This link has been bookmarked by 9 people . It was first bookmarked on 31 Mar 2008, by Sarah Puglisi.
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13 Nov 14
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"Every expression that we employ, apart from those that are connected with the most rudimentary objects and actions, is a metaphor, though the original meaning is dulled by constant use."
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We use metaphors to group areas of experience (life is a journey), to orientate ourselves (my consciousness was raised), to convey expression through the senses (his eyes were glued to the screen), to describe learning (it had a germ of truth in it), etc. Even ideas are commonly pictured as objects (the idea had been around for a while), as containers (I didn't get anything out of that ) or as things to be transferred (he got the idea across)
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eaders come to metaphors armed with commonplace understandings of the word employed, understandings which enter into how we read the passage.
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Metaphors have entailments that organize our experience, uniquely express that experience, and create necessary realities.
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metaphor does not simply express, it conditions thought.
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Much of man's reasoning is vacuous, simply transferring meaning from intimate, domestic surroundings to the unknown.
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n less picturesque terms, metaphor is a mapping from source (familiar, everyday) to target domain (abstract, conceptual, internal, etc.)
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Knowledge does not exist independently of conceptual schemes, or even perhaps of linguistic formulation.
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21 Jan 13
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Metaphors are therefore active in understanding. We use metaphors to group areas of experience (life is a journey), to orientate ourselves (my consciousness was raised), to convey expression through the senses (his eyes were glued to the screen), to describe learning (it had a germ of truth in it), etc. Even ideas are commonly pictured as objects (the idea had been around for a while), as containers (I didn't get anything out of that ) or as things to be transferred (he got the idea across). {3}
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Metaphors in Science
How does science and scientific prose deal with this most obvious of facts? By stratagem and evasion. The scientific style aims at clarity, objectivity and impersonality — attempting to persuade us that the reality depicted is independent of experimenter and reporting. The key evidence is that laid out in the scientific paper, which, though purporting to be a plain account of what was done and observed, is in fact {4} a carefully tailored document making a bid for personal recognition. The abstract allows the significance of the work to be modestly hinted at. The passive voice makes appear inevitable and impersonal what was often achieved only after great effort and skill by the experimenter. Stylistic devices like metaphor, irony, analogy and hyperbole that might call attention to the staged nature of the reporting are muted or banned. Where descriptive, the language employs figures drawn from physics: inert and mechanical. Sentence structure is simple, not to say barbaric: commonplace verbs linking heavy noun clusters.
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Lakoff and Johnson Metaphors are much more powerful instruments in the eyes of Lakoff and Johnson. {7} Metaphors have entailments that organize our experience, uniquely express that experience, and create necessary realities. Lakoff and Johnson attacked the two commonly accepted theories of metaphor.
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In its strong form the theory cannot account for relationships in systems of metaphors, nor for extensions of such metaphors. In its weak form the theory doesn't account for categories of metaphor. In addition to the above-mentioned difficulty that B is always more concrete and clearly-defined than A, it is to be doubted that statements like "I'm on a high" really involved similarities at all.
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Previous theories derive, Lakoff and Johnson believe, from a naive realism that there is an objective world, independent of ourselves, to which words apply with fixed meanings. But the answer is not to swing to the opposite and embrace a wholly subjectivists view that the personal, interior world is the only reality. Metaphors, for Lakoff and Johnson, are primarily matters of thought and action, only derivatively of language. Metaphors are culturally-based, and define what those with certain assumptions and presuppositions find real. The "isolated similarities" are indeed those created by metaphor, which simply create a partial understanding of one kind of experience in terms of another kind of experience. They are grounded in correlations within our experience.
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Hayden White sketched a theory of history which bridged the claims of art and science by defining the deep structures of historical thought in terms of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony. {21}
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Rhetoric of Science
Alan Gross goes a good deal further than most literary critics in his Rhetoric of Science. {23} Truth in science, he argues, is a consensus of utterances rather than a fit with evidence. Whatever scientists may assert — and they very much resent any reduction of science to a form of persuasion — philosophers have long known that the claim of science to truth and objectivity rests on shaky foundations. Knowledge does not exist independently of conceptual schemes, or even perhaps of linguistic formulation.
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Concluding Thoughts
Where is metaphor grounded? Not in logic, nor literary theory. There is no purely literal language in terms of which metaphor may be evaluated and objectively assessed. Along a broad front in cognitive psychology and social anthropology, metaphor is currently subject to extensive analysis, but the findings can only be partial, and relative to the discipline involved. What is becoming clearer is that metaphor — like linguistic theory and theories of speech acts — is rooted in the beliefs, practices and intentions of language users.
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4. Alan Gross's The Rhetoric of Science (1990).
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6. Donald Davidson's What Metaphors Mean in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984).
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7. G. Lakoff and M. Johnson's Metaphors We Live By (1986). Andrew Goatly's The Language of Metaphors (1997) is a systematic elaboration.
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24. See George Lakoff and Raphael Núñez's Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being (2000). for an application of metaphor theory to mathematics.
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10. George Lakoff. Jan. 2004. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff. Introduction to Lakoff and controversies raised.
11. "Metaphors We Live By" by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Janice E. Patten. 2003. http://theliterarylink.com/metaphors.html. Review/summary of first four chapters of the book.
12. Cognitive Linguistics and the Marxist approach to ideology. Peter E Jones. http://www.tulane.edu/~howard/LangIdeo/Jones/JonesAbs.html. Cognitive linguistics and a Marxist critique of ideologies. -
15. Thinking About Thought. Piero Scaruffi. 2001. http://www.thymos.com/tat/metaphor.html. General essay that takes metaphor theory a little further.
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16 Mar 11
Amira .Metaphors are not simply literary devices, but something active in understanding, perhaps even the very basis of language.
Read this section for arguments that metaphors organize our experience, uniquely express that experience, and create convincing realities. Poetry, which uses them instinctively, is following a scientific truth. -
13 Jan 11
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04 Apr 10
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22 Feb 10
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Metaphor commonly means saying one thing while intending another, making implicit comparisons between things linked by a common feature, perhaps even violating semantic rules. {1} Scientists, logicians and lawyers prefer to stress the literal meaning of words, regarding metaphor as picturesque ornament.
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Can metaphors be paraphrased in literal terms
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the Logical Positivist approach who stressed the rational, objective aspects of language
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Max Black showed that readers come to metaphors armed with commonplace understandings of the word employed, understandings which enter into how we read the passage.
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Davidson denies that metaphors have a meaning over and above their literal meaning
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Metaphors are much more powerful instruments in the eyes of Lakoff and Johnson
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uniquely express that experience
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organize our experience
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Lakoff and Johnson attacked the two commonly accepted theories of metaphor. The abstraction theory — that there exists one neutral and abstract concept that underlies both the literal and metaphoric use of word — failed on six counts
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Metaphors, for Lakoff and Johnson, are primarily matters of thought and action, only derivatively of language. Metaphors are culturally-based, and define what those with certain assumptions and presuppositions find real. The "isolated similarities" are indeed those created by metaphor, which simply create a partial understanding of one kind of experience in terms of another kind of experience. They are grounded in correlations within our experience.
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metaphor permeates all discourse
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the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis
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Sociologists remember what Vico said long ago: "man, not understanding, makes his world.
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simply transferring meaning from intimate, domestic surroundings to the unknown
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In less picturesque terms, metaphor is a mapping from source (familiar, everyday) to target domain (abstract, conceptual, internal, etc.)
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But, contrary to Lakoff and Johnson's view that metaphor represents something fundamental to brain functioning, many sociologists regard the target domain as culturally determined. In describing their marriages, speakers choose models (target domains) that provide a helpful match ("we made a good team, I'd be lost without her"). {12}
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Chomsky's grammar once supposed there were syntactic universals
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a literary device deriving from the schools of classical rhetoric and intending to put an argument clearly and persuasively
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Kenneth Burke thought tropes were ready-made for rhetoricians because they describe the specific patterns of human behaviour that surface in art and social life.
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Hayden White sketched a theory of history which bridged the claims of art and science by defining the deep structures of historical thought in terms of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony.
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What of the Iliad and Odyssey? Parry and other scholars showed that Homer's productions were improvisations to music of a vast collection of stock phrases — a procedure still used by Serbian Guslars who can improvise tens of thousands of lines in this way. Plato preferred the new written procedures (castigating poets of the old oral tradition in The Republic) but also worried that the very process of writing and learning from texts imprisoned speculation in authoritative interpretations. Meditation was needed to bring the past into the presence, and this may also explain Plato's desire for eternal forms. Classical rhetoricians developed mnemonic devices but it was the north European scholastics who made memory a record of doings that could be examined under confession. In twelfth-thirteenth century Europe the validity of an oath (given word, symbolically the Word of God) is transferred to documents that have legal force.
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Translation was not an issue in the classical world: the literate spoke several languages and could interpret ( i.e. recast) from one to another. Christian Church became monolingual to incorporate Greek and Hebrew into the culture of late Antiquity. Indeed, for long centuries, the vernacular spoken by all classes in Europe was a romance language pronounced differently in different places, none of the pronunciations being close to classical Latin. It was never written down, and only in ninth century Germany was an attempt made to create a 'German grammar'. Charlemagne accepted a uniform pronunciation of official Latin, but this was incomprehensible to his subjects and was therefore repealed. Depositions were taken from the vernacular and written in Latin, and Latin creeds were rendered and remembered in the vernacular. Elio Anonio de Nebrija attempted in 1492 to create a Spanish that was not spoken but served to record speech, his grammar and argument for a standardized Castillano being intended to curb the publication of literature inimical to the crown.
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31 Mar 08
Karen McMillanMetaphors are not simply literary devices, but something active in understanding, perhaps even the very basis of language. Read this section for arguments that metaphors organize our experience, uniquely express that experience, and create convincing real
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10 Nov 06
Sarah PuglisiMetaphors are not simply literary devices, but something active in understanding, perhaps even the very basis of language. Read this section for arguments that metaphors organize our experience, uniquely express that experience, and create convincing real
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