Lakoff and Turner: More Than Cool Reason, ch. 4

In the chapter on "The Great Chain of Being," George Lakoff and Mark Turner invent a type of logical analysis so liberal that any sentence can be read as a metaphor.

The analysis employs what they call the GENERIC IS SPECIFIC metaphor. They use this to show how a sentence about a concrete situation (the proverb "Blind blames the ditch") acts as a schema that we can use to interpret another concrete situation (a defamed politician blames the press).

This is their theory: The metaphor GENERIC IS SPECIFIC

maps a single specific-level schema onto an indefinitely large number of parallel specific-level schemas that all have the same generic level structure as the source-domain schema. (p. 162)

From the discussion that follows (pp. 163-64) it is clear that what they have in mind is that we reconstruct the generic frame that the insulted blind person is an instance of, and then plug the bitter politician into the same frame.

Thus, no special knowledge of the role of proverbs in social norms is needed; no special bias towards people or their interactions is needed; no ability to recognize the literary genre of proverbs is needed; and no presupposition of communicative intent in a printed publication or a poetry reading is needed.

It should be clear that once all these contextual factors are removed, anything can be a picture of anything. If I say "I'm angry at my mother," that's a specific-level sentence, so that's a metaphorical statement about anybody else's anger. If I say "The plates are in the second cupboard," that's just as deep and meaningful as saying "I threw the first stone."

Again, analyses like these make Lakoff and Turner at best irrelevant to literature. As Reuven Tsur suggested, a wide and consistent application of their theories would most likely be a catastrophe for poetics and literary criticism.

Gibbs: "Metaphor and Culture" (1999)

In Ray Gibbs' contribution to his and Gerard Steen's anthology, Gibbs air some pretty serious second thoughts about his whole notion of where metaphor.

Thus, looking back at his extensive record of experimental work in metaphor theory, he comments:

My thinking about the role of conceptual metaphor in people's use and understanding of language has mostly embraced an individualistic view of cognition. (p. 151)

[T]his work did not explicitly acknowledge that social and cultural constructions of experience fundamentally shape embodied metaphor. (p. 155)

The alternative is "supra-individual" picture (p. 154) in which metaphors are "cognitive webs [...] spread out into the cultural world" (p. 146).

How Does the Supra-Individual Work?
It's not entirely clear what the dynamics of this more muddled picture would be.

Gibbs give as an example a report of a therapy session in which a couple were asked to think about their sex life in terms of food (p. 158). This clearly is not a metaphor arising spontaneously out of immediate experience, and yet it changed their behavior. Thus, the environment provided the cognition.

Somewhat more obscurely, he also noted that when you get angry, you are already exhibiting some cultural know-how about, e.g., politeness and retribution (p. 155-56). This is, of course, a kind of cultural knowledge build into your body and your immediate reactions, but the example would also benefit from some conceptual clarification.

Filling the Gaps
Gibbs is right about many things in this paper, but I think there are a number of observations that could have improved his thinking:

• Language is primarily a tool for communication. The problem is not just that the subjective semantics that some person has is influenced by the environment---rather, the idea of one isolated person "having" a semantics already misconstrues the situation.
• Language, subjective experience, and the symbolic order (i.e., the social norms) are three different dimensions of the theory, and we should name them so that we can talk about their interactions. I feel fairly certain that the symbolic order is by far the strongest and most immutable of these three.
• The linguist is a member of a culture. Therefore, when the linguistic has intuitions about meaning, these are shaped by social norms. Therefore, when the linguist says, "We experience things this way," the assertion may in some cases be more of a datum (revealing a norm) than an observation (revealing an a priori structure).

Glucksberg and Keysar: "Understanding metaphorical Comparisons" (1990)

In a critique of Ortony's imbalance model, Sam Glucksberg and Boaz Keysar suggest that metaphorical vehicles are shorthands for ad hoc categories without conventional names. My job is a jail thus states that my job is a member of some category which is characterized by having a jail as a central member.

As far as I can see, they do not solve the problem of how this ad hoc category is constructed, but they hint in the direction of some kind of Gricean repair process. A jail is for instance both a prototypical punishment and a prototypical type of confinement, but we somehow select an appropriate candidate from this list.

They do not address the issue of why this process occurs so rapidly, and I think they are open to much of the psychologically motivated criticism that Grice himself is subject to.

The paper is interesting for bringing back conversation and communication in the discussion (see especially pp. 15-16). Lakoff and Johnson sometimes read metaphors as if they have no other role than to express well-established correspondences. This essentially builds irrelevance into the definition.

Glucksberg and Keysar also briefly mention the fact that people and names can act like source domain (pp. 15-16). They thus discuss the difference between utterances like the following three:

• Xiao-Dong is a Bela Lugosi (= like that type of actor)
• Xiao-Dong is like a Bela Lugosi (= somewhat like that type of actor)
• Xiao-Dong is like Bela Lugosi (= like that particular person)

The paper as a whole is a good example of the para-Lakoff/Johnsonian theory of metaphor stemming from Andrew Ortony and to some extent co-existing with it with very little interaction.

Casasanto and Henetz: "Handedness Shapes Children's Abstract Concepts" (2011)

This article by Daniel Casasanto and Tania Henetz shows a difference in the bodily experience which is not mirrored in speech. From the abstract:

In one experiment, children indicated where on a diagram a preferred toy and a dispreferred toy should go. Right-handers tended to assign the preferred toy to a box on the right and the dispreferred toy to a box on the left. Left-handers showed the opposite pattern. In a second experiment, children judged which of two cartoon animals looked smarter (or dumber) or nicer (or meaner). Right-handers attributed more positive qualities to animals on the right, but left-handers to animals on the left. These contrasting associations between space and valence cannot be explained by exposure to language or cultural conventions, which consistently link right with good.

The article also quotes some other very interesting studies Casasanto has done with other coworkers.

These studies show that adult subjects have the same tendency to biased towards their dominant side, as shown for instance in an analysis of the gestures that four presidential candidates made during two debates (p. 2).

Further, this tendency can be temporarily reversed by handicapping the subjects' dominant hand with an annoying ski glove (pp. 9-10).

Ibarrexte-Antuñano: "Metaphorical Mappings in the Sense of Smell" (1999)

This paper by Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano is a relatively minor follow-up on Eve Seetser's book.

Ibarretxe-Antuñano suggests that the metaphorical meanings of smell and sniff are constructed through a "property selection process" (pp. 38-41).

It's not entirely clear to me what she means. The article doesn't seem to explain where the selection criteria come from, whether the model is analytical or psychological, or how it would work in general.

Readings: On Traps and Gaps
In any event, the paper is useful because it contains a list of past attempts (as of 1999) to solve the over- and undergeneration problems in conceptual metaphor theory (p. 40).

These attempts have employed the following theoretical ideas:

• Salience imbalance (Ortony 1979): The vehicle and topic must share a feature; that feature must be salient in the vehicle, but not in the topic
• Domains-interaction (Tourangeau and Sternberg 1981, 1982): Metaphor aptness is a function of (a) the similarity between the terms within domains and (b) the disssimilarity of the domains
• Structure-mapping (Gentner 1983, Gentner and Clement 1988): Analogies work best when they (a) transfer a lot of object relations, i.e., structure, and (b) only transfer few object attributes
• Class inclusion (Glucksberg and Keysar 1990): Metaphors are simply class-inclusion statements, just like a tree is a plant; the underlying reading process exactly the same

If we include the other obvious sources on the topic, the list can be expanded with the following texts:

• Compound metaphors (Grady 1997, 1998, 2002): One metaphor can act as a relevance filter on another and thus remove unwanted entailments
• Process selection processes (Ibarretxe-Antuñano 1999): As word meanings are extended, certain properties (like "physical" or "volitional") are somehow dropped
• The Invariance principle (Lakoff 1993, 2008): Inferences are carried over from the source domain if and only if they are consistent with the target domain (i.e., they are carried over if and only if they are carried over)

Olaf Jäkel: "Kant, Blumenberg, Weinrich" (1999)

In this article, Olaf Jäkel quotes passages from Kant, Cassirer, Whorf, and Blumenberg that preempts many of the core ideas in cognitive metaphor theory. He then goes on to discuss the theory of Harald Weirich, which is almost a notational variant of the original cognitive metaphor theory.

Interstingly, Weinrich makes the following reservation:

Is every metaphor rooted in an image field [= a conceptual metaphor]? That would be too much to claim. In fact, every word can take on metaphorical meaning, every matter can be addressed metaphorically, and imagination knows no bounds. Arbitrary, isolated metaphors are always possible. But they are rarer than some may think, and what is more important, usually they are not successful in [i.e., adopted by] the linguistic community. (p. 19)

The quote comes from his 1958 article "Münze und Wort: Untersuchungen an einem Bildfeld."

Gibbs and Steen (eds.): Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics (1999)

In the introduction to this collection, Raymond Gibbs and Gerard Steen warn their readers that

there may not be a direct mapping between linguistic metaphor and conceptual metaphor, on one hand, and between linguistic metaphor and individual cognition, on the othter. (p. 4)

That is, conceptual metaphors may not explain the actual linguistic data; and even if it does, it may not be good model of what goes on in the head (see also p. 2).

Unfortunately, Gibbs and Steen's solution is to posit a "jigsaw" model in which every individual only has a piece of the puzzle:

A complete conceptual metaphor may only emerge from examination of the communication between, or across, participants in some community. This examination yields a "supra-individual," cultural class of metaphors. (p. 3)

And even when a particular individual has the piece of the puzzle stored in his or her brain, the "pre-stored conceptual metaphors may not always be activated" in the expected situations.

This way, cognitive metaphor theory gets to keep its cake and eat it too: It recognizes that there aren't actually any conceptual mappings in there (as shown by experiments), but they are still "out there" (as posited in our speculative analyses). The consequence is of course that the conceptual mappings only appear to those who believe.

Gibbs and Steen proceed to notice that many metaphors lack experiential basis (presumably they're thinking of something like ARGUMENT IS WAR).

Reading list

I definitely need to read the article "MIP: A Method for Identifying Metaphorically Used Words in Discourse" (2007) at some point. I read Steen et al.'s article from 2010, but the 2007 paper is cited more frequently.

Heidegger on Heraclitus' fragment 7

I spent most of yesterday reading Heidegger's lecture notes from the winter semester 1941/42. Besides being extremely explicit in their nazi sympathies, the lecture notes are interesting because they give an exceptionally clear picture of what Heidegger thought philosophy was good for and how it was supposed to be done.

There's a remarkable focus on meditative thought and mental exercises in his instructions to the new students. He tells them to be patient, to concentrate, to keep their attention on the subject matter, to continually return and retrace ("walk the same path over and over," quoting from memory), and not prioritize process over product ("we will not move, but remain at the same spot").

Taken together, these recommendations on method are strikingly similar to buddhist meditation practices, as Michael Zimmerman and others have also pointed out.

They are also extremely naive, in a sense. Heidegger clearly thinks that his speculative practice can somehow help students reach "deeper" levels of understanding of being or of particular pieces of text by Heraclitus or Nietzsche.

On this matter, I have to agree with Richard Rorty; replacing the metaphysics of seeing the truth with a metaphysics of hearing the call of being does not improve the situation. Any language that claims to be transparent and authentic is producing contradiction and marginalization.

From Molecule to Metaphor (2006), chapters 15-17

These three chapters in Feldman's book are based on the classes he and George Lakoff give together at Berkeley. They describe Lakoff's theory of metaphor as we know it from countless other sources.

Primary Metaphor and the Basis of Meaning
Feldman begins by repeating the well-known theory that meaning grows out of first-hand experience:

For perception, action, emotions, and so on, human experience and the social relations shared by all people provide the basis for learning words. (p. 185)

[...] abstract, cultural, and technical words and concepts arise from the opulent substrate of direct experience. [...] people, as neural systems, understand abstract ideas because these concepts are mapped to and actiavte brain curcuits involved in embodied experience. (p. 185)

There is now very strong evidence that essentially all of our cultural, abstract, and theoretical concepts derive their meanings by mapping, through metaphor, to the embodied experiential concepts we explored in earlier chapters. (p. 199)

Bi-directional Metaphor and Scaffolding
Lakoff (through Feldman) makes a curious remark in the middle of chapter 16:

Once a domain of knowledge becomes well known, it can itself serve as a source domain (basis) for understanding more novel concepts. We sometimes get metaphors mapping both ways, for example, between war and sports. These create no difficulty---the appropriate concepts in each domain are activated and inferences are drawn from the combined activation. (p. 209)

And nothing more is said of that matter. This seem to be essentially Lakoff falsifying Lakoff: Saying at once that metaphors need not go "all the way down" and still claiming that they do.

More concretely, the first sentence seems to oscillate between to claims depending on which way the evidence goes: Either it means that we learn new things by comparing them to old (which everyone agrees on); or else it means that the connection between the new subject matter and the old are permanently established and remain in use (which is false).

I don't know exactly what it means that "the appropriate concepts in each domain are activated and inferences are drawn from the combined activation," and Feldman/Lakoff doesn't explain. Is the target domain known or not known? Is any information actually transferred, and if so, what?

The Invariance Principle Returns
They also repeat what Lakoff said twenty years ago:

Metaphorical mappings preserve the cognitive topology (that is, the frame and schema structure) of the source domain, in a way consistent with the inherent structure of the target domain. This is called the invariance principle. (p. 209-10)

Or, equivalently: metaphors preserve structure except when they don't. They continue:

As a consequence, the image-schematic structure of the target domain cannot be violated: one cannot find cases in which a source domain interior is mapped onto a target domain exterior, or a source domain exterior is mapped onto a target domain path. This simply does not happen. (p. 210)

But since the target domains don't have literal paths, this could hardly be more than a tautology. There would be no way to identify whether the thing we map the interior onto actually is an "interior," since no such thing is there.

The only way we could in principle falsify this claim would be if we could find some case where the metaphorical outside of the target domain could also be the metaphorical inside. Such cases do indeed exist and thus falsify Lakoff's claim. Examples are HOT/COOL IS FASHIONABLE, UPHILL/DOWNHILL IS DIFFICULT, and THICK/THIN IS IMPLAUSIBLE.

From Molecule to Metaphor (2006), chapter 10

Here's a strange quote from Feldman's book:

Even as adults, the experience we associate with a word and thus its meaning differs depending on our age, gender, profession, and so on. People who only watch a sport event or artistic performance cannot fully understand participants' conversation about the activity. (p. 130)

It's difficult to disagree with the first sentence here, and we should probably applaud that a cognitive linguist acknowledges this fact.

But it's almost equally difficult to agree with the second sentence or see any logical relation between them. Where does this extreme solipsism come from?

Perhaps this kind of thinking is the very core of the problem in cognitive metaphor theory. If everything become a matter of private experience, then our evident ability to understand each other seems like a miracle. Feldman needs a shot of Wittgenstein.

Basic Level Nonsense
Speaking of Wittgenstein, I'm still shocked at the sheer amount of nonsense associated with the term "basic level category." Elanor Rosch (in all due respect) seems to have assumed without the slightest shed of argument that all concepts come in triples like vehicle > car > truck.

That's a bizarrely unfounded claim, conceptually and empirically. What would, for instance, be the "basic level" in the following strings of inclusions?

entity  >  ( . . . )  >  artifact  >  toy  >  doll  >  puppet  >  hand puppet

As far as I can see, the only way to pin these levels onto an absolute scale with a "ground floor" would be to randomly pick one by intuition. This would essentially fold the data into the definition and empty the theory completely of any meaning.

From Molecule to Metaphor (2006), chapter 7

As a part of his general introduction to non-neurological psychology, Jerome Feldman cites a 1979 study that indirectly sheds some new light on Tim Rohrer's fMRI findings.

Ambiguity and Primed Priming
In the 1979 priming experiment by Tanenhaus et al., subjects were asked to decide whether a given string (e.g., season) was an English word. They did this in one of two conditions.

In one condition, the subjects were primed with a completely unrelated sentence, e.g., she was afraid to talk. In the other condition, they were also primed with an unrelated sentence; but in this case, the sentence contained an ambiguous word, e.g., she was afraid to fall.

These sentences were constructed so that there was only one possible way to read the ambiguous word. For instance, in the example above, the word fall can only be read as the verb, not the noun. Any activation in the concept of falling would be a secondary effect and would not contribute to the understanding of the sentence.

However, the researchers consistently found that the indirectly related primes would nudge the subjects into faster and more accurate decisions, just as if they were responding to unproblematically related words (e.g., cat--kitten).

It thus seems that the seasonal meaning of fall is, to some extent, activated by the sentence she was afraid to fall. This is not plausibly explained as a metaphorical process, especially since a number of the ambiguous words were clearly not related, e.g. I put it in the box as a prime for fight.

Relation or Disambiguation?
Now look again at Rohrer's findings: He had his subjects read sentences that contained metaphorical uses of words such as grasp or fist, and he found that such words, on average, lead to increase in activity in same the brain regions that are associated with the actual hands and arms.

He took this as a confirmation of the conceptual mapping hypothesis. Since hand metaphors activate the hand concept, literal meaning must be involved in metaphorical understanding. His findings are indeed consistent with this hypothesis.

However, as the experiment by Tanenhaus et al. shows, the brain activity could just as well be a byproduct of a disambiguation process. We can take grasp the theory and grasp the cup to apply two distinct meanings of the word grasp. Both meanings would then presumably be activated during reading, just like the verb and noun meanings of box are both activated during the reading of I put it in the box.

Rohrer's results are then equally also consistent with another theory that does not assume a productive and active link between the two meanings of grasp. Instead, it assumes a link from the sound grasp to two meanings, but only one is picked on the basis of the context.