Metaphors We Live By

This book could be considered to be one of the most intellectually honest of any book in print, for it unashamedly deals with commonsense notions of how the human mind deals with the world. One sometimes gets the impression that some works, especially on the philosophy of mind, tend to mystify or glamorize the workings of the mind. This book gives much weight to the use of metaphors for this purpose, and in doing so is faced with just how efficacious these metaphors are. The ordinary human conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical it argues, and that metaphors are the predominant mode of cognition. The evidence for their assertion comes primarily from linguistics, and they give numerous examples of the metaphors that are employed by humans in everyday discussion and interactions with others. The authors emphasize though that metaphor is not just a linguistic notion, but that human thought processes themselves are largely metaphorical. So how do we study the metaphorical nature of thought? The author's answer is simple: we use metaphorical linguistic expressions to study the nature of metaphorical concepts. This will allow an understanding of the metaphorical nature of our activities. 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.

This is not easy reading, probably because it was written for nerds like me. At first I thought this was just a reference book about different kinds of metaphors but there is more to this book than just metaphors. It incorporates philosophy, psychology, scientific reasoning, the meaning and purpose of myths, and so on, because one way or another metaphors themselves cover all these aspects. This is a really excellent book for studying how the mind works or reasons so I will treasure this book forever. And yes, my description incorporated a few pretty interesting metaphors which are both true and objective.

The Authors thought they had something new to say. They did, but it was mostly new jargon (coherence, spatialization, experiential, orientational) that can never be adequately defined. Why on earth couldn't these Authors coin metaphors to clarify their thesis? What was their thesis? In the Afterword they call it the Neural Theory of Language. In short, neural connections in the brain can link the abstract idea with a concrete image and metaphorical thinking is, therefore, inescapable. 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.

I thought this book was boring at first because of all the linguistic examples, a lot of which I just glazed over to get to the next paragraph, unfortunately it comes with the territory, and really you won't have to deal with much at all in the second half of the book. Really though this book is a banger, my highlighter was going crazy. Will be really good to look back at many times in the future. Metaphors lend structure to concepts, concepts give structure to thought and action. Knowledge on this subject is very fundamental because there is so much overlap with other philosophical topics.

行文が完結で、例も多くてわかりやすいです。ただし、欧米系のメタファーは、アジア系の私たちに、ピンと来ない時も。全体的によかったです。

A very interesting read. That said, the book is written in an academic style and, while there's nothing wrong with that per se, it's probably not what you're looking for if you're after a treatment of this topic written in an accessible and easy to read style for the layperson. (In fact, much of the content in several of the chapters is taken from an article published by the authors in the Journal of Philosophy and retains that style of writing.)

It will give new insight about how we are thinking, and influence of metaphor in profound meaning making. ❤❤

The book was not in good shape and was not properly sealed

Même si la traduction française a pris soin du texte original, l'ouvrage en VO vaut le détour.