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.

Reuven Tsur: "Lakoff's Roads Not Taken" (1999)

This is another paper that criticizes Lakoff's metaphor theory for being "flat"---or in Tsur's terms, having "little literary subtlety" (sec. 6).

Tsur's point is basically that Lakoff conflates quick decoding with slow interpretation. This conflates revolutionary language and conventional chatter, and consequently, "its literary application may be harmful" (sec. 4).

Metaphors: Fast or Slow?
Lakoff sees metaphors as instances of cognitive maps. This has the consequence that expressions like life's road or My career was at a crossroads receive stable meanings.

Tsur frowns at this description because he feels it conflates meaning (the product of reading) with understanding (the process of reading). This essentially accommodates metaphorical understanding to literal understanding: Both occur instantly and on the basis of standard tools.

This instant decoding, however, "is not necessarily a competent response to a piece of literature" (sec. 2). In particular, not all sentences are equally pregnant, significant, and ambiguous, and a theory that predicts certainty and intelligibility will hide this fact.

To illustrate this, he uses a sentence from Oedipus the King:

"Lauis was slain where three highroads meet" (sec. 2).

As he says, this sentence's "'air' of significance" is not explained by standard mappings like LIFE IS A JOURNEY. Something else must be going on, both in terms of product and process.

His theory is that this sense of significance kicks in because the meeting of the three roads seems unmotivated. We therefore shift to the slower process of "delayed conceptualization," and this produces more readings and more uncertainty. (And the pieces, by the way, fall into place as it is later revealed that it was Oedipus himself who killed the old king).

Uncertainty, Confidence, and Openness
In a sense, we can see Tsur's theory like this: A reader reads words, understands their meaning, and everything is going fine; but then something---a textual clue or an obnoxious English teacher---pushes the reader out of equilibrium, and the text suddenly seems riddled with loose ends. This tension triggers a search process, and the tension is relieved when a locally most consistent reading is found.

This seems reasonable and consistent with Davidson's observation that, once we start thinking about it, there is not end to what a metaphor might mean. Man is a wolf might be an instantiation of PEOPLE ARE SAVAGE ANIMALS, and it might be an instantiation of PEOPLE ARE PACK ANIMALS, and the metaphor can easily borrow some meanings from both mappings at once.

Tsur wraps this in a quasi-cognitive language by saying that a metaphor is "an efficient coding of information" because it "increases the number of meanings encoded in one spatial image" (sec. 3).

The point, however, is still that there is no algorithm for understanding. Once we're in the land of deep reading, the increased expressivity is bought at the priced of decreased certainty.

Contradiction and Falsehood as Metaphor Triggers
In fact, Tsur himself seems to be saying (following Monroe Beardsley) that this mode of reading is always triggered by "indirectly self-contradictory or obviously false" statements. Tsur is thus in line with Grice on this matter.

Unfortunately, truth is and consistency is not the whole story, as Donald Davidson's example No man is an island shows. However, the Gricean analysis still holds if we allow other conversational oddities to trigger a "deep" reading (e.g. irrelevance).

Lakoff, though, seems to reject all Gricean analysis. That's problematic, since reading-time measures seem to suggest that original metaphors and conversational implicatures are understood in much the same way. (Tsur cites Rachel Giora for this claim.)