss being in the classroom in the role of a student and reading something completely foreign, of feeling my mind creak, of feeling someone else's passion for the ideas seep through your skin. I also genuinely enjoyed the central tenets of the book, though I also needed to remember the pre-post-modern writing context and I think my understanding of the first half may have been helped by more than a first year linguistics class.
June 14, 2016
The first 5 or 6 chapters are pretty promising. And it's straight downhill from there.
The beginning is well written and buttressed by plenty of examples so the ideas reveal themselves naturally and are convincing. The latter part is mostly empty talk and written in a bone dry textbook style with the quintessential bullet lists and ordered lists of talking points every three to five pages, and IIRC, the longest list has 10 items and is less fun to read than the one written on that stone tablet.
The beginning is well written and buttressed by plenty of examples so the ideas reveal themselves naturally and are convincing. The latter part is mostly empty talk and written in a bone dry textbook style with the quintessential bullet lists and ordered lists of talking points every three to five pages, and IIRC, the longest list has 10 items and is less fun to read than the one written on that stone tablet.
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