Metaphor as a cognitive process

(Studiu de specialitate)

Ciobanu Marioara – Colegiul Naţional Economic "Theodor Costescu”

Since the early 1970s there has been a progressive increase in studies of metaphor.
Interest in the subject outside the literary world has markedly increased, accompanied by
a number of breakthroughs in understanding about the function of metaphor. There is a
very extensive literature on metaphor. Of special interest to many authors in the social
and natural sciences is the degree to which concept formation is guided by metaphor or
may even be totally based on metaphor. There appears to be increasing recognition of the
power of metaphor to facilitate communication in situations where groups are fragmented
by disciplinary, language or educational barriers.
A substantial body of philosophical and empirical inquiry over the last forty years
is leading many philosophers and scientists who study thought and language to conclude
that metaphor is one of our primary conceptual tools, and dominates thinking in ways we
rarely think about consciously. We owe most of our most powerful ideas about the world
and how it works to metaphoric thinking, and we probably couldn’t function without it.
Most of us remember metaphors from English class, and think metaphors have something
to do with poetry (and they do). Others may remember it as a form of description by use
of comparison. This is partially because metaphors were merely one of a number of
poetic descriptive devices, including similes, metonymy, oxymoron, and symbols.
When cognitive scientists and linguists refer to metaphors, they mean useful
concepts that allow us to organize and categorize entire sets of ideas. For example, the
“free market” is a metaphor that encompasses a number of ideas and theories about
economics, foreign and domestic social policy, and day-to-day business activities. This
definition may sound dull, misguided, or even wrong, especially to people who were
taught that metaphors are “false things” by their teachers. A classic example of what
people conceive to be a “false” metaphor would be the poetic metaphors we learned
about in school, such as “she was a rose who bloomed.” The phrase is seen as a poetic
device, a description by comparison. It can’t be true since women aren’t flowers. In other

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words, metaphors are false because they aren’t true literally. The mistake is not that
metaphors aren’t literally true, or that we would be mislead if we mistakenly assumed
they were literally true. The mistake is to assume that only literal statements can be true,
and we can make true, literal statements about the world.
Cognitive scientists and philosophers are now beginning to realize that both these
assumptions are false mainly because the brain can’t process information about the world
literally. We base our information about the world on our experiences of the world,
experiences that are interpreted by the body and brain. As a result, the same unconscious
mechanisms that interpret visual data into images and auditory data into sounds, music
and language, also interpret experience, memory and even conscious thought. The brain
uses basic bodily experiences to create conceptual categories. We experience the physical
characteristics of objects through vision, hearing, touch, taste and smell. We also
experience force, motion, containment, comfort and pain. These categories make an
otherwise bewildering collection of everyday experiences, feelings, objects and thoughts
easier to process and recall. We even use metaphors to describe the thinking process
itself. For instance, we see points (both "seeing" and "points" being metaphors), grasp
subjects, pitch and catch onto ideas, even collect and recollect our thoughts. None of
these describe literal activities, and yet we use these expressions as though they were
literal statements. The word "organize" is a metaphor derived from making a body
(instrument of organs), and "organization" a metaphor derived from the body itself. These
terms are so ingrained in the language that we aren’t even aware they are metaphors.
Metaphor is a classic device through which a complex set of elements and
relationships can be rendered comprehensible - when any attempt to explain them
otherwise could easily be meaningless. It is the peculiar strength of metaphor that it can
convey the essential without excessive oversimplification, preserving its complexity by
perceiving it through a familiar pattern of equivalent complexity.
A metaphor according to Nelson Goodman, "typically involves a change not
merely of range but also of realm. A label along with others constituting a schema is in
effect detached from the home realm of that schema and applied for the sorting and
organizing of an alien realm. Partly by thus carrying with it a reorientation of a whole
network of labels does a metaphor give clues for its own development and elaboration...

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A whole set of alternative labels, a whole apparatus of organization takes over a new
territory... and the organization they effect in the alien realm is guided by their habitual
use in the home realm. A schema may be transported almost anywhere. The choice of
territory for invasion is arbitrary; but the operation within that territory is almost never
completely so... which elements in the chosen realm are warm, or are warmer than others,
is then very largely determinate
The metaphor is a mechanism which makes it possible to conceptualize and
reconceptualize the world by transferring features from a source domain to a target
domain. Thus, the metaphor does not need to invent new terms to refer to reality. On the
contrary, based on previously existing terms, it provides a different view of reality to the
extent that it is enriched by the cognizant subject’s affectivity and emotions. Therefore
the metaphoric understanding and production requires more communicative than
linguistic competence, for the metaphor’s sense depends on the communicative context
and not on the utterance’s lexical, morphological, and syntactic structures.
In his book" A cognitive Theory of Metaphor”, Earl Mac Cormac presents an
original and unified cognitive theory of metaphor using philosophical arguments which
draw upon evidence from psychological experiments and theories. He notes that
implications of this theory for meaning and truth with specific attention to metaphor as a
speech act, the iconic meaning of metaphor, and the development of a four-valued system
of truth.
A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor takes up three levels of explanation--metaphor as
expressed in surface language, the semantics of metaphor, and metaphor as a cognitive
process--and unifies these by interpreting metaphor as an evolutionary knowledge
process in which metaphors mediate between minds and culture. Mac Cormac considers,
and rejects, the radical theory that all use of language is metaphorical; however, this
argument also recognizes that the theory of metaphor may itself be metaphorical.
The book first considers the computational metaphor often adopted by cognitive
psychology as an example of metaphor requiring analysis. In contrast to three well-
known philosophical theories of metaphor - the tension theory, the controversial theory,
and the grammatical deviance theory - it develops a semantically anomaly theory of
metaphor based on a quasi-mathematical hierarchy of words. In developing the theory,

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Mac Cormac makes much-needed connections between theories of metaphor and more
orthodox analytic philosophy of meaning, including discussions of speech acts and the
logic of fuzzy sets. This semantically theory of explanation is then shown to be
compatible with contemporary psychological theories of memory.
In the early 1980s, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson published a radical new
model of metaphor that challenged the established thinking on the subject (Lakoff and
Johnson, 1980). They introduced the concept that metaphor might not only be concerned
with language, but also about the way we think, Indeed they suggested that making
metaphors is a cognitive process, and is something that the human brain does naturally.
According to Lakoff and Johnson, our thoughts are shaped or framed by metaphor. Our
brains work by relating new knowledge to old, and we are constantly looking at things as
if they were something else. When we encounter something new, we ask ourselves “have
I seen something like this before?” The model that Lakoff and Johnson proposed
suggested that the whole way we understand and relate to the world is metaphorical, and
that linguistic metaphor is just a surface reflection of the deep level of cross-domain
linking that happens in our minds.
Ivor Armstrong Richards, the author of the famous Philosophy of Rhetoric, wrote
in 1936:” The mind is a connecting organ, it works only by connecting and it can connect
any two things in an indefinitely large number of different ways. Which of these ways it
chooses is settled by reference to some larger whole or aim, and, though we may not
discover its aim, the mind is never aimless”.(Richards, 1936: 125)
Metaphor and to a lesser degree metonymy, are two major cognitive mechanisms by
which the mind operates as a connecting organ, but they are also social connectors. A
good metaphor reaches parts of the brain that other cognitive mechanisms cannot reach,
but it also reaches out to other minds in ways that other cognitive devices cannot. Good
metaphors expand the mind, fire up the imagination and help to create, as some surmise,
consciousness of oneself and of others. Metaphors create cognitive and possibly
neurological bonds between conceptual or mental domains, but they also create social
bonds, as least of an ephemeral type (see Nerlich & Clarke, 2001).