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.

The Steen-Gibbs-McGlone debate in Discourse Processes (2011)

In 2011, the journal Discourse Processes had a special issue on cognitive metaphor theory. The issue consists of four papers, a target piece by Raymond Gibbs, a reply by Matthew McGlone, a reply by Gerard Steen, and a rebuttal by Gibbs. The whole thing spans about 50 pages.

What is Cognitive Metaphor Theory?

Gibbs is quite direct in his claims. He directly openly says that:

Under the CMT view, so-called clichéd expressions, such as "stay the course" and "We're spinning out wheels," are not dead metaphors, but reflect active schemes of metaphorical thought. (p. 532)

However, the picture later muddles a bit because he constrains his claims to primary metaphors (pp. 9–10) and disqualifies explicit similes such as My job is a jail (p. 547). He also entertains the thought, inconsistent with conventional versions of cognitive metaphor theory, that these mappings may be learned through verbal behavior (p. 540).

But in fact, the story gets even muddier than that. In the last section before the conclusion, he floats his dynamical systems proposal for cognitive metaphor theory (p. 551ff). But while it all sounds very good with emergence and self-organization, Gibbs never commits to any particular model. This puts him in the questionable company of a tradition that throws around fancy math terms without actually saying very much.

That's not a nice accusation, but I'm afraid it's unavoidable. Gibbs himself seems to misunderstand fundamental concepts about dynamical systems: For instance, he seems to confuse the system states and state spaces (p. 551), confuse out-of-equilibrium states with chaos (see p. 115 of his 2005 book), and to confuse attractors with their associated basins of attraction (p. 551). Also, talking about "nonlinear interactions" (p. 554) without specifying what the independent variables are is just plain nonsense.

Constrained Comprehension

At any rate, the bottom line is that cognitive mappings aren't after all the basis of metaphor understanding; rather, they are factor that influence understanding, but neither necessary nor sufficient:

… many conceptual metaphors, along with many other constraining forces, may have partial, probabilistic influence on one's understanding of verbal metaphor. (p. 553)

That seems about right — but of course, we would have to specify what those forces were for this to be a informative statement. Gibbs seems to put everything in the mix, just to be on the safe side:

For instance, some dynamic processes occur over short time spans (e.g., neural firings or momentary thoughts). Others processes unfold over the course of individuals’ lives, and so guide development and change in personality, and interpersonal interactions throughout the lifespan. Dynamic processes also operate on populations over a much longer, evolutionary timeframe. (p. 551)

So just about anything can potentially be a relevant factor in determining comprehension. In his reply to this claim, Steen comments:

This basically brings all possibly relevant parameters of discourse processing together, from neural cognition to cognitive evolution, with all other dimensions of language use and discourse processing in between; and, in principle, allows for each of them to exert some yet to be determined effect on the ongoing discourse process. … If such a dynamic systems theoretical model could generate more precise predictions … it would be a valuable upgrade of CMT. (p. 587)

So it's not like the claim is wrong, it's just that it's only a ragtag collection of vague analogies rather than a theory.

The Case for Cognitive Metaphor Theory

OK, so getting a precise theory out of Gibbs can occasionally be a bit like holding on to wet soap. But he does bring a set of arguments to the table in order to support the claim that cross-modal effects play some sort of role in word comprehension. Here is, schematically, the arguments he cites:

1. Metaphorical expressions are systematic (p. 532)
2. Novel metaphors can be explained by means of old mappings (p. 532)
3. The mappings explain certain facts about etymology (p. 532)
4. Mappings are shared across cultures (p. 538)
5. Scientific concepts can be analyzed as metaphors (p. 540)
6. Verbal framing can influence decision-making (p. 540)
7. There are mappings in non-verbal thought (pp. 540–41)
8. Gestures sometimes seem to reflect mappings (p. 541)
9. There are cross-modal spill-over effects from non-verbal to verbal tasks (p. 541–542)
10. People have consistent mental images (p. 544)
11. People have consistent judgment of underlying mappings (p. 544)
12. (Quite novel) euphemisms are understood faster when primed metaphorically (p. 545)
13. Transparent idioms are learned faster than no-so-transparent (p. 546)
14. Domains are similar in an asymmetric way (p. 548)

So that's a lot of stuff, and not all of these arguments are equally good.

The Bad

Some of them are bad just for conceptual reasons: For instance, interviewing people about their mental imagery is just not a very reliable way of producing cognitive evidence. Ironically, Gibbs seems to accept this point when the data goes the other way, as in his comments on McGlone's paraphrase task:

Yet, asking people to verbally paraphrase a novel metaphor may not be the best indicator of the possible underlying presence of conceptual metaphor in interpreting these novel expressions. Given the long-noted difficulties people have in paraphrasing metaphors (Gibbs, 1994), the fact that 41% could provide interpretations that seem to meet some criteria for conceptual metaphor may be a positive finding in favor of CMT. (p. 546–47)

In fact, the quote goes on to question McGlone's materials on the grounds that metaphors of the form A is B or the form A is the B of C are "Not typically motived by single conceptual metaphors" (p. 547), so that that do not count as negative evidence anyway (even though they do, apparently, count as positive).

Other arguments are weak for empirical reasons: For instance, the systematicity which originally motivated cognitive metaphor theory has in fact been hugely overstated, and much of the last 15 years of research has been dedicated to the problems that arise from the fact that there are unsystematic holes in metaphorical mappings. (This parallels the fact that there is no cognitive reason that you can't ask for the time with the question How late is it?) Similar problems hold for the gesture evidence.

The Good

But some pieces of evidence are good. Here's a list of some of the experimental studies that Gibbs cites, and which I think have a lot of merit:

• Meier and Robinson 2004: Positive words are recognized faster when they're presented at the top of a computer screen.
• Giessner and Schubert 2007: Subjects judge bosses to have more power when they are depicted higher up on a screen.
• Williams and Bargh 2008a: Subjects find other people more friendly when they're holding a cup of warm coffee.
• Williams and Bargh 2008b: Subjects find themselves more socially isolated when they have been asked to measure large distances.
• Zhong and Lilgenquist 2006: Subjects who think about immoral behavior are more likely to accept an antiseptic wipe afterwards.
• Meier, Robinson, and Clore 2004: Subjects are slower at categorizing words like faith or beggar as positive or negative when the positive are dark or the negative bright.
• Wilson and Gibbs 2007: Subjects are faster at reading a metaphorical grasp sentence if they have first made a grasping hand movement.

I am not saying all of these studies are methodologically unproblematic (in fact, I am quite skeptical about using the Giessner and Schubert study as evidence of how online processing works). I am just saying that Gibbs is right in saying that they bring some information to the table which should not be ignored.

Gibbs: The Poetics of Mind (1994), overview of ch. 3

Chapter 3 (pp. 80-119) is one of the more interesting ones in Gibbs' book. It seems to defend the theory that figurative meanings are (almost always) accessed faster and more easily than literal meanings.

If this is a correct representation of his views, they are indeed consistent with the fact that Gibbs wants the data to eventually point towards cognitive metaphor theory. He thus wants to make plausible the claims that figurative meanings to be connected to the literal meanings by hard-wired neural connections.

What's On the Table

Gibbs' theory of ambiguity resolution should be seen in contrast with two distinct alternatives:

1. Gibbs' own theory: People usually access the figurative meaning first, and only later and optionally the literal meaning. Possibly, the effort necessary to access a literal meaning "partly depends on the frequency and familiarity of these phrases" (p. 96).
2. The strictly discrete Gricean theory: Comprehension runs through a series of steps; one looks for a literal reading, evaluates its fitness, rejects this literal reading, looks for a different reading, evaluates this second reading, etc.
3. The lexical representation hypothesis: A number of mutually inhibitory readings are simultaneously activated, and one of them wins out (p. 93).

Probably no one has believed the strictly stepwise Gricean theory since the mid-1970s. The really decisive difference in this context is thus between a "horse race" theory (p. 93) and Gibbs' own "automatic" theory (cf. pp. 95-96).

Some Problems For Gibbs

Gibbs' theory is problematic mainly for two reasons:

First, it is conceptually confused, because the very idea of an idiom is a phrase is stable and frequently used. Gibbs has thus failed to give a definition of figurative language that would allow us to separate the effect of frequency imbalances from the effect of figurative thought.

Second, as Matthew McGlone has pointed out, there is something theoretically confused about the idea that source and target domains are tightly neurally connected. If there was really an automatic transfer of activation from temperature to emotions, it is unclear how we separate the two domains or arrive at different readings in different contexts. Nothing in Gibbs' theory explains how that is possible.

The Structure of the Chapter

The chapter contains the following sections:

1. Untitled introduction (p. 80)
2. The traditional view of figurative language understanding (pp. 81-84)
3. Psycholinguistic research (pp. 84-109)
1. Indirect speech acts (pp. 85-91)
2. Idioms (pp. 91-97)
3. Slang (pp. 97-98)
4. Proverbs (pp. 98-99)
5. Metaphor (pp. 99-106)
6. Metonomy (pp. 106-107)
7. Irony (pp. 107-109)
4. Are literal and figurative language processing identical? (pp. 109-115)
5. The processes and products of understanding (pp. 115-119)
6. Conclusion (p. 119)

The subsections on indirect speech acts, idioms, and metaphors contain references and discussions of much of the same evidence as Gibbs recycles in chapters 4 and 6.

For instance, the (very interesting) experiment by Cristina Cacciari and Patrizia Tabossi that he discusses on page 95 reappears on page 287 almost as if he was not aware that he had already presented it.

(By the way, based on the prose style, it seems probable that the discussion in chapter 6 was written before that in chapter 3).

McGlone: "Concepts as Metaphors" (2001)

The last chapter in Sam Glucksberg's book Understanding Figurative Language is a super-important essay by Matthew McGlone that summarizes much of the psychological evidence against cognitive metaphors theory in a mere 17 pages.

Circularity
McGlone stresses that linguistic evidence alone cannot decide the matter:

How do we know that people think of theories in terms of buildings? Because people often talk about theories using building-related expressions. Why do people often talk about theories using building-related expressions? Because people think about theories in terms of buildings. Clearly, the conceptual metaphor view must go beyond circular reasoning of this sort and seek evidence that is independent of the linguistic evidence. (p. 95)

He also notes that the strong view of metaphor is incoherent because it would imply that we could not distinguish theories from actual buildings (pp. 94 and 105).

Introspection and post hoc analysis
He goes on to discuss the fact that our semantic intuitions may be an unreliable source of knowledge (p. 95-97).

He provides three arguments for this conclusions, Keysar and Bly's quite ingenious false-etymology experiment (pp. 95-96); a new analysis of a legal argument by Steven Winter (pp. 96-97); and the phenomenon of false etymologies (p. 97).

Winter claims, referring explicitly to cognitive metaphor theory, that the only natural reading of "under the color of law" is "under the (false) appearance of legality" (p. 96). McGlone reports that his subjects in fact think the opposite, so the speculative account was in fact quite misleading in this case (p. 97).

McGlone illustrates the concept of false etymologies with the example Martha is the spitting image of her mother (p. 97).

While an analyst may be tempted to conjure up some "cognitive" motivation for the connection between spit and resemblance, the phrase is in fact derived through an abbreviation of spirit and image. Any "cognitive" story would, in other words, just be another slice of the big baloney.

Note that this argument goes very well together with examples of dead metaphors. If metaphors really were so psychologically real as claimed by the cognitive theory, they should all be completely transparent.

The Lack of Support for Analogical Processing
On the following pages (pp. 99-104), McGlone offers a number of arguments that speak for and against the cognitive theory of metaphor based on psychological experiments.

The first list of arguments against the mapping-based account of understanding is based on his 1994 doctoral dissertation and his 1996 article based on it. These are:

• Paraphrases do not respect conceptual mappings Subjects paraphrase the lecture was a three-course meal as, e.g., the lecture was a gold mine (p. 99).
• Similarity judgements are based on content, not mapping Subjects see the lecture was a three-course meal as equally similar to the lecture was a steak for the intellect and the lecture was a goldmine (p. 99).
• Priming effects rest on content, not mapping As in snack => meal vs. goldmine => meal (pp. 99-100).
• Content-based memory cues work better than mapping-based For instance, "large quantity" is better than "food" as a cue for the lecture was a three-course meal (p. 100).

A finding that seems to support the mapping hypothesis is the following, reported by Nandini Nayak and Raymond Gibbs:

• Subjects prefer text continuations that preserve coherence in terms of mappings So if subjects are given a text with three or four ANGER IS HEAT phrases, they prefer continuations that also applies this mapping to one that applies ANGERS IS ANIMAL BEHAVIOR (pp. 100-101).

However:

• Continuations that preserve mappings do not facilitate reading At least not when these mappings are highly conventional. This was shown using Nayak and Gibbs' own stories (pp. 101-102).

McGlone notes that one should also be careful in the interpretation of experiments of these kinds, since priming effects based on surface words might be conflated with priming effects based on mappings (p. 102).

Unfamiliar or Ambiguous Sentences in the Context of Analogies
He goes on to cite evidence in favor of the following claims:

• Ambiguous sentences can be disambiguated by a mapping prime So the sentence the meeting was moved two days forward has different natural interpretations after the deadline has passed and we passed the deadline (pp. 102-103).
• Novel metaphors are facilitated by relevant mapping primes So Sirens will wail every time they meet is more intelligible as a metaphor about arguments if it is preceded by the novel phrase verbal grenades than the conventional phrase shoot down his arguments (p. 104).

He notes that there is probably some analogical reasoning implies when you hear the sentence Rush Limbaugh's bloated ego gobbled up his integrity and used the airwaves as a toilet (p. 104). There certainly seems to be more pictorial "meat" to it than the more anemic stock phrases typically analyzed in the field.

He comments:

As Bowdle and Gentner (1997) have suggested, the processes used to understand any particular metaphoric expression depend on its conventionality. When an expression is completely novel, it requires different kinds of inferential work than when it is familiar. Thus, the conceptual metaphor view is insufficient as a general account of figurative language comprehension, in part because it does not recognize important processing differences between conventional and novel expressions. (pp. 104-105)

This distinction should be seen on the background that the air of poetic strangeness inherent in creative metaphors can also accompany slightly strange formulations of literally true facts.

Consider for instance the following novel metaphors:

• The soul a prison for the body (i.e., not vice versa)
• Her comment really stepped on an emotional landmine.
• Rush Limbaugh uses the airwaves as his toilet.

Compare these to the following true and literal statements:

• My body has 20 nails.
• I ate the food with my mouth.
• Your house is standing on a planet.

I presume that, in both cases, the phenomenological effect is produced by the higher requirements implied by a novel way of seeing an object.

Criticisms of cognitive metaphor theory cited by Haser

In the "Introductory remarks" of her aggressively polemic book Metaphor, Metonymy, and Experientialist Philosophy (2005), Verena Haser cites a number of relatively recent works that criticizing cognitive metaphor theory.

The list contains the following items:

• Michiel Leezenberg: Contexts of Metaphor (2001)
• Matthew McGlone: "Concepts as metaphors," in Sam Glucksberg: Understanding Figurative Language (2001)
• Dirk Geeraerts: "Cognitive semantics and the history of philosophical epistemology," in Geiger and Rudzka-Ostyn (eds.): Conceptualizations and Mental Processing in Language (1993)
• Olaf Jäkel: "Kant, Blumenberg, Weinrich," in Gibbs and Steen (eds.): Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics (1999)
• John R. Taylor: "Category extension by metonomy and metaphor," in Dirven and Pörings (eds.): Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast (2002)
• Petra Drewer: Die Kognitive Metapher als Werkzeug des Denkens (2003)
• Marina Rakova: The Extent of the Literal (2003)

Fortunately, I'm already more or less halfway through this list. Surprisingly, the most prominent scholar on her list happens to sit in an office just across the hall from where I am sitting right now.

George Lakoff: "The contemporary theory of metaphor" (1993)

George Lakoff's contribution to the second, expanded version of Metaphor and Thought (1979/1993) is written like a corrective to the "old," "traditional," and "classical" metaphor theories of the dark ages preceding Metaphors We Live By (1980). Lakoff's article gives paradigmatic examples of the thinking, rhetoric, and evidence he applies.

Literal means understood-without-mappings
Lakoff defines "literal" in terms of his hypothetical entity, the conceptual mapping:

those concepts that are not comprehended via conceptual metaphor might be called "literal." (p. 205)

He gives the sentence the balloon went up as an example of a literal utterance. It is thus not, according to Lakoff, comprehended through the use of a mapping. A sentence like the line goes from A to B does, on the other hand, does use a mapping (see also p. 215).

This definition is interesting, not only because it renders the concept of literal language dependent on Lakoff's theory. It also highlights the fact that what counts as literal and what counts as metaphorical is an empirical and psychological question. Lakoff should thus, according to his own theory, give an argument as to why the balloon went up does not require some pre-established bridge between various parts of the brain, and why the temperature went up does.

Note that he also implicitly hypothesizes that we do not need any conceptual infrastructure to comprehend surprising but presumably literal expressions such as the camel flew away or a wooden balloon.

If there is such a thing as conceptual mappings, it is not self-evident that they are only involved in what lakoff calls metaphorical expressions, and he gives no argument to that effect.

Literal language is identified by intuition
Later in the text, he relies even more explicitly on his intuition. He want to argue that the phrase ahead of is used metaphorically in the sentence

John is way ahead of Bill in intelligence. (p. 214)

To do so, he states:

To say that there is no metaphorical mapping from paths to scales is to say that "ahead of" is not fundamentally spatial and characterized with respect to heads; it is to claim rather that "ahead" is very abstract, neutral between space and linear scales, and has nothing to do with heads. This would be a bizarre analysis. (p. 214-15)

Again here, there is some confusion as to what counts as definition, and what counts as data. Lakoff clearly has the intuition that the meaning of ahead of is traceable to its spatial meaning, but he does not provide any criterion for literality or centrality other than this case-by-case intuition.

Since less clear-cut examples can be given, his extrapolation to all conceptualizations of magnitudes and scales is somewhat dubious.

Metaphor relates the abstract to the concrete
According to Lakoff, the function of metaphor is to conceptualize the abstract in terms of the concrete:

as soon as one gets away from concrete physical experience and starts talking about abstractions or emotions, metaphorical understanding is the norm. (p. 205)

Metaphor allows us to understand a relatively abstract or inherently unstructured subject matter in terms of a more concrete, or at least highly structured subject matter. (245)

Metaphors are mappings across conceptual domains.
Such mappings are asymmetric and partial. [...]
Mappings are not arbitrary, but grounded in the body and in everyday experience and knowledge. (p. 245)

This entails that we can picture the the metaphorical relations as a partial order on the set of domains. In this order, concrete, physical experience would be minimal elements, and all other domains could be placed somewhere higher up in the lattice corresponding to the order.

Conceptual mappings, a shy bird
One of the most interesting and controversial claims of cognitive metaphor theory is that there are no "dead" metaphors (see, e.g., pp. 227 and 245). We should be careful how we read this claim, though, to get its meaning and explanatory power right.

When asked how a particular metaphor is understood, we can pick an answer somewhere between two poles: In one extreme, we allege that the whole linguistic expression is stored in memory, along with its meaning, so that only recall and no "thinking" is required. In the other extreme, we claim that the metaphor requires a search from scratch for a good interpretation, perhaps in terms similarity, relevance, or both.

Lakoff and Johson's theory lies in between these two poles: They claim that the linguistic expressions are not stored, but that a non-linguistic infrastructure---"a huge system of thousands of cross-domain mappings" (p. 203)---is.

Thus, when I say that I'm boiling mad, you do not retrieve a stored meaning of the phrase. Instead, the metaphorical expression exploits an already existing mapping. This mapping works because activation in the concept "heated to the boiling point" will propagate into the concept "very, very angry." Thus, no stored phrase is needed; no search in conceptual space is needed.

Although there is nothing wrong with the picture of this neurological propagation, it fails to explain the linguistic data. The unfortunate effect is that clinging to a rigid structure behind metaphorical expressions (fixed mappings) is either wrong or a good old similarity-based account on a new bottle.

The mapping account: Motivation and idea
The mapping account of metaphor in its most basic form explains a metaphor with reference to a structure-preserving function from the source domain to the target domain. The explanatory power of the theory lies in the fact that this function can be employed by different linguistic terms, not just a fixed, finite set of phrases.

Lakoff himself exemplifies this mechanism by his stipulated function from the domain of travel to the domain of love. The theory then says that travel concepts map onto love concepts, but not only that: The relations that hold between any specific set of travel concepts are preserved by the function so that we reason as if they also hold between the love concepts.

So for instance, the images of IMPEDIMENTS and VEHICLE under this mapping are DIFFICULTIES and RELATIONSHIP. And since IMPEDIMENTS can cause the VEHICLE to stop (a relation in the source domain), so can DIFFICULTIES cause the RELATIONSHIP to stop (the corresponding relationship in the target domain).

So far, the theory is simple and true. It does seems to warrant the conclusion that we use these mappings, and using them for reasoning and not just talk. But then the problems begin.

Ontological gaps in the mapping
The first problem is that not all objects fit into the function.

It goes fine if we plug entities like DESTINATION, FUEL, etc. into metaphorical expressions---these are then discovered that to have been related to LIFE GOALS, EMOTIONS, etc. all along.

But other objects seem to have no equivalents in the target domain. GAS STATION, MAP, PASSPORTS, and numerous other entities are only feebly related, if at all, to entities in the domain of love.

A the quote above (from p. 245) shows, Lakoff is aware of this problem, and he recognizes that metaphors are only "partial" mappings. The functions can only be defined on a subset of the source domain

There is no explicit discussion of why that might be the case, given that the mappings are real, coherent objects, but the arguments I discuss below may throw some light on the mystery.

Epistemic gaps in the mapping
The second problem is the fact that not all source domain structure is in fact preserved in the target domain. For instance, as Lakoff notes,

you can give someone a kick, even if that person doesn't have it afterward, and [...] you can give someone information, even if you don't lose it. (p. 216)

Thus "giving" a kick and "giving" information does not have the same structure as "giving" a present.

Lakoff explains this by saying that the "inherent target domain structure automatically limits what can be mapped" (p. 216). He calls this, in super-sinister fashion, "the Invariance Principle," and he launches it as an empirical hypothesis, not a patch on his theory (p. 215).

It should be clear, though, that this principle takes the piss out of the theory to a quite considerable extent. Remember that the empirical justification for introducing the invisible conceptual mappings was the fact that they could explain an array of facts without invoking conventionality or learning of particular phrases; and a part of its attraction lay in the fact that it warranted the hypothesis that these mappings governed thought as well as speech.

Modifying this strong hypothesis with a cautious "principle" that can be invoked every time a mapping begins to look like nothing but a handy label on a bunch of contingent conventions significantly reduces the attractions of the theory. If mapping can't predict anything and only explain some things some times, then they should indeed be an endangered species.

The cyclicity of the language-thought-language argument
A last point that resonated well with McGlone's criticism is the fact that Lakoff sometimes seems to use his own hypotheses as evidence for his theory. An example concerns the mapping SEEING IS TOUCHING, which accounts for metaphors like their eyes met. Lakoff writes:

This metaphor is made real in the social practice of avoiding eye "contact" on the street (p. 243)

The example is quite similar to the ARGUMENT IS WAR example in Metaphors We Live By:

It is important to see that we don't just talk about arguments in terms of war. We can actually win or lose arguments. We see the person we are arguing with as an opponent. We attack his positions and we defend our own. [...] It is in this sense that the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor is one that we live by in this culture; its structures the actions we perform in arguing. (p. 4)

Given what Lakoff has said about the "Invariance Principle," this suddenly seems a lot less likely. If the target domain can really override the relations of the source domain, why should the mapping then provide any new information?

Apparently, we already have such an extensive knowledge of argumentation that we can filter out siege his argument from attack his argument. So why should the metaphor have anything to say with respect to our actions?

At best, the metaphor can fill out some roles that were not already filled or structured by our prior knowledge of the target domain -- but this is a much weaker statement than the one Lakoff (and Johnson) actually made.

Kertész and Rákosi: "Cyclic vs. Circular argumentation in the Conceptual Metaphor Theory"

This is a somewhat far-fetched scholastic exercise written in an attempt to defend Lakoff and Johnson's theory from charges of circular reasoning. The whole paper relies on a highly idiosyncratic philosophy of science and rhetoric.

The two texts that are cited as criticisms of Lakoff and Johnson are: 

• Verena Haser's Metaphor, Metonymy, and Experientialist Philosophy: Challenging Cognitive Semantics (2005)
• "Concepts as Metaphors," Matthew McGlone's chapter in Sam Glucksberg: Understanding Figurative Language: From Metaphors to Idioms (2001)

Haser (p. 146) criticizes Lakoff and Johnson's remark that we could imagine a culture in which argument was conceptualized and lived in terms of dance:

Their premise (‘imagine a culture . . .’) can be spelt out as follows: Suppose that people in a certain culture view arguments in a different way than we do (i.e., not in terms of war, but in terms of a dance). Their conclusion says that in such a culture, people would ‘view arguments differently’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 5).’’

McGlone (p. 95) charges Lakoff and Johnson with using linguistic data to illegitimately infer something about thought:

How do we know that people think of theories in terms of buildings? Because people often talk about theories using building-related expressions. Why do people often talk about theories using building-related expressions? Because people think about theories in terms of buildings.

As Keysar et al. point out, the good part of Lakoff and Johnson's argument is that they point out that a number of linguistic expressions "cohere." It is a fair enough conjecture that the source of this coherence is something "in the head," but no amount of linguistic evidence alone can settle the issue.