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Metaphors We Live By First Edition
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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.
- ISBN-100226468011
- ISBN-13978-0226468013
- EditionFirst Edition
- PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
- Publication dateApril 15, 2003
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.9 x 8.5 inches
- Print length256 pages
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Editorial Reviews
From the Inside Flap
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.
From the Back Cover
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.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Metaphors We Live By
By George Lakoff, Mark JohnsonThe University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2003 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-46801-3
Contents
Preface,Acknowledgments,
1. Concepts We Live By,
2. The Systematicity of Metaphorical Concepts,
3. Metaphorical Systematicity: Highlighting and Hiding,
4. Orientational Metaphors,
5. Metaphor and Cultural Coherence,
6. Ontological Metaphors,
7. Personification,
8. Metonymy,
9. Challenges to Metaphorical Coherence,
10. Some Further Examples,
11. The Partial Nature of Metaphorical Structuring,
12. How Is Our Conceptual System Grounded?,
13. The Grounding of Structural Metaphors,
14. Causation: Partly Emergent and Partly Metaphorical,
15. The Coherent Structuring of Experience,
16. Metaphorical Coherence,
17. Complex Coherences across Metaphors,
18. Some Consequences for Theories of Conceptual Structure,
19. Definition and Understanding,
20. How Metaphor Can Give Meaning to Form,
21. New Meaning,
22. The Creation of Similarity,
23. Metaphor, Truth, and Action,
24. Truth,
25. The Myths of Objectivism and Subjectivism,
26. The Myth of Objectivism in Western Philosophy and Linguistics,
27. How Metaphor Reveals the Limitations of the Myth of Objectivism,
28. Some Inadequacies of the Myth of Subjectivism,
29. The Experientialist Alternative: Giving New Meaning to the Old Myths,
30. Understanding,
Afterword,
References,
Afterword, 2003,
CHAPTER 1
Concepts We Live By
Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish—a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.
The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor.
But our conceptual system is not something we are normally aware of. In most of the little things we do every day, we simply think and act more or less automatically along certain lines. Just what these lines are is by no means obvious. One way to find out is by looking at language. Since communication is based on the same conceptual system that we use in thinking and acting, language is an important source of evidence for what that system is like.
Primarily on the basis of linguistic evidence, we have found that most of our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical in nature. And we have found a way to begin to identify in detail just what the metaphors are that structure how we perceive, how we think, and what we do.
To give some idea of what it could mean for a concept to be metaphorical and for such a concept to structure an everyday activity, let us start with the concept argument and the conceptual metaphor argument is war. This metaphor is reflected in our everyday language by a wide variety of expressions:
ARGUMENT IS WAR
Your claims are indefensible.
He attacked every weak point in my argument.
His criticisms were right on target.
I demolished his argument.
I've never won an argument with him.
You disagree? Okay, shoot!
If you use that strategy, he'll wipe you out.
He shot down all of my arguments.
It is important to see that we don't just talk about arguments in terms of war. We can actually win or lose arguments. We see the person we are arguing with as an opponent. We attack his positions and we defend our own. We gain and lose ground. We plan and use strategies. If we find a position indefensible, we can abandon it and take a new line of attack. Many of the things we do in arguing are partially structured by the concept of war. Though there is no physical battle, there is a verbal battle, and the structure of an argument—attack, defense, counterattack, etc.—reflects this. It is in this sense that the argument is war metaphor is one that we live by in this culture; it structures the actions we perform in arguing.
Try to imagine a culture where arguments are not viewed in terms of war, where no one wins or loses, where there is no sense of attacking or defending, gaining or losing ground. Imagine a culture where an argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, experience them differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently. But we would probably not view them as arguing at all: they would simply be doing something different. It would seem strange even to call what they were doing "arguing." Perhaps the most neutral way of describing this difference between their culture and ours would be to say that we have a discourse form structured in terms of battle and they have one structured in terms of dance.
This is an example of what it means for a metaphorical concept, namely, argument is war, to structure (at least in part) what we do and how we understand what we are doing when we argue. The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. It is not that arguments are a subspecies of war. Arguments and wars are different kinds of things—verbal discourse and armed conflict—and the actions performed are different kinds of actions. But argument is partially structured, understood, performed, and talked about in terms of war. The concept is metaphorically structured, the activity is metaphorically structured, and, consequently, the language is metaphorically structured.
Moreover, this is the ordinary way of having an argument and talking about one. The normal way for us to talk about attacking a position is to use the words "attack a position." Our conventional ways of talking about arguments presuppose a metaphor we are hardly ever conscious of. The metaphor is not merely in the words we use—it is in our very concept of an argument. The language of argument is not poetic, fanciful, or rhetorical; it is literal. We talk about arguments that way because we conceive of them that way—and we act according to the way we conceive of things.
The most important claim we have made so far is that metaphor is not just a matter of language, that is, of mere words. We shall argue that, on the contrary, human thought processes are largely metaphorical. This is what we mean when we say that the human conceptual system is metaphorically structured and defined. Metaphors as linguistic expressions are possible precisely because there are metaphors in a person's conceptual system. Therefore, whenever in this book we speak of metaphors, such as argument is war, it should be understood that metaphor means metaphorical concept.
CHAPTER 2The Systematicity of Metaphorical Concepts
Arguments usually follow patterns; that is, there are certain things we typically do and do not do in arguing. The fact that we in part conceptualize arguments in terms of battle systematically influences the shape arguments take and the way we talk about what we do in arguing. Because the metaphorical concept is systematic, the language we use to talk about that aspect of the concept is systematic.
We saw in the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor that expressions from the vocabulary of war, e.g., attack a position, indefensible, strategy, new line of attack, win, gain ground, etc., form a systematic way of talking about the battling aspects of arguing. It is no accident that these expressions mean what they mean when we use them to talk about arguments. A portion of the conceptual network of battle partially characterizes the concept of an argument, and the language follows suit. Since metaphorical expressions in our language are tied to metaphorical concepts in a systematic way, we can use metaphorical linguistic expressions to study the nature of metaphorical concepts and to gain an understanding of the metaphorical nature of our activities.
To get an idea of how metaphorical expressions in everyday language can give us insight into the metaphorical nature of the concepts that structure our everyday activities, let us consider the metaphorical concept TIME IS MONEY as it is reflected in contemporary English.
TIME IS MONEY
You're wasting my time.
This gadget will save you hours.
I don't have the time to give you.
How do you spend your time these days?
That flat tire cost me an hour.
I've invested a lot of time in her.
I don't have enough time to spare for that.
You're running out of time.
You need to budget your time.
Put aside some time for ping pong.
Is that worth your while?
Do you have much time left?
He's living on borrowed time.
You don't use your time profitably.
I lost a lot of time when I got sick.
Thank you for your time.
Time in our culture is a valuable commodity. It is a limited resource that we use to accomplish our goals. Because of the way that the concept of work has developed in modern Western culture, where work is typically associated with the time it takes and time is precisely quantified, it has become customary to pay people by the hour, week, or year. In our culture TIME IS MONEY in many ways: telephone message units, hourly wages, hotel room rates, yearly budgets, interest on loans, and paying your debt to society by "serving time." These practices are relatively new in the history of the human race, and by no means do they exist in all cultures. They have arisen in modern industrialized societies and structure our basic everyday activities in a very profound way. Corresponding to the fact that we act as if time is a valuable commodity—a limited resource, even money—we conceive of time that way. Thus we understand and experience time as the kind of thing that can be spent, wasted, budgeted, invested wisely or poorly, saved, or squandered.
TIME IS MONEY, TIME IS A LIMITED RESOURCE, and TIME IS A VALUABLE COMMODITY are all metaphorical concepts. They are metaphorical since we are using our everyday experiences with money, limited resources, and valuable commodities to conceptualize time. This isn't a necessary way for human beings to conceptualize time; it is tied to our culture. There are cultures where time is none of these things.
The metaphorical concepts TIME IS MONEY, TIME IS A RESOURCE, and TIME IS A VALUABLE COMMODITY form a single system based on subcategorization, since in our society money is a limited resource and limited resources are valuable commodities. These subcategorization relationships characterize entailment relationships between the metaphors. TIME IS MONEY entails that TIME IS A LIMITED RESOURCE, which entails that TIME IS A VALUABLE COMMODITY.
We are adopting the practice of using the most specific metaphorical concept, in this case TIME IS MONEY, to characterize the entire system. Of the expressions listed under the TIME IS MONEY metaphor, some refer specifically to money (spend, invest, budget, profitably, cost), others to limited resources (use, use up, have enough of, run out of), and still others to valuable commodities (have, give, lose, thank you for). This is an example of the way in which metaphorical entailments can characterize a coherent system of metaphorical concepts and a corresponding coherent system of metaphorical expressions for those concepts.
CHAPTER 3Metaphorical Systematicity: Highlighting and Hiding
The very systematicity that allows us to comprehend one aspect of a concept in terms of another (e.g., comprehending an aspect of arguing in terms of battle) will necessarily hide other aspects of the concept. In allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept (e.g., the battling aspects of arguing), a metaphorical concept can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor. For example, in the midst of a heated argument, when we are intent on attacking our opponent's position and defending our own, we may lose sight of the cooperative aspects of arguing. Someone who is arguing with you can be viewed as giving you his time, a valuable commodity, in an effort at mutual understanding. But when we are preoccupied with the battle aspects, we often lose sight of the cooperative aspects.
A far more subtle case of how a metaphorical concept can hide an aspect of our experience can be seen in what Michael Reddy has called the "conduit metaphor." Reddy observes that our language about language is structured roughly by the following complex metaphor:
ideas (or meanings) are objects.
linguistic expressions are containers.
communication is sending.
The speaker puts ideas (objects) into words (containers) and sends them (along a conduit) to a hearer who takes the idea/objects out of the word/containers. Reddy documents this with more than a hundred types of expressions in English, which he estimates account for at least 70 percent of the expressions we use for talking about language. Here are some examples:
The CONDUIT Metaphor
It's hard to get that idea across to him.
I gave you that idea.
Your reasons came through to us.
It's difficult to put my ideas into words.
When you have a good idea, try to capture it immediately in words.
Try to pack more thought into fewer words.
You can't simply stuff ideas into a sentence any old way.
The meaning is right there in the words.
Don't force your meanings into the wrong words.
His words carry little meaning.
The introduction has a great deal of thought content.
Your words seem hollow.
The sentence is without meaning.
The idea is buried in terribly dense paragraphs.
In examples like these it is far more difficult to see that there is anything hidden by the metaphor or even to see that there is a metaphor here at all. This is so much the conventional way of thinking about language that it is sometimes hard to imagine that it might not fit reality. But if we look at what the CONDUIT metaphor entails, we can see some of the ways in which it masks aspects of the communicative process.
First, the LINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS ARE CONTAINERS FOR MEANINGS aspect of the CONDUIT metaphor entails that words and sentences have meanings in themselves, independent of any context or speaker. The MEANINGS ARE OBJECTS part of the metaphor, for example, entails that meanings have an existence independent of people and contexts. The part of the metaphor that says LINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS ARE CONTAINERS FOR MEANING entails that words (and sentences) have meanings, again independent of contexts and speakers. These metaphors are appropriate in many situations—those where context differences don't matter and where all the participants in the conversation understand the sentences in the same way. These two entailments are exemplified by sentences like
The meaning is right there in the words,
which, according to the CONDUIT metaphor, can correctly be said of any sentence. But there are many cases where context does matter. Here is a celebrated one recorded in actual conversation by Pamela Downing:
Please sit in the apple juice seat.
In isolation this sentence has no meaning at all, since the expression "apple-juice seat" is not a conventional way of referring to any kind of object. But the sentence makes perfect sense in the context in which it was uttered. An overnight guest came down to breakfast. There were four place settings, three with orange juice and one with apple juice. It was clear what the apple-juice seat was. And even the next morning, when there was no apple juice, it was still clear which seat was the apple-juice seat.
(Continues...)Excerpted from Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson. Copyright © 2003 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : University of Chicago Press; First Edition (April 15, 2003)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 256 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0226468011
- ISBN-13 : 978-0226468013
- Item Weight : 1.12 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.9 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #31,294 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #17 in Linguistics Reference
- #22 in Consciousness & Thought Philosophy
- #80 in Cognitive Psychology (Books)
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About the authors
George Lakoff is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972. He previously taught at Harvard and the University of Michigan. He graduated from MIT in 1962 (in Mathematics and Literature) and received his PhD in Linguistics from Indiana University in 1966. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Don't Think of an Elephant!, among other works, and is America’s leading expert on the framing of political ideas.
George Lakoff updates may be followed on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google+. Find these links, a complete bibliography, and more at http://georgelakoff.com
Mark Johnson is the Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon. He is the author of The Body in the Mind and Moral Imagination, both published by the University of Chicago Press. Johnson and George Lakoff have also coauthored Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought.
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Customers find the book amazing and insightful, providing a window into a vocabulary. They also say the metaphors change the way they look at the world. However, some find the reading experience repetitive and not light reading. Opinions are mixed on readability, with some finding it easy to read and others finding it difficult to get through.
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Customers find the book amazing, interesting, and paradigm-shifting. They say it's well written and opens a window to a vocabulary that they can visualize and interpret into their paintings.
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"An excellent, systematic analysis of phrases that build up the seemingly random system the whole language uses, without the users giving the..." Read more
Customers find the book very insightful, providing a good introduction to how we use metaphors. They also say the authors provide many and thorough examples of how our understanding of reality is structured. Readers also describe the book as a philosophical look at language, a foundational book, and a rewarding read.
"...It incorporates philosophy, psychology, scientific reasoning, the meaning and purpose of myths, and so on, because one way or another metaphors..." Read more
"...Metaphors lend structure to concepts, concepts give structure to thought and action...." Read more
"...When the Authors write "Metaphorical thought is unavoidable, ubiquitous and mostly unconscious" (P. 272) what are they attempting to convey?..." Read more
"...The metaphorical concepts can be extended however, and be deployed in a way of thinking traditionally called "figurative."..." Read more
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And yes, my description incorporated a few pretty interesting metaphors which are both true and objective.
When the Authors write "Metaphorical thought is unavoidable, ubiquitous and mostly unconscious" (P. 272) what are they attempting to convey? How can they describe something that is mostly unconscious? Claiming that the mechanisms in the brain for using metaphor are all unconscious makes it clear they don't know what they are talking about.
One problem for the authors is their claim that the concepts like UP-DOWN are universal. They often cite cultural and environmental differences to support their ideas but omit more universal differences such as the zero gravity environment. When one is orbiting the earth in zero gravity it is difficult to find an up or a down, or a top or bottom. Likewise, even on earth, when one stands on one's head, the feet point upward.
The most audacious part of Author's thesis is that using metaphors can create a new reality. Their claim is that if one either acts upon or believes a metaphorical view, this constitutes a "reality." Of course this all depends on what one calls reality. I always preferred Phil Dick's description: "Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
The fallacy of the Author's thesis lies in their use of the term "concept." They try to use the term concept (defined as an abstract idea) to describe being metaphorically structured. But metaphors are, themselves, abstract or non literal use of language. It is hard to see how using one abstraction to clarify or structure another abstract term could enhance understanding. When using a metaphor one shape-shifts or morphs the language into a form that one person might find helpful, another comical, and still another nonsensical. For example to say for amusement, Bette bounces around like a rubber ball, hardly adds to any understanding or a serious description of poor Bette.
The authors are careful to point out that the use of metaphors does, possess a notion of entailment, and that metaphorical entailments are able to characterize a coherent system of metaphorical concepts. Thus this system is not loose and unstructured, but rather similar in fact to the many systems of logic that one finds in computer science and in research in artificial intelligence. However, being able to view one aspect of a concept in terms of another will mask other aspects of this concept, and the authors give several interesting examples of this. When a concept is structured by a metaphor it is always partially structured, for otherwise the metaphor and the concept it is trying to understand would be identical. The metaphorical concepts can be extended however, and be deployed in a way of thinking traditionally called "figurative."
Along with these structural metaphors, the authors discuss `orientational metaphors', that serve to organize an entire system of concepts with respect to one another. As their name implies, these metaphors usually involve spatial orientation, and originate in human cultural and physical experience. Several examples of orientational metaphors are given, and they give what they consider to be plausible explanations of how they arise in experience. They remind the reader though that these explanations are not set in stone. However they clearly believe, and they emphasize this in the book, that metaphors cannot be understood or represented independently of its experiential basis. A metaphor is inseparable from its experiential basis.
The philosophical reader will probably want to know how the metaphorical nature of thought connects with a "theory of truth". The authors don't resist flirting with the boundaries of philosophy, and give a rather lengthy discussion of metaphors and "truth." The authors clearly do not believe in the traditional Western notion of objective, absolute, and unconditional truth. They do however vigorously put forward a notion of truth which they believe meshes with their paradigm of metaphor.
Truth, the authors believe, depends on "categorization", which means that statements are only true relative to some understanding of them, that understanding always involves human categorization arising from experience and not from inherent properties, that statements are true only relative to the properties emphasized by the categories used in the statement, and that categories are not fixed and not constant.
The authors then put forward an explanation of how a sentence can be understood as true, before tackling the general case of metaphors. To understand a sentence as being true in a particular situation involves both having an understanding of the sentence and of the situation. But to understand a sentence as being true it suffices to understand only approximately how it fits the understanding of the situation. Thus the authors introduce a metric, i.e. a notion of closeness between the situation and the sentence that fits this situation. Obtaining this fit may require several things to happen, such as "projecting" an orientation onto something that has no inherent orientation, or providing a background for the sentence to make sense.
Having detailed what is involved in understanding a simple sentence as being true, the authors then state that including conventional metaphors does not change anything. The understanding of truth for conventional metaphors can be done in terms of metaphorical "projection" and in terms of nonmetaphorical "projection". In metaphorical projection understanding of one thing is done in terms of another kind of thing, whereas in nonmetaphorical projection only one kind of thing is involved. The case of new metaphors does not involve essentially anything more than the case of conventional metaphors.
The authors summarize their "experientalist" theory of truth as the understanding of a statement as being true in a given situation when the understanding of the statement fits the understanding of the situation closely enough for the purposes at hand. This theory, they say, does mesh with some aspects of the correspondence theory of truth but rejects the notion of a "correspondence" between a statement and some state of affairs in the world. The correspondence between a statement and that state of affairs is mediated they say by the understanding of that statement and the state of affairs. In addition, truth is always relative to the conceptual system used to understand situations and statements. Further, the understanding of something involves putting it into a coherent scheme relative to a conceptual system. The author's theory of truth is thus reminiscent of the familiar coherence theories of truth. In addition, understanding is always grounded in experience, with the conceptual systems arising from interaction with the environment. Their theory of truth does not require a notion of "absolute" truth, and most interestingly, and most provocatively, individuals with different conceptual systems may understand the world differently, and have different criteria for truth and reality.
The key word is "different": an interesting project would be to quantify this.
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