McGlone: "What is the explanatory value of conceptual metaphor" (2007)

Matthew McGlone is one of the staunchest critics of cognitive metaphor theory, and in this 2007 paper, he reiterates a number of the arguments he has given in the past.

These arguments are roughly the following:

1

If our knowledge of abstract objects (like social relationships) were really derived from our knowledge of concrete objects (like heat, distance, and containers), then we would not be able to see the difference between the two (p. 114). This is a problem also pointed out by by Gregory Murphy (1996).

More generally, the stronger the claim of cognitive metaphor theory becomes, the weirder it becomes that we can distinguish, say, theories from actual buildings. In an interesting spin on this, McGlone considers the sentence

• My recent trip to L.A. was a rollercoaster ride (p. 122)

This is a conceptualization of a journey in terms of a journey—and so, it seems weird that we can recognize it as a metaphor, and that we don't draw literal rollercoaster inferences about the journey from this sentence.

2

He takes Keysar and Bly's 1995 study on false etymologies as evidence for the fact that our sense of linguistic coherence may be "illusory" (p. 115). He further supports this fact by citing other folk etymologies that are known to be false.

3

All the very good arguments made in his own 1996 paper on the topic are repeated (p. 117). This relates to paraphrase, reading speed, and recall.

4

The aptness data from Nayak and Gibbs (1990) and can be explained as an effect of stylistic coherence rather than cognitive facilitiation. Further, when Glucksberg et al. (1993) tested the stories for actual reading facilitation effects, they found none. In this connection, he also considers and rejects the recall data from Albritton et al. (1995) because they failed to control for lexical priming.

5

On a slightly different note, his own experiment in McGlone and Harding (1998) found that people read the ambiguous sentence the meeting was moved forward in a way that is consistent with the metaphor used in the preceding discourse (p. 120):

• We passed the deadline two days ago. The meeting originally scheduled for next Wednesday has been moved forward two days [i.e., to Friday].
• The deadline passed two days ago. The meeting originally scheduled for next Wednesday has been moved forward two days [i.e., to Monday].

 This is consistent with cognitive metaphor theory, but also with the theory that there is a more abstract super-structure which subsumes both time and space. He finds this latter suggestion "epistemologically more plausible" and suggests that perhaps the common features of time and space are "simply more transparent in spatial language than in other linguistic domains" (with a reference to Talmy 1996).

6

Lastly, he cites the reading time study by Keysar et al. (2000) which found that there was no significant difference between the facilitation effect of conventional and non-conventional metaphors.

Gibbs: Embodiment and Cognitive Science, ch. 4 (2005)

It's a bit surprising that someone as keen on criticizing introspective psychology as Ray Gibbs should find himself doing it extensively when the lights are dimmed. Pages 90–114 of his most recent book almost reads as an illustration of the kind of speculative neuroscience that he warns others against.

The Defective Mouth

For example, in a discussion of the idioms chew the fat and chew the rag — based on discussions in Goossens et al. (1995) — he motivates the meaning of the phrase as follows:

Given that both fat and rags can be chewed a long time, with little nutritional value coming from these activities, these idiomatic phrases express the idea of talking about something a long time with little new information to be gained from this experience. (p. 100)

Even if we accept this link, when did fat ever become low on nutrition?

More factual weirdness crops up as Gibbs discusses how people experience various bodily processes:

The metaphor "spit out" reflect the idea that has something of value in the body, which through effort he or she is able to gather up (like spit or phlegm) and say (or expectorate). (p. 100)

That's a bit gross, but it's also inaccurate: When was spit ever "valuable," and when did we ever have a reoccurring experience of desiring other people's spit? Even if the connection was unproblematic, the imagery wouldn't work.

Similarly, without any open reservations, Gibbs links the experience of coughing something up to a state of well-being:

"Getting something off one's chest," just like "blowing off steam" and "coughing something up," restores a sense of balance or well-being to an individual. (p. 103)

Even more oddly, the idiom lie through one's teeth is explained by means of an image of the truth being located inside the mouth of the speaker:

When people "lie through their teeth," the [mouth which is perceived as a] container is perceived as a hiding place where true information resides, but the container is somewhat defective, and we can see through the speaker's shameless attempt to lie about something when the truth can partly be seen. (p. 104)

It wouldn't matter that this image strikes me as completely bizarre if we only got some evidence that it is psychologically plausible. The problem is that, of course, we don't.

Murphy–Gibbs Revisited

Gibbs still has an old axe to grind with Gregory Murphy, who pointed out some serious gaps in his theory back in 1996. In the book, Gibbs essentially reiterates his defense of cognitive metaphor theory — constrain the theory so everything it claims is prefaced by "optionally."

So let's take the conclusions first: In the last section of the chapter on concepts, Gibbs repeats that "conceptual simulations surely … create imaginative understandings of events" (p. 122), and that

… human conceptual processing is deeply grounded in embodied metaphor, especially in regard to abstract understandings of experience. (p. 122)

On the previous page, he also talks about "embodied simulation in the creation of concepts in context" and "the sensorimotor nature of conceptual processing" (p. 121).

All of this talk of online simulation and temporary constructs seems quite consistent with the idea that comprehension isn't a matter of word-for-word recall, but rather of constructing something like a little film clip in the head which represents the meaning of a sentence. In the process of creating such a film, common bodily experiences may take precedence over other contextual cues.

I take this to be the idea behind his talk of emergence and self-organization, although the whole thing is a bit vague:

My suggestion is that image schemas are attractors within human self-organizing systems. … The important point here is that attractors are not localized representations, but emerging patterns of entire systems in action (i.e., interplay of brain, body, and world). In this way, the stable properties of image schemas (e.g., the topographic structure of something like SOURCE-PATH-GOAL) are not separate from sensorimotor activity. Image schemas should not be reduced to sensorimotor activity, but it is a mistake to view image schemas as mental representations that are abstracted away from experience. (p. 115)

The problem is that this seems to contradict his claim that certain "attractors" can be ignored when we feel like it:

Each metaphoric construal of a concept [e.g., LOVE] in some context results in a concept that is independent as a temporary representation apart from embodied source domain information in long-term memory. My suggestion, then, is that conceptual metaphors may not preexist in the sense of continually structuring specific conceptual domains. But conceptual metaphors may be used to access different knowledge on different occasions as people immediately conceptualize some abstract target domain given a particular task. Conceptual metaphors may also simply emerge as the product of conceptualizing processes, rather than serve as the underlying cause of these processes. (p. 121)

As Murphy pointed out in the original debate, this leaves wide open the question of how people select the appropriate metaphor, and after the metaphor is chosen, how to select the correct properties from the source domain. Whenever someone postulates a context-sensitive selection, they also implicitly postulate a mechanism that can perform this selection.

What Does This Leaves Us With?

It's a part of this picture that Gibbs wholeheartedly supports Joe Grady's corrective to cognitive metaphor theory (1997), i.e., that non-primary metaphors are constructed out of several primary metaphors glued together. This means that the theory essentially only applies to primary metaphors.

So in sum, the picture that seems to emerge is the following: Whenever you understand affection, normality, power, quantity, etc., you do so by means of mental simulations of a bodily process. Comprehension is a matter of choosing he right analogy between a bodily process and an abstract concept. Because some experiences are more salient, they are also more likely to be used.

So that's at least a theory. It's probably wrong, though, since many sentences are understood perfectly fine without the use of any bodily simulation — in fact, bodily simulation can even be an obstacle to correct understanding in many cases.

Steen: Finding Metaphor in Grammar and Usage (2007)

Gerard Steen's 2007 book on metaphor is very long, and it contains both chapters that are interesting for me and chapter that aren't. Steen has chosen to read the chapters so as to cover all the possible combinations of the following pairs of dichotomies (cf. ch. 1.4):

• grammar — usage
• language — thought
• symbols — behavior

So that's eight topics. Not surprisingly, this structuring a book this way produces a fair bit of repetition, but it also makes it easy to skip things that are less important to you.

From my perspective, the two important chapters the ones that touch on psycholinguistic aspects of the theory. That's chapters 9 and 12.

Curriculum

There's a list of books and papers that seem to have been more informative of Steen's position than others. I would say his core reading list consists of the following:

• Rachel Giora: On Our Mind (2003)
• Ray Gibbs: Embodiment and Cognitive Science (2005)
• Ellen Winner: The Point of Words (1988)
• Charles A. Perfetti: "Comprehending Written Language," in The Neurocognition of Language (1999)

He also refers a number of times to Lynne Cameron's Metaphor in Educational Discourse (2003), although that seems to be less central to his argument.

With respect to the debates about the psychological reality of conceptual mappings, he cites the following works in particular a lot:

• Lera Borodistsky: "Metaphoric Structuring" (2000)
• The debate in Cognition between Gregory L. Murphy (1996, 1997), and Ray Gibbs (1996)
• The debate in Cognitive Linguistics between William Croft (1998), Dominiek Sandra (1998), David Tuggy (1999)

There are other references as well, but these are the ones that receive the most attention.

Conclusions

Much of the point of Steen extensive methodological discussion is to weed out some of the more crazy claims made by cognitive metaphor theorists. In the process of doing so, he occasionally his own opinions on these matters.

Somewhat surprisingly, he is quite pessimistic about the cognitive validity of cognitive metaphor theory. In his discussion of Perfetti and Giora, he poses the following three questions (pp. 351–52):

1. Does the activation of polysemous words with metaphorical senses, in comprehension contexts requiring the metaphorical sense, always involve the activation of both the basic nonmetaphorical sense as well as the indirect metaphorical sense (processing of linguistic form)?
2. Does the activation of polysemous words with metaphorical senses, in comprehension contexts requiring the metaphorical sense, always involve such a degree of activation of the basic nonmetaphorical sense that it is sufficiently rich to function as a conceptual source domain for mapping the indirect metaphorical sense (processing of conceptual structure domains)?
3. Does the activation of polysemous words with metaphorical senses, in comprehension contexts requiring the metaphorical sense, always display some manifestation of an obligatory mapping from the basic nonmetaphorical sense to the indirect metaphorical sense (processing of conceptual structure of mapping)?

(Incidentally, this quote also illustrates Steen's almost meditatively repetitive style.) Anyway, his own answer to these questions is negative:

Salient word meanings [in the sense of Giora] are word meaning that are frequent, familiar, conventional, and prototypical, and it is these senses which are quickest to retrieve. Since metaphorical word senses may also be highly frequent, familiar, conventional, and prototypical, they may also be activated faster than their nonmetaphorical counterparts. It follows that questions 3, 2 and even 1 have to receive negative answers, as may be inferred from Giora's detailed review of her own and other researcher's work. (p. 352)

It follows that the symbolic analyses we know from cognitive metaphor theory don't really have much cognitive validity:

The fact that symbolic synchronic or historical analysis may helpfully privilege a particular class of senses as direct or nonmetaphorical does not directly map onto individuals' cognitive representation of such senses as prior or even necessary in the online comprehension of linguistic forms when these are to be processed in the metaphorical ways. (p. 352)

That's pretty radical, but it's perhaps less surprising if we see Steen as the strict methodology policeman of cognitive metaphor theory — in that case, we would expect him to have the most cautious conclusions in the field.

The Murphy/Gibbs debate

Spread out over three issues of Cognition in 1996 and 1997, Greg Murphy and Ray Gibbs had a very interesting exchange of opinions about cognitive metaphor theory (Murphy 1996, Gibbs 1996, Murphy 1997).

Murphy argued that a prior-similarity-based account of meaning extension is leaner and more precise than cognitive metaphor theory. Gibbs disagreed.

The Strong View and the Weak View
Murphy (1996) makes a distinction between what he calls the "strong" and the "weak" version of cognitive metaphor theory.

The strong view is that target domains have no inherent structure, and so get all their meaning through metaphors. The weak view is that they do have some "skeleton" of structure (1996: 187), perhaps consisting of something like thematic roles and unspecified relations between actors.

Murphy dismisses the strong view on two accounts.

First, all the false inferences predicted by a general metaphor need to be blocked. This can essentially only be done if the target domain has an autonomous structure, and if there is an authority higher than metaphor that can choose to apply or not apply the metaphors.

Second, suppose we have a chain of conceptualization such as

ARGUMENT <<< WAR <<< A WILD ANIMAL <<< A PERSON <<< A PLANT

There are then four links in which noise, wrong inferences, and memory problems may slip in. This seems computationally and psychologically unfortunate.

"Problems of circularity of evidence"
Murphy also notes that one cannot expect the same pool of data to be both explainer and explained. Non-linguistic evidence is needed (1996: 183).

He notes that some of Boaz Keysar and Bridget Bly's (1995) evidence also seems to suggest that metaphor understanding is a post-hoc, backward-looking construction.

That seems to be how our intuitions work. But Murphy warns us that we should not assume that the products of these intuitions reflect anything about the actual mental process (1996: 184).

"Problem of multiple metaphors"
Murphy goes on to note that some super-metaphorical arbiter must choose between metaphors when we have multiple inconsistent options.

As an example, he mentions LOVE, which is conceptualized as a JOURNEY, an OPPONENT, a UNITY, a HIDDEN OBJECT, a VALUABLE COMMODITY, and INSANITY. These various source domains seem to license different inferences.

In his response to Murphy's article, Gibbs rebuts that "concepts are temporary, independent constructions in working memory created on the spot" (Gibbs 1996: 313).

This is in direct conflict with the claim that the conceptual system exists "in long-term memory" which appears elsewhere in the literature (Lakoff 1998: 51; Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 69).

What counts as literal?
According to Murphy, when Lakoff and Johnson state that physical meanings are the only literal meanings, this is

their theory of concepts applied to language; namely, it says that only simple physical experiences can be directly encoded in linguistic meaning, and nonphysical or abstract relations must be expressed via metaphor. Thus, their claim that Inflation is rising is metaphoric is basically an assumption of their theory, rather than evidence for it. (1996; p. 189)

He concludes that "a number of the 'metaphors' that L&J and others identify may well not metaphors at all" (p. 190). He doesn't seem to have a clear account of how one could test "metaphoricity" himself, though.