Haser: Metaphor, Metonymy, and Experientialist Philosophy (2005), chs. 2 and 3

Chapter 2 of Verena Haser's book deals with the often ill-defined distinction between metaphor and metonymy. It is not directly relevant to me.

Chapter 3 pecks a little at some of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's rhetoric. Two "case studies," that is, two point of criticism, are examined. The first (ch. 3.2.1) is the problems with overgeneration, and the second (ch. 3.2.2) is their use of non-existent straw men.

Only the former of these contains arguments directed at the substance of the theory itself (as opposed to its rhetoric).

In this section, Haser notes that ideas can't be sautéed when they evidently can be half-baked (p. 59). Lakoff and Johnson try to edge out of this problem by saying that abstract target domains aren't sharply defined and therefore behave somewhat unpredictably. Haser replies that this concept is ad hoc and ill-defined (p. 60).

She also notes that one of their prime arguments against their rhetorical straw man, the "strong homonymy view," presupposes the fact that metaphors are fueled by conceptual mappings (p. 60).

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.

Kövecses: Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (2002/2010)

This book is a textbook in cognitive metaphor theory, summarizing and surveying most of what has been going on the field since the publication of Metaphors We Live By.

It faithfully reproduces every example and argument ever proposed by that tradition. It has very few original examples, and the quality of the argumentation is often less than one would desire.

Metaphor "governs our thought"
In the preface to the first edition of the book, Kövecses cites a number of conventional metaphors like the ills of society, the road to success, and a branch of the organization.

He then goes on to claim that these aren't dead at all, contrary to appearances:

The "dead metaphor" account misses an important point: namely, that what is deeply entrenched, hardly noticed, and thus effortlessly used is most active in our thought. The metaphors listed above may be highly conventional and effortlessly used, but this does not mean that they have lost their vigor in thought and that they are dead. On the contrary, they are "alive" in the most important sense---they govern our thought: they are "metaphors we live by." (p. xi)

I suppose that by this logic, a word like capital most vigorously evokes the image of a head, since it is even more conventionalized and more hidden than phrases like head of state or warhead.

The evidence for metaphorical thought
Like all cognitive metaphor theorists, Kövecses wants to have his cake and eat it, too: He wants our knowledge of target domains to arise out of metaphors, but metaphors to be constrained by our knowledge of the target domains.

It is quite shocking how little the arguments for these claims have evolved over the past 30 years. I will need to quote him at some length to fully convey this state of affairs.

So, after citing the metaphor LOVE IS A JOURNEY, Kövecses writes (p. 9):

From this discussion, it might seem that the elements in the target domain have been there all along and that people came up with this metaphor because there were preexisting similarities between the elements in the two domains. This is not so. The domain of love did not have these elements before it was structured by the domain of journey. It was the application of the journey domain to the love domain that provided the concept of love with this particular structure or set of elements. In a way, it was the concept of journey that "created" the concept of love.

Note the lack of qualifiers here. All of our knowledge about love arises through metaphorical mappings, it seems. This should be contrasted with his reliance on "objective, preexisting similarity" when he talks about the constraints on metaphor (p. 79).

He goes on:

 To see that this is so, try to do a thought experiment. Try to imagine the goal, choice, difficulty, or progress aspect of love with making use of the journey domain. Can you think of the goal of a love relationship without at the same time thinking of trying to reach a destination at the end of a journey? Can you think of the progress made in a love relationship without at the same time imagining the distance covered in a journey? Can you think of the choices made in a love relationship without thinking of choosing a direction in a journey? The difficulty of doing this shows that the target of love is not structured independently of and prior to the domain of journey.

Another piece of evidence for the view that the target of love is not structured independently of any source domains is the following. In talking about the elements that structure a target domain, it is often difficult to name the elements without recourse to the language of the source. In the present example, we talk about the goals associated with love, but this is just a slightly "disguised" way of talking about destinations given in the source; the word goal has an additional literal or physical use---not just a metaphorical one. In the same way, the word progress also has a literal or physical meaning, and it comes from a word meaning "step, go."  These examples show that many elements of target concepts come from source domains and are not preexisting.

There are thus two main strands of evidence for this theory of the psychology of speech: Introspection and linguistic or etymological evidence.

I think Raymond Gibbs has said what needed to be said about the first one. Verena Haser, Sam Glucksberg, and others have said what needed to be said about the other.

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.