Metaphor and Symbol, 23: 1–23, 2008

Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN 1092-6488 print / 1532-7868 online
DOI: 10.1080/10926480701723516

Argument is Argument: An Essay on

Conceptual Metaphor and Verbal Dispute
James Howe
Department of Anthropology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge, Massachusetts

The metaphor “ARGUMENT IS WAR” looms large in the conceptualist and experi-
entialist approach of Lakoff and Johnson (1980). Despite extensive discussion
of this metaphor by critics and supporters of Lakoff and Johnson, it has so far
escaped serious scrutiny on several key points. English-speakers can identify verbal
exchanges as arguments without resort to metaphorical comparisons or transfers,
and speakers’ use of war metaphors to characterize verbal dispute depends on
conventional understandings rather than personal experience of war or of other
kinds of physical struggle. Much of the evidence for Lakoff and Johnson’s claims—
a culture that metaphorizes argument as dance; the historical and personal priority of
force over verbal dispute; the influence of metaphor on action; even the experience
supposedly shaping source domains—depends on supposition and ungrounded
assertion. In making sense of how people use this metaphor, the discourse-based
program elaborated by Naomi Quinn (1991, 1997) carries analysis further than a
purely conceptualist approach.

In George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s widely read and widely accepted claims
for the metaphorical structuring of experience and action, the notion that English-
speakers understand verbal arguments through tropes of war has special salience.
Allotted the lead-off position in Lakoff and Johnson’s rhetorical batting order,
“ARGUMENT IS WAR” is the first trope they consider in their programmatic

1
“ARGUMENT AS WAR” is also featured in the article-length summation of Lakoff and Johnson’s
position published the following year (1981, pp. 287–289).
Requests for reprints should be sent to James Howe, Department of Anthropology, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room 16-267, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307,
USA. E-mail: howe@mit.edu
2 HOWE

book, Metaphors We Live By, and one to which they return repeatedly (1980,
pp. 3–6, 61–64, 77–105).1 Disciples, advocates, and commentators have also
given this metaphor particular attention (Eubanks, 1999; Gibbs, 1994, p. 249;
Knowles & Moon, 2006, pp. 31–33, 40–44, 98–100, 103–104, 161; Kövecses,
2002, pp. 5, 30, 74, 80, 158; Krzeszowski 2002; Sweetser, 1992, pp. 713,
717–719). And in the last few years, Lakoff and Johnson themselves have
emphatically reaffirmed the essential soundness of their analysis (2003). While
the Lakoff-Johnson program by no means stands or falls on the validity of
claims for this one trope, “ARGUMENT IS WAR” has a special place in their
work, and as such it deserves closer scrutiny than it has received in its first
quarter-century.
To be sure, the analysis of this trope has not escaped criticism altogether.
Vervaeke and Kennedy (1996) have used “ARGUMENT AS WAR” to raise doubts
about the existence, conceptual unity, and in particular, the falsifiability of implicit
metaphor. Ritchie (2003) expands the scope of the war metaphor to encompass
competitive games and low-level personal conflict; he locates its basis in childhood
experience of constraint and struggle rather than in organized warfare; and he argues
for the reversibility or bidirectionality of some metaphors (see also Vervaeke &
Kennedy, 2004; Ritchie, 2004). In contrast to both parties, who see themselves
offering modifications or corrections to an intellectually powerful program,
Verena Haser treats “ARGUMENT AS WAR” as Exhibit A in an exhaustive and
unrelenting indictment of Lakoff and Johnson’s work (2005, pp. 53–71, 148–157,
173–195, 199–201, 205–208, 233–237, 249–253). Among Haser’s (2005) many
criticisms, she denies that source domains are typically more clearly delineated
and/or more concrete than target domains (pp. 59–60), and she claims that expres-
sions treated by Lakoff and Johnson as instantiations of “ARGUMENT AS WAR”
can be regrouped, reanalyzed, or even understood individually without recourse to
conceptual metaphor (pp. 173–195; 205–208; 233–237).
As will become clear, the criticisms offered in the present paper—intended
as friendlier than Haser’s if not so supportive as those of Ritchie, Vervaeke, and
Kennedy—overlap with a few of their points but otherwise differ substantially.
I suggest the following:

1. Use of the term argument by native-speakers of English does not depend on

metaphor, and that understanding of that category is at best only partially
conditioned by metaphor.
2. Claims for the primacy and greater experiential grounding of war and
physical violence as compared with verbal conflict are at best unproven.
3. The semantics of dialogue and disputation in English cannot be reduced to
a single word.
4. The notion that another culture might metaphorize argument as dance is
fallacious, and indeed, oxymoronic.
 CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR AND VERBAL DISPUTE 3

5. The claim that people whose languages have gentle metaphors for debate and
disputation would act in less contentious ways, based entirely on supposition
and ungrounded assertion, is contradicted by data offered here from one
non-western culture.
6. Despite attempts by Lakoff, Johnson, and their disciples to incorporate
cultural difference into their program, it displays an unresolved tension
between universalism and particularity, as well as dependence on time-worn
clichés about human nature and difference.

I conclude by suggesting that Lakoff and Johnson’s experientialist approach

should be supplemented by the more fully cultural and discourse-based
program elaborated by Naomi Quinn (1991, 1997).2 Throughout, attention
to “ARGUMENT AS WAR” will I hope illuminate persistent issues in
“conceptualist” and “experientialist,” approaches to metaphor.3

HOW DO WE KNOW WHEN WE’RE ARGUING?

Lakoff and Johnson suggest that the trope “ARGUMENT IS WAR,” as a

“conceptual metaphor,” structures and embodies the way English-speakers think
about discourse in fundamental ways: it is not that culturally standardized under-
standings of argument existing outside of metaphor are expressed through the
trope of war but rather that those understandings are to be located in the metaphor
itself—they are embedded or encoded in it.4 “Thus one activity, talking, is
understood in terms of another, physical fighting” (1980, p. 81). Such under-
standings, they suggest, for the most part lurk outside conscious recognition.
“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” (p. 3).
Even further, Lakoff and Johnson argue that native English-speakers decide
whether a verbal or written exchange is an argument—whether it qualifies as an

2
Other key metaphors in the conceptualist canon might also benefit from skeptical re-examination.
Given the prominence in the literature of “ANGER IS A HOT FLUID IN A CONTAINER” (Gibbs,
1994, pp. 7–9, 162–164, 203; Kövecses, 2002, 2005), it is disconcerting that when Kövecses offers
seven examples showing the elaboration of this metaphor in English (2005, p. 152), three of them
(have a cow, blow a fuse, fly off the handle) are actually based on other source domains.
3
I am grateful to Nicolas Howe and Naomi Quinn for helpful comments on a draft of this essay,
and to the many MIT students who participated in class discussions of Metaphors We Live By.
4
In their original formulation, Lakoff and Johnson (1980, pp. 77–86) write of gestalts, struc-
tured wholes encompassing source and target, and in later work, of domain conflation or blending
(Fauconnier & Turner, 2002; Lakoff & Johnson, 2003). These are useful, important distinctions, but
they do not affect my critique of “ARGUMENT AS WAR.”
4 HOWE

instance of that category—in terms of its resemblance to war.5 They offer an

extended discussion of the superordinate term conversations, as a certain kind of
speech event characterized in terms of participants, parts, stages, linear sequence,
causation, and purpose, and they ask how a participant knows when conversation
has mutated into argument.6 Their answer is that in an argument one experiences
oneself “as being in a warlike situation   The structure of the conversation
takes on aspects of the structure of a war, and you act accordingly” (p. 79). Thus
participants, in identifying a particular conversation as argument, invoke criteria
that are entirely metaphorical: “When we perceive dimensions of our experience
as fitting the WAR gestalt   we become aware that we are participating in
another kind of experience, namely, an argument” (p. 83).7 One may call on
other metaphors—arguments as buildings or containers or journeys—to suggest
other aspects of arguing or to define the subcategory of “rational arguments”
(pp. 87–96), but only the primary metaphor of war lets us know when we are
arguing.
It does so, according to Lakoff and Johnson, because war is more clearly
delineated and readily apprehended than discourse, in terms of both present
experience and past history: “This metaphor allows us to conceptualize what
a rational argument is in terms of something that we understand more readily,
namely, physical conflict” (p. 61). Source domains, as characterized by more
recent work in this tradition as well as by Lakoff and Johnson’s original claims,
are more natural and/or more concrete or physical, more highly structured,
more clearly delineated, understood more readily, absorbed earlier in life, and
altogether more readily apprehended than target domains, which are typically
characterized as “abstract” (Cacciari, 1998, p. 121; Gibbs, 1998, p. 90; Kövecses,
2005, p. 5; Sweetser, 1992, p. 711; see Haser, 2005, pp. 59–61). Indeed, both

5
In one respect, recent conceptualists seem to be making more limited claims than did Lakoff
and Johnson: though they suggest that target domains are understood in terms of metaphor, not
all of them insist that instances are identified through metaphor, in this case, that one recognizes
argument only through its resemblance with war. Indeed, the question of how such target entities
as love, emotion, anger, etc. are recognized or identified is often ignored or taken for granted in
conceptualist work.
6
Lakoff and Johnson characterize an argument as one kind of conversation. In my own usage,
a verbal exchange or dialogue that turns into an argument has ceased to be a conversation—the
two forms of speech are for the most part mutually exclusive. This difference, however, does not
substantially affect either their claims or my critique.
7
As Haser (2005, p. 157) tellingly notes, Lakoff and Johnson’s claim that metaphors are grounded
in systematic experiential correlations between domains implicitly presupposes that one is already
able to perceive the characteristics of both sides of the correlation. How could we experience the
correlation between the duration of time and the extension of space unless we can already perceive
both duration and extension? The problem is the same as that inherent in Durkheim and Mauss’s
classic argument (1963 [1903]) that we can only perceive natural entities in terms of their connection
with the divisions of society (see Needham, 1963, p. xxvii).
 CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR AND VERBAL DISPUTE 5

Kövecses (2005, p. 5) and Gibbs (1998) incorporate this distinction between

abstraction and physical experience into core definitions of metaphor.8
Carrying this line of analysis even further, Lakoff and Johnson suggest that
a concern with argumentation, that is, with rationality in argument, is to a great
extent a form of self-deception:

Not only are all the “rational” arguments that are assumed to actually live up to the
ideal of RATIONAL ARGUMENT conceived of in terms of WAR, but almost all
of them contain, in hidden form, the “irrational” and “unfair” tactics that rational
arguments in their ideal form are supposed to transcend   Examples like these
allow us to trace the lineage of our rational argument back through “irrational”
argument (= everyday arguing) to its origins in physical combat (1980, p. 64; see
also Kövecses, 2002, pp. 74–75).

The history invoked by Lakoff and Johnson to demonstrate the priority of

physical combat over speech is the history of the human species “over the
ages,” that is, over the extremely longue durée of our evolutionary past (1980,
pp. 61–62), a point to which I return below. The somewhat shorter history
of our word argue, on the other hand, offers little support for their claims.
According to dictionaries of Latin, the words arguo and argumentum already had
the strong sense of developing a line of fact and reason to support a position.9
The cognates of argument in French and Spanish, moreover, refer primarily to
argumentation, and other words in those languages are called on more often to
discuss contention or dispute.10 Even in English, the OED (1989) entry for argue
gives roughly equal weight to disputing and argumentation, while case-making
and logic dominates concerning the noun argument. Although we must look to
more authoritative philology than I can offer for a definitive etymological history,

8
“Metaphor consists of a source and target domain such that the source is a more physical
and the target a more abstract kind of domain” (Kövecses, 2005, p. 5). See Dorothy Holland’s
incisive critique of Lakoff and Johnson’s claims that some experiences are more physical than others
(Holland, 1982, pp. 291–293). Concerning “ARGUMENT IS WAR” in particular, she points out that
for most Americans, our experience of argument is actually much more direct and personal than any
knowledge and experience we may have of war (p. 293).
9
The Oxford Latin Dictionary (Glare, 1982, p. 168) gives five meanings for the noun argumentum,
none of which refer to quarreling or even dispute. Of the six definitions offered for the verb arguo,
the first two concern argumentation. The other four involve notions of disputation, contradiction,
and criticism but not quarreling.
10
The Larousse Gran diccionario of Spanish (2004, p. 33) confirms my own sense that discutir,
disputar, and pelear are the verbs of choice for disagreeing with heat about something, and that
cognates of our word argument refer more to making a case. The dictionary of the Real Academia
Española (1992) offers as secondary meanings of argüir “echar en cara” (reproach) and “disputar
impugnando la sentencia u opiníon ajena,” but the first meaning given is “sacar en claro, deducir
como consecuencia natural” (1992, p. 132). Usage in French appears similar (Robert, 2001; Corréard
& Grundy, 1994).
6 HOWE

the evidence readily at hand gives little comfort to the idea that “irrational”
nastiness takes historical priority over reasoned argument.
More significantly for Lakoff and Johnson’s core argument, David Ritchie
challenges their claims for the experiential priority of war in the lives of most
English-speakers:

Given the small number of people in the United States who have directly experi-
enced war, it is not easy to see how “ARGUMENT IS WAR” can be grounded in
direct physical or social experience   . On the other hand, several of the other activ-
ities within this group of interrelated concepts that are grounded in.. experience,
[because children have] well-developed schemas for physical and verbal fighting,
contests, and games    It is likely that our experience of both argument and war are
grounded [sic] in the common experience of frustrated desires and the consequent
conflict of wills   (Ritchie, 2003, p. 132).

Lakoff and Johnson have responded to comments like Ritchie’s in an

afterword written for the second edition of their book (which is otherwise
unchanged from the first edition). There they substitute the word struggle for
war.

Many readers have correctly observed that most people learn about argument
before they learn about war. The metaphor actually originates in childhood with the
primary metaphor Argument is Struggle. All children struggle against the physical
manipulations of their parents; and, as language is learned, the physical struggle
comes to be accompanied by words (2003, p. 265).11

Except in this one respect, however, Lakoff and Johnson do not retreat from
their previous analysis of “ARGUMENT AS WAR,” and indeed, they present
it as an example of what, following Grady and others, they now call primary
metaphors, that is, tropes “directly grounded in the everyday experience that
links our sensory-motor experience to the domain of our subjective judgments”
and the basis on which more complex metaphors are constructed (2003, pp. 255,
264–265; 1999, pp. 46–59; Grady, 1997). Although adult experience is still
presumably relevant, emphasis falls heavily on the earliest stages of life, on the
grounding of metaphor in childhood maturation. So important is this aspect of
the research program initiated by Lakoff and Johnson that it is now routinely
identified as “experientialist.”

11
The proposed switch from war to struggle as source domain complicates Lakoff and Johnson’s
argument in other ways. In their original formulation, they insist on the separation of source and
target: “It is not that arguments are a subspecies of war. Arguments and wars are different kinds of
thing” (1980, p. 5). This claim is much harder to sustain if the target and source both lie in the realm
of everyday experience of struggle.
 CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR AND VERBAL DISPUTE 7

Note also that Lakoff and Johnson (and if I understand him correctly, their
critic Ritchie) hold fast to the idea that we locate and comprehend verbal
argument in terms of its metaphoric relationship to physical conflict: we know
arguing when we hear it or do it through its resemblance, if not to battle, then
to parental discipline and restraint, playground tussles, punch-ups, dodgeball, or
football games. This claim, that our core understanding of everyday words is to
a great extent metaphoric, that we understand entities or domains in terms of
other entities or domains—or in more recent versions, in terms of a complex
relationship, blend or combination of the two—has become one of the founda-
tional principles of conceptual metaphor theory (e.g., Gibbs, 1994, pp. 24–79).
But does our own experience as English-speakers support this claim
concerning argument? Are there strong reasons to believe either that we cannot
understand or identify the concept in its own terms without resort to metaphorical
transfers, or that physical combat is experientially prior to or more basic
than verbal disagreement? Must we mentally invoke Antietam, dodgeball, or
a spanking every time we hear someone wrangle? The evidence suggests not.
English-speakers have from earliest childhood a wealth of concrete experience
with disagreement, contests of will, and other verbal conflict with parents,
siblings, friends, schoolmates, and others—experience every bit as fundamental
as that of physical violence or constraint. Even if it could be shown that the very
earliest struggles between parent and child were entirely physical, verbal inter-
action follows within a few months (how many times in a year does a toddler
hear the word “No”?), and this slight temporal priority, if it exists, by no means
proves that in the long run one form of engagement with others is necessarily
more deep-seated or basic, still less, that we can only understand one in terms
of the other.12
English-speakers readily decide whether an interaction qualifies as arguing, or
whether an amicable exchange has turned into an argument, in terms of criteria
specific to verbal interaction: Do the parties disagree? Do they persist in their
disagreement? Does one or both work hard to persuade the other or insist that
her position is correct? Does the exchange become vehement, antagonistic or
rancorous? These criteria belong to the domain in question itself—they do not
require a conceptual or verbal transfer from another domain.13 Nor are they
hidden away from consciousness, either within metaphor or any place else. It

12
Given persistent disputes in the literature about how to distinguish the literal from the
metaphorical, or whether such a distinction is possible (Gibbs, 1994; Katz, 1998, p. 24), I should
note that what is at issue here is less literal versus metaphorical per se than whether a concept or
domain such as argument cannot be understood except in terms of a transfer or comparison or blend
with another domain.
13
Haser makes much the same point: “   the very descriptions employed by Lakoff/Johnson
show that it is possible to refer to the various characteristic features of arguments without resorting
to metaphorical language, and hence metaphorical conceptions” (Haser, 2005, p. 149).
8 HOWE

may be that some people have difficulty in abstracting and verbalizing such
criteria (as is of course true of many aspects of language), but the criteria are
nonetheless readily accessible in other ways, as is obvious when the words
arguments or argue appear in conversation or print.

Q. “Did your parents argue a lot?” A. “All the time.” Q. “How did you know when
they were arguing?” A. “They yelled at each other.”

[Someone who had difficulty finding a destination while driving with a friend,]
“We had a mild argument about where it was.”

“‘He had very strong opinions on everything    One tended to have arguments.
They were always friendly arguments, but they were arguments nonetheless. It
was a little bit intimidating at the time.’” (from an obituary, Boston Globe, p. D7,
2/16/07)

“I don’t know if you noticed how thin the walls were [in the motel last night]. The
couple next door had a huge argument. We could hear the entire content of the
argument—that’s how thin the walls were.”

[A colleague who was asked about arguments witnessed during fieldwork in

Greece:] “It’s very constructive arguing. It’s discussion at a heightened level.
Arguing but not fighting, if you know what I mean. They’re very articulate and
opinionated—they make great informants. And they like to persuade others of their
opinions. But I also found that in comparison with Americans, they’re more likely
to concede the point.”

“HOW TO WIN A BOSTON SPORTS ARGUMENT. Tip #18, Do your

homework. Study the Globe’s Baseball Preview in the paper TODAY!” (Headline
in the “Sidekick” Section, Boston Globe, 3/30/07).

Q. “Do you think professors or graduate students argue more?” A. “I think

professors argue more. Not only are they more deeply committed to their positions
(political, theoretical), they are more willing to risk pissing off their peers.”14

The examples offered above show that, far from skulking outside our
awareness in metaphor, the distinctions by which we identify and characterize
arguments form part of each person’s everyday working definition of the word
in question: none of the examples requires a transfer from another domain to
make sense of the speaker or writer’s usage. People may, in particular instances,

14
All of these examples came from published texts or from conversations and written exchanges
in which I participated. In those that take question-and-answer form, I was the questioner.
 CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR AND VERBAL DISPUTE 9

disagree about whether a verbal encounter is an argument, and they may pay
more attention to one criterion than to another (”Well, yes, they disagreed, but
no one stayed mad for long“) but those criteria are readily used and readily
articulated. Americans undoubtedly call on metaphors of war, among others, to
characterize or discuss arguments (see below), but they don’t need metaphor to
know one when they hear one.15

WORDS AND THINGS

Whatever the features, moreover, by which argument is to be defined and

identified, the insistent focus on that one word shown by Lakoff and Johnson,
as well as their supporters and critics, by narrowing a complex semantic and
behavioral field down to a single noun, ultimately distorts analysis. Just as
one cannot understand chairs or armoires without situating them in the larger
domains of furniture and furnishings, so arguments should be seen in a much
larger context as just one element (though admittedly, a salient one) in a large
array of terms we apply to discourse and discourse-mediated relations between
two parties, including partial synonyms like quarrel, spat, tiff, row, squabble,
altercation, controversy, difference-of-opinion, disagreement, falling-out, feud,
debate, dispute, set-to, polemic, or exchange-of-letters-in-a-scholarly-journal, as
well as mostly contrasting terms such as conversation, chat, interview, inter-
rogation, question-and-answer session, inquiry, dialogue, courtship, seduction,
greetings, pillow talk, purchases, or placing an order.16
That we have a word (actually several words) to characterize exchanges that
strike us as contentious and disputatious, just as we have terms for amicable or
cooperative or amorous exchanges, by itself tells one very little.17 It says nothing
at all about the intensity, degree of nastiness, or frequency of argumentative
exchanges—how many minutes a day are devoted to quarreling or disputing

15
A recent article on “ARGUMENT AS WAR” by Tomasz Krzeszowski (2002), endorsed by
Kövecses (2005, pp. 165–166) puts the procedures and assumptions of conceptual metaphor theory
in an odd but revealing light. Krzeszowski claims that metaphors can “become real” (p. 141),
either when they are expressed physically rather than verbally, or more significantly, when the
target domain turns into the source domain. He even asserts that in principle one should be able to
compute the “reality quotient” of a metaphor (p. 143). He supports these claims by showing that in
a drama famous in Poland, relations among opposed characters deteriorate from polite disagreement
to physical violence, i.e., that argument allegedly becomes war. He fails to show, however either that
the turn to violence (whether in the drama or elsewhere) is governed by metaphor, or that disputation
could not lead to violence even in the absence of such a metaphor—or even that “ARGUMENT IS
WAR” is a standard metaphor in Polish.
16
Eubanks (1999), in an article I only recently discovered, makes much the same point.
17
One might doubt, in fact, that any language would lack terms by which to characterize the
tenor and nature of verbal exchanges.
10 HOWE

rather than chatting, and how unpleasant things get—still less, about the overall
dominance of verbal aggression in our system of discourse.18 Indeed, we might
expect that different groups of English-speakers, while using the same words
and making the same distinctions, might vary widely in their behavior. It may
well be, as Deborah Tannen (1999) suggests, that Americans are a particularly
contentious lot (see below), but you can’t prove it through analysis, metaphorical
or otherwise, of a single word.

ARGUMENT AS DANCE?

In an extension of their claims, Lakoff and Johnson exhort their readers to

consider an alternative to our own bellicose metaphor:

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 (1980, pp. 4–5).

The fundamental difficulty with this fantasy, as even a moment’s contemplation

should have suggested, is that the word argument does not and cannot occur
in any language except English. In other languages there are words that, with
varying degrees of plausibility, might be translated into English as argument,
but they are not themselves argument (not even cognates in other European
languages). To translate some foreign word, gzornenplatz,19 as argument is to
suggest that gzornenplatz shares enough features with our English word to be
felicitously translated by it—something that in other contexts and concerning
other words, Lakoff has himself pointed out (1987, pp. 304–337). Thus to suggest
that a single word in another language could combine argument and dance is a
form of verbal sleight-of-hand, logically impossible as well as misleading.20

Lakoff and Johnson seem to have an inkling of the problem when they add:

But we would not view them as arguing at all: they would simply be doing
something different. It would seem strange even to call what they are doing

18
A certain kind of speech could in theory be labeled as rancorous in the extreme but occur only
rarely, as would be the case, for instance, if philippic were part of our everyday vocabulary.
19
This word comes from one of Bob Newhart’s comedy routines from many years back.
20
The absence of notions like attacking and defending or gaining and losing ground might not
keep us from translating a foreign word as argument, but the absence of any notion of winning or
losing certainly would.
 CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR AND VERBAL DISPUTE 11

“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 struc-
tured in terms of battle and they have one structured in terms of dance
(1980, p. 5).21

This incommensurability, however, is located not in the field of semantics but

in discourse as practice or behavior: it is what those imaginary others are doing
and saying that we would find hard to recognize as argument, not the words or
metaphors they use to describe it. Little or no doubt is entertained concerning the
possible existence of a language in which argument is defined or metaphorized
as dance.
Consider, in contrast, what a linguist, ethnographer, or translator would
actually do on encountering a word in a foreign language, gzornenplatz, one that
through metaphor or another kind of polysemy links discourse with dance: unless
it were an especially aggressive form of dance, the probability of translating
that word as argument is slight indeed. A translator encountering discourse-as-
dance, if forced to offer a one-word equivalent, would be much more likely to
choose some English term other than argument, perhaps adding a footnote to
elaborate on the complications, while a linguistic-minded ethnographer would
probably offer a page or chapter devoted to unraveling the semantic and behav-
ioral complexities of the gzornenplatz-complex. What they would not do is
blithely translate balletic gzornenplatz as ”argument.“ Lakoff and Johnson’s
thought experiment, not merely specious and oxymoronic, fails entirely to come
to terms with linguistic or cultural difference.
It is of course conceivable that a word from another language might at least
approximate what Lakoff and Johnson have in mind, that it might actually link
dance not just with discourse but also with disputation and contention. This
notion, while not absolutely impossible, is unlikely enough to require examples
from real-world languages—especially after a quarter-century, mere supposition
will not do.

FRIENDLY DANCE-TALKERS?

Lakoff and Johnson insist that the metaphors used for argument strongly
condition action and practice as well as understanding. “The concepts that govern
our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday

21
Note also that Lakoff and Johnson presume that another culture would understand dance as they
do (intricate maneuver and cooperation rather than self-assertion or wild abandon), an assumption
that does not hold across the board for dance even in our own society (see Haser’s discussion, 2005,
pp. 152–153).
12 HOWE

functioning, down to the most mundane details” (1980, p. 3). For truculent
English-speakers:

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 (p. 4).

On the other hand, anyone fortunate enough to speak a language that equates
argument with dance would act nice: “In such a culture, people would view
arguments differently, experience them differently, carry them out differently,
and talk about them differently” (p. 5).
In this instance as well as others, Lakoff and Johnson are advancing a
classically Whorfian argument. True, where Benjamin Whorf (1956) stressed
the primacy of grammatical categories and what supposedly could or could
not be expressed in Hopi verbs, Lakoff and Johnson begin and end with
metaphor. But like Whorf, they claim that language partially determines or influ-
ences both thought and behavior, and that different languages create radically
different conceptual and behavioral worlds. In contrast to other, more restrained
Whorfians, moreover (see Katz, 1998), they argue for the effect of metaphor not
just on perception and understanding but also on fundamental aspects of social
action. As Lakoff (1991) put it in the hyperbolic opening sentence of a widely
read essay on the Gulf War, “METAPHORS CAN KILL” (see also Lakoff &
Johnson 2003, p. 243–244). Although Whorf’s name is not mentioned in the text
of Metaphors We Live By, in the acknowledgements the authors tip their hats to
him and to Edward Sapir as well (1980, p. xi), while in another work Lakoff
(1987, pp. 304–337) has offered a chapter devoted to a long, systematic, and
impressively lucid discussion of “WHORF AND RELATIVISM,” in which he
identifies him as “the most interesting linguist of his day” (p. 330) and affirms
that “like Whorf, I believe that differences in conceptual systems affect behavior
in a significant way” (p. 337).22
An exhaustive examination of metaphorical Whorfianism lies outside the
scope of this paper. Here I would only note that a common criticism of Whorf’s
work—that he offered little or no independent evidence for the presumed
cognitive and behavioral effects of linguistic forms—applies with special force

22
In more recent work Lakoff has carried forward this very strong Whorfian argument, arguing
that key metaphors affect decisions about war and peace (1991) and the political mindsets of Liberals
and Conservatives (1996, 2006). The claims made by others in the recent Whorfian revival (see
Katz, 1998) tend to be less bold than Lakoff’s, and even conceptualists, with the notable exception
of Kövecses (2005, chapter 8), have not on the whole embraced Lakoff and Johnson’s Whorfianism
as enthusiastically as they have other aspects of their program.
 CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR AND VERBAL DISPUTE 13

to “ARGUMENT AS DANCE,” in which every aspect of the example, including

the linguistic form itself and the language in which it occurs, is imaginary.23
As a small attempt to fill this vacuum, I offer my own experience studying
public debate and discussion in one nonwestern society. A single ethnographic
case, even a real one, cannot by itself support wide cross-cultural generalizations,
but it can suggest some of the difficulties with Lakoff and Johnson’s claims. The
Kuna of Panama, though their language lacks a one-word equivalent to argument,
have many terms for forms of public speech we would recognize as argumentative
and/or based on argumentation. For the Kuna, the primary site of discussion and
debate is the village “gathering house” (onmakennega). There several nights a
week the assembled men of a community discuss its affairs, debating important
issues and resolving trouble cases as well as discussing more routine matters
(Howe, 1986; Sherzer, 1983). Most of the terms used for gathering speech are
based on the highly polysemic word igar, igal, igala, whose root meaning is
“path” or “way.” In one cluster of expressions, igar is best rendered as “case,
issue, matter, point of discussion,” as in igar dummad/igar bibigwa “major/minor
issue,” igar dargwen “problem,” igal abalusad, “messed up, bad case,” as well
as the verb phrases igal itoe, “hear/discuss cases,” igar nudake “put a matter
in order,” and igar naboe “settle a case.” In another semantic cluster, igar has
the sense of “way, law, norm, precedent, decision, correct thinking.” Thus: igal
amie, “find a way, decide or resolve something,” igar maye “clear a trail, initiate
understanding, set a precedent or norm,” igar mai, “the way lies, a norm, law, or
precedent exists,” be wis igarye “you (should) know what’s what, what’s right,”
or naga igal uke, “give each other the way.”
These expressions based on igar characterize the discourse and practice of
the Kuna gathering house in terms that are largely positive and benign or at least
neutral, as do other expressions such as binsaed dake “see thoughts,” binsaed
uke “give thoughts,” unae “counsel,” or muchub-muchub nase golle “call to one
another.” According to Lakoff and Johnson, gathering discussions characterized
in such friendly terms would lead one to expect sweetness, light, and perhaps
intricate verbal maneuver. In fact, from my own experience sitting through
several hundred such evenings, the tone of discussion varies widely, from the
most amicable and routine conversations to fierce, intransigent shouting matches.
If I could identify a median point or norm, it would be contained and civil but
very pointed, adamant, and direct argument. Kuna friends sometimes lamented to
me their inability to reach consensus more simply and pleasantly and even more
what they saw as a tendency to fierce and impassioned debate, regretting that
when they gave each other the way, they were so often “opposed, at each other”

23
Lakoff and Johnson, moreover, show only that there is at least sometimes a congruity between
metaphor and action: they offer no proof that when participants argue aggressively, their actions are
motivated, impelled, or controlled by the war metaphor.
14 HOWE

(abinabin), or “angry” (urwe). The point is not that the benign terms used by
the Kuna do not affect people’s understanding or behavior, but that they do so,
not automatically but with intent: they are used, both implicitly and explicitly, to
encourage harmony. This effort, moreover, enjoys only partial and inconsistent
success—they (and we) can argue fiercely under the cover of mild metaphors.

AN ARGUMENT CULTURE?

Lakoff and Johnson might take heart from the quasi-Whorfian argument in a
best-selling book by the sociolinguist Deborah Tannen, The Argument Culture:
Stopping America’s War of Words (1998, 1999),24 in which she contends that
a deeply rooted and long-standing tendency in North American culture toward
vitriol and verbal aggression has reached dangerous levels in recent years,
infecting journalism, politics, litigation, and academia. Though Tannen, surpris-
ingly, does not mention or cite Lakoff and Johnson, she argues strongly for
the effect of dominant metaphors on our thoughts and actions: “The terms in
which we talk about something shape the way we think about it—and even
what we see” (1999, p. 14). In particular, she returns throughout the book to
the metaphor of war and what she perceives as its highly negative consequences
(pp. 4, 13–26, 29, 36, 45, 52, 60–62, 234–236, 259, 267, 274–276, 289). She also
devotes a chapter (pp. 208–236) to cross-cultural comparison—to societies with
more peaceful forms of discourse; to alternative forms for managing, containing,
ritualizing and resolving disagreement and dispute; and to less individualistic
and binary ways of conceptualizing gender and the relationship of self to society.
One may take issue with some of Tannen’s evidence and interpretations, but
overall, she makes a plausible case that American public life is more antagonistic
and argumentative than is desirable or necessary.
Examined more closely, however, Tannen’s claims and methods diverge sharply
from those of Lakoff and Johnson. She does not depict argument in such consis-
tently one-sided terms: “Sometimes passionate opposition, strong verbal attack,
are [sic] appropriate and even called for” (p. 7). When argument is ritualized,
contained, or used to establish intimacy, moreover, it may have socially positive
effects (pp. 209–212, 216, 226–234). Concerning the war metaphor in particular,
Tannen does not lament its existence in and of itself, nor does she suggest that it is
so deeply embedded in linguistic forms as to be unavoidable. On the contrary, she
locates the problem in the frequency and readiness with which we invoke it in situa-
tions where other metaphors and other approaches are linguistically and culturally
available. Concerning argument in general, “What I question is the ubiquity, the

24
Tannen’s book appeared in 1998 and 1999 in different versions with different subtitles following
the colon. My citations are from the 1999 edition subtitled “America’s War of Words.”
 CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR AND VERBAL DISPUTE 15

knee-jerk nature, of approaching almost any issue, problem, or public person in an

adversarial way” (p. 8). Thus for Tannen the connection leading from metaphor to
behavior is less deterministic and more open to individual and collective agency than
it is for Lakoff and Johnson.

UNIVERSALISM AND CULTURAL DIFFERENCE

In Lakoff and Johnson’s research program, cultural, and linguistic variation

occupies a variable, ambiguous, and in the last analysis, weak position. On
the one hand, they allude frequently to such variation, and they insist “every
experience takes place within a vast background of cultural presuppositions”
(1980, p. 57). As noted above, moreover, a vein of Whorfianism runs through
their work. Lakoff in particular, in later publications on politics and war (1991,
1996, 2006), has frequently invoked cultural difference. In practice, however,
their explanatory schema for the origin and structuring of metaphor assigns to
culture a distinctly secondary, even ancillary role, something with which to tie
up loose ends not accounted for by the primary factors in their analysis. As
they see it, the fundamental source domains of metaphor, which structure our
understanding of target domains such as argument, are based on “experientially
basic” “natural kinds of experience” (1980, p. 117). Such experiences, the
“products of human nature” (1980, p. 118)25 as human nature interacts with
more or less uniform features of the natural and social environment, occur
over lifetimes but especially in early childhood, and they are apprehended by
each person individually but in largely identical ways: they are thus to be seen
as simultaneously individual and collective, and despite frequent cursory nods
toward cultural variation, to a considerable degree universal as well (Lakoff &
Johnson, 1999, pp. 46–47).26 To the extent that culture matters, it is largely
because it circumscribes the environment within which natural experience occurs,
not because metaphor is mediated, governed, or generated by culture in any
fundamental way.
The tension between universalism and cultural difference is particularly acute
concerning “ARGUMENT AS WAR.” Here Lakoff and Johnson simultaneously
espouse, not just the two poles of the opposition, but long-standing, shopworn
clichés about human nature and human difference associated with each pole.
At one extreme, their notion of a truly nice culture in which people argue

25
All emphasis in the original.
26
Here again, the experientialist program depends heavily on imagination: even a quarter-century
later, experimental or observational data on the experience that allegedly generates metaphoric
concepts and source domains is notably sparse. In effect, a key element in the explanatory model
was and to a great extent still is hypothetical.
16 HOWE

like dancers follows a long tradition of utopian romanticization of The Other—

meaning that wonderfully egalitarian, unexploitative, unspoiled, and unsoiled Alter
whose virtues expose the limits and vices of our own thought and conduct. Such
dichotomies, as David Murray (1993) notes, homogenize and essentialize both sides
of the comparison, oversimplifying the West as well as its virtuous antitheses. Most
famously represented by Montaigne’s famous essay on cannibalism (1958 [c. 1578–
1580]), in which the essayist concedes that the Tupinamba may eat people but insists
that in every other way they put Europeans to shame, binary contrasts (1958 [c.
1578–1580]), and idealization of The Other pervade recent popular representations
of indigenous peoples, from “Dances with Wolves” to “The Gods Must Be Crazy.”
A few pages after conjuring up radical variability, Lakoff and Johnson proceed
to explain “ARGUMENT IS WAR” in terms of a constant, a pan-human, and
indeed animal universal.

Fighting is found everywhere in the animal kingdom and nowhere so much as

among human animals. Animals fight to get what they want    The same is true of
human animals, except that we have developed more sophisticated techniques for
getting our way. Being “rational animals,” we have institutionalized our fighting
in a number of ways, one of them being war    [and] its basic structure remains
essentially unchanged    Part of being a rational animal    involves getting what
you want without subjecting yourself to the dangers of actual physical conflict. As
a result, we humans have evolved the social institution of verbal argument (1980,
pp. 61–62; see also Kövecses, 2002, pp. 74–75).

Beyond the obvious question of how one explains a variable by a constant—how

those nice dance-talkers managed to escape the brand of Cain—it is striking
that once again Lakoff and Johnson have brought us back again to the realm
of the imaginary, in this instance to our imaginings of human evolutionary
history. As has often been noted, the blank screen of our distant past, the
hundreds of thousands of years for which we have little direct evidence other
than scattered fossil remains, has encouraged theorists not just to speculate but
to project their own values and assumptions. Lakoff and Johnson’s imaginings
of our brutish origins, very much in the spirit of Robert Ardrey (1961) and
William Golding (1954), portray humans as superficially rational but fundamen-
tally selfish, aggressive animals. Overall, in this awkward combination of univer-
salism and difference, of original sin and happy feet, Lakoff and Johnson seem
to have simultaneously clasped both Hobbes and Rousseau to their bosoms.27
The cultural question, fortunately, has not remained where Lakoff and Johnson
left it in 1980. Among stalwarts in the conceptualist camp, Gibbs (1999) and

27
It is interesting that Jean-Louis Dessalles, in Why We Talk: The Evolutionary Origins of
Language (2007, pp. 294–314) makes a detailed argument for the crucial importance in the early
evolution of language not of verbal aggression but of argumentation.
 CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR AND VERBAL DISPUTE 17

Kövecses (2005) have made heroic efforts to reconcile metaphor and culture
(see also Knowles & Moon, 2006, pp. 79–94). Gibbs in particular, in “Taking
Metaphor out of Our Heads and Putting it into the Cultural World” (1999) has
responded to work in anthropology and other disciplines by granting a greater
role to culture and elaborating a “distributed” view of embodiment that does
not reduce metaphor so insistently to individual experience (see also Steen
and Gibbs, 1999). Albert Katz loosens the relationship between embodiment
and metaphor by asking, “What if language itself is a source of experiential
knowledge?” (1998, p. 33). None of them comes fully to grips, however, with
the gap between individual experience and cultural convention, and with the
grounding of metaphor in discourse and agency as well as the mind.

A CULTURAL AND DISCOURSE-CENTERED ALTERNATIVE

As noted above, Lakoff and Johnson introduce other metaphors for argument but
grant them lesser roles (1980, pp. 87–96): argument as building or container or
journey can be used by English-speakers to highlight particular aspects or subcat-
egories of arguing, but these secondary metaphors do not identify arguments,
either as a class or in particulars, nor do they assign core meanings in the same
way as does the “primary” metaphor of “ARGUMENT AS WAR” or its alter-
native, “ARGUMENT AS STRUGGLE.” Note, however, that by affirming the
existence of multiple culturally standardized metaphors for their target concept,
Lakoff and Johnson leave open the possibility that none of those metaphors is
obligatory or absolutely primary, that all may be used optionally by English-
speakers to communicate particular aspects of arguing.
This alternative approach to metaphor has been developed by the cognitive
anthropologist Naomi Quinn (1991, 1997), who argues that the Lakoff-Johnson
approach “understates the variability in the use of metaphors while overstating
their role in constructing understanding” (1997, p. 141).28 Quinn’s prime example
is marriage. She argues that Americans share a set of culturally standardized
notions of what marriage is and what it should be, but that these understandings
are not uniquely embodied in metaphor; rather, each core idea about marriage
can be conveyed by several different tropes. “At the same time that the small
number of metaphor classes suggests widespread sharing, the finding of such
variability among the metaphors within these classes suggests that the metaphors
themselves cannot be the basis of this shared understanding” (1997, p. 143).
If there is consistency in the metaphors chosen to convey the qualities desired

28
Conceptualist critiques of Quinn’s approach (Gibbs, 1994, pp. 197–204; Kövecses, 1999, 2005,
chapter 9) focus closely on the topic of marriage, and I do not discuss them here. Perhaps needless
to say, I do not find them convincing.
18 HOWE

in American marriage, it is, according to Quinn, because of their salience as

exemplars of those qualities:

Manufactured products, durable things, possessions and journeys are drawn upon
over and over again as sources of metaphors for lasting marriages, not because they
constitute our understanding of marriage, but simply because they are the major
cultural exemplars, in our world, of things that typically last (p. 146).

Quinn also differs radically from Lakoff and Johnson in deriving the
most commonly used metaphors about marriage not just from extra-linguistic
experience of the world but also from discourse itself. Metaphors, according
to Quinn, come to be shared and standardized in the process of using them:
“speakers    select their metaphors to match the points they are developing or
have already made” (p. 157), and over the long run, “as they gain popularity,
given metaphors for marriage become more and more strongly linked through
repeated encounter and use, not only to the particular aspects of marriage they
exemplify, but to marriage in general” (p. 149).
Quinn insists on the importance of natural language as evidence: “In order
to exploit this analytical potential of metaphors it [is] necessary    to attend
to their usage in actual discourse” (p. 157). Concerning Lakoff and Johnson’s
often cited example of “time is money,” for instance (1980, pp. 7–9), she shows
that English-speakers use other metaphors in addition to those mentioned by
Lakoff and Johnson, and that they alternate readily between different metaphors,
suggesting that “money does not, in fact, constrain the way Americans conceptu-
alize time” in the totalizing way claimed (1997, p. 152). Similarly, the ability of
English-speakers to alternate between literal and metaphorical statements of the
same idea undercuts the supposed primacy of metaphor: “If speakers’ ability to
restate immediately a metaphorical point nonmetaphorically is suggestive, cases
in which they do the reverse demonstrate quite unequivocally that the metaphor
did not give rise to the point” (pp. 157–158).29

29
Quinn’s concern with natural speech and with the ability of speakers first to alternate between
metaphorical and literal usage and second to explain metaphors in literal terms has far-reaching
implications. There can be no doubt, for instance, that speakers of many languages use metaphors of
space to discuss time, but at least in English and the few other languages I know, they also have quite
a few temporal terms that are neither metaphorical nor spatial. In English: afterwards, previously,
soon, later, now, yesterday, long ago, last Tuesday, etc. Among other things, the existence and
frequent use of these non-metaphorical temporal terms casts doubt on the assertion that “we cannot
really be said to have a concept of time apart from metaphor” (Gibbs, 1994, p. 441). Before one can
conclude definitively that we understand time in some absolute way in terms of space, or that we
cannot understand it in non-spatial terms, we need to pay serious attention to both sorts of temporal
expression, metaphorical and non-metaphorical, and we need to examine a large corpus of natural
speech in which English-speakers talk about time.
 CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR AND VERBAL DISPUTE 19

Independently of Quinn, Philip Eubanks (1999) has arrived at a strikingly

similar position. Criticizing the dominant cast of mind in conceptualist studies,
one “that prefers abstraction to concreteness, algorithmic explanations to messy
rhetorical study” (p. 174), Eubanks insists that “no metaphor can be separated
from its discursive milieu” (p. 175), and that “if metaphor has internal functions,
those internal functions depend fundamentally on larger discursive and rhetorical
conditions. Therefore, metaphor is not merely used rhetorically; it is constituted
rhetorically” (p. 177).30 “Metaphors,” moreover, “are always in conversation
with both compatible and contradictory literal concepts and metaphors,” past
and present (p. 184).
Quinn’s approach, I would suggest, works very well for “ARGUMENT AS
WAR.” In particular, it neatly handles a discrepancy caused by Lakoff and
Johnson’s shift from war to struggle: if the source domain is indeed struggle
or constraint or fighting, and if that domain is generated or governed by our
experience, especially in childhood, why then are metaphors closely based on
juvenile conflict so seldom used, except to suggest that the parties to an argument
are being childish? Conversely, if the source domain is struggle in general
or childhood struggle in particular, why then the prevalence of metaphors of
war, which, both semantically and experientially, lies so far from juvenile and
domestic conflict? Put more abstractly, if the source is A1, why do the metaphors
invoke A2 instead?
The answer suggested by Quinn’s approach is that metaphors invoke conven-
tional shared understandings, cultural understandings, at least as much as they do
anyone’s direct experience, and that speakers choose among available metaphors
with the goal of conveying one of those conventional understandings concerning
a particular target, whether to claim that their marriage is like the Rock of
Gibraltar or to suggest that an opponent’s claims are indefensible. As David
Sapir (1977, pp. 9–11) suggests, different social groups accumulate sets of
understandings (of greater or lesser coherence) about source and target domains,
what Sapir, following Black (1962, p. 40) calls “systems of associated common-
places,” and while those understandings are often grounded in and validated by
experience, they cannot be reduced to unmediated apprehension of the world,
first because convention can shape experience or even override it altogether to
an extent Lakoff and Johnson do not recognize, and second, because different
groups inhabiting the same environment may arrive at radically different under-
standings. Ancient Mesoamericans, as Eva Hunt (1977) brilliantly showed, could
point to numerous facts about hummingbirds (their wings shimmer, they drink
from flowers, they can reverse direction in the sky, they fight among themselves)

30
Although Eubank (1999), unfortunately, accepts uncritically the universality of “ARGUMENT
AS WAR,” his discussion of the metaphor’s use and its co-existence with other metaphors is a marked
improvement on Lakoff and Johnson.
20 HOWE

that seemed to link them with the sun and with war—associations not shared by
contemporary non-indigenous inhabitants of the region. Once established, those
associations were undoubtedly reinforced by a multitude of individual observa-
tions, but those observations were shaped and guided by the pre-existing cultural
associations: no one’s experience of hummingbirds constituted pure, raw contact
with the natural world.31
Concerning war, Americans have accumulated a multitude of associations
(fear, foreign lands, boredom, comradeship, regimentation, marching, saluting,
exhaustion, bad food and wet feet, venereal disease, sacrifice, heroism, grief, and
early death), which come to most of us through tradition, conversation, and the
media much more than through direct experience. Only a few of those associ-
ations, however, are regularly invoked concerning verbal dispute. A speaker’s
invocation of “ARGUMENT AS WAR” may be informed in diffuse ways by
personal experience of childhood or adult struggle or even of war itself, but
it calls more directly and immediately on a much more limited set of conven-
tional understandings: namely, that war, as an antagonistic practice, opposes two
sides who attack and defend; that war proceeds through sequences of moves and
countermoves; that war depends on calculation, tactics, and strategy; that war has
winners, losers, and clear outcomes. Our knowledge of war, personal and cultural,
may go well beyond and even contradict some of those understandings: we may
know that outcomes are often inconclusive; that both sides can lose; that plans
and calculations are often partial, absent, or delusory, leaving armies blundering
through “The fog of war.” But it is the conventional understandings that everyday
metaphor invokes. The path from experience to trope is anything but direct.
The conceptualist and experientialist analysis of source and target, to borrow
a metaphor from immigration studies, is in some respects a push model: the
direction of movement is from more allegedly basic and better-understood
domains towards more abstract and unclear ones.32 The former are mapped onto,
expand out onto, or colonize the latter. Quinn’s is in great part a pull model,
which gives priority to the target: our cognitive and discursive needs concerning
topics and objects of concern, whether argument or marriage or time, motivate us,
individually and collectively, to seek out and draw on domains and distinctions
through which to think and talk about them. It is the cognitive and discursive
utility and fruitfulness of source domains and not just their immediacy or ease
of apprehension that suggests them to us.

31
In the experientialist program, it is not the world itself that determines our apprehension of
source domains but the world interacting with our sensory and cognitive predispositions—a useful
and valid point but not one that affects my critique.
32
The push metaphor I am offering here, though I think it highlights an important difference
between the two models, is not intended to encompass all aspects of the relationship between source
and target in the experientialist or conceptual metaphor approach, certainly not the notions of domain
conflation or blending (see Lakoff and Johnson, 2003).
 CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR AND VERBAL DISPUTE 21

Lakoff and Johnson’s oft-repeated claim that source domains are typically
more basic, concrete, and readily understood depends on synecdoche (a trope
they mostly ignore),33 more specifically on what have been called exemplary
synecdoches, meaning selected particulars in a part-whole relationship that are
used to characterize by implication not just the whole but all the other particulars.
For Lakoff and Johnson, the exemplary synecdoches are source domains based
on “sensory-motor” experience, in which the experiential priority of the source
domain seems most obvious, with the implication that other source domains,
though perhaps more complex, share that same experiential priority. If standing
upright is the very concrete, physical basis for our metaphorical use of up
and down, if physical sensations of heat inform metaphors of emotion; Lakoff,
Johnson, and their followers would have us attribute the same priority to war
and to other source domains in general.
Reanalysis of “ARGUMENT AS WAR,” on the other hand—specifically, my
claims for the complexity of war as a source domain, its distance from common
experience, and the selectivity with which English-speakers invoke it—suggests
that some domains deserve closer scrutiny than they have so far received. Why
is “time,” for instance, meaning in this instance the daily segmentation and
disciplining of our work lives, any more abstract than money? (Lakoff and
Johnson 1980, pp. 7–9). Money is, after all, a highly complex, mysterious, and
conventional medium of exchange, an intellectual challenge even to economists,
and for young children, a great puzzle.34 Why, for that matter, is our experience
of other people’s anger and of our own any less immediate or embodied than our
observations of hot liquid under pressure? (Gibbs 1994, p. 7–9, 162–164, 203;
Kövecses 2002, 2005). Undoubtedly, many source domains are indeed relatively
concrete and relatively easy to comprehend, but what all source domains have
in common is a set of images, entities, and distinctions that help us talk about
and make sense of target domains. It is less that they force themselves into our
thoughts than that they are, in Lévi-Strauss’s terms, good to think.

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