Rapp et at.: "Neural correlates of metaphor processing" (2004)

This study used fMRI to investigate which parts of the brain that are involved in the processing of metaphors of the form A is B.

Contrary to expectation, it turned out that all the extra activity that the metaphors induced (compared to the literal control sentences) was in the left hemisphere. A previous PET study had found activation in the right hemisphere, but this may have been due to the more complex syntax they used in their materials.

The authors assert that they used 120 sentences, but they do not include their materials in the paper. This obviously makes the paper much less useful from the point of view of linguistics.

The only two sentences they cite are the following (p. 397):

• Die Worte des Liebhabers sind Harfenklänge (metaphorical)
• Die Worte des Liebhabers sind Lügen (literal)

It's difficult to capture just exactly how poetically tone-deaf this sounds, but think A lover's voice is the sweetest sound, and you're roughly in the right ballpark.

At any rate, we now know that you need to pump slightly more blood to the left-hand side of your brain if I call your lover's words sweet music than if I call them lies. Interpret at your own risk.

Innis: Empire and Communications (1950)

I've always thought it sounded quite odd when Derrida said that Western philosophy has a preoccupation with the spoken word. How could a genre almost be more rigidly text-oriented than European philosophy?

Now that I've been reading some of Harold Innis' Empire and Communications, I'm beginning to see the contours of a different historical hypothesis that I hadn't originally read into Derrida's arguments. This concerns the extremely high value that European 19th-century philology put on phonetic alphabets as opposed to syllabic or idiographic scripts.

I think Innis sort of reiterates the valorization. Take a look at the kind of words that he uses to describe the "progress" of the Babylonian writing system:

Conventionalization of pictographs began with signs most frequently used and advanced rapidly with the replacement of strokes by wedges. Pictographic expression became inadequate for the writing of connected religious or historical texts and many signs were taken to represent syllables. By 2900 BC the form of the script and the use of signs had been fully developed, and by 2825 BC the direction of writing and the arrangement of words according to their logical position in the sentence had been established. (p. 27)

It's not that it must necessarily be a progress history—he might just mean "fully developed" in the sense of "to its known final form," or perhaps in some pragmatic sense (as the word "inadequate" suggests). But surely, there is quite a lot of directionality built into the metaphors he is using.

He continues as follows:

By 2900 BC the introduction of syllabic signs in a vocabulary which was largely monosyllabic had reduced the number of signs to about 600. Of these signs about 100 represented vowels, but no system was devised for representing single consonantal sounds or creating an alphabet. Cuneiform writing was partly syllabic and partly ideographic or representative of single words. Many of the signs were polyphonic or had more than one meaning. Sumerian had no distinctions of gender, and often omitted those of number, persons, and tenses. An idea had not fully been developed to the symbol of word or syllable. Pictographs and ideograms took on abstract phonetic values, and the study of script became linked to the study of language. (p. 28)

Weird, isn't it? It's almost as if he takes gender/number/person/tense marking as the mark of a civilized and modern language.

Here's what he writes on alphabets in the beginning of the chapter on ancient Greece:

The alphabet escaped from the implications of sacred writing. It lent itself to an efficient representation of sounds and enabled the Greeks to preserve intact a rich oral tradition. The ancient world troubled about sounds. (p. 53)

Maybe there's something to this. It is strange that Plato, the number one critic of the poetic tradition, should also be the main proponent for the use of structured conversation as a learning tool. Don't we have any ancients that thought that books could do something that the spoken word couldn't?

Gibbs: The Poetics of Mind, comments on ch. 5 (1994)

Most of chapter 5 of Gibbs' book is spent criticizing some rather uninteresting claims about metaphor, namely, the claim that they rely on preexisting similarity and the claim that comprehension moves through a process of finding and rejecting a literal reading before considering a metaphorical alternative. The chapter plods along without much reflection or analytical distance.


Gibbs vs. Sperber and Wilson
During a discussion of Searle's Speech Acts, Gibbs uses the opportunity to bring out his old point about the separation of process from product in theories of comprehension. He claims that pragmatic theories focus exclusively on products while making claims about processes as well (p. 228).

He also briefly considers relevance theory as a possible alternative in the section named "The metaphor-as-loose-talk view." "Loose talk" is a relevance-theoretic name for vague assertions, especially vague assertions that are just precise enough given the context.

Gibbs rejects that metaphors can be regarded as "loose talk" in this pragmatic sense because it

incorrectly assumes that that metaphors [...] obligatorily demand additional cognitive effort to be understood. Furthermore, the very notion of metaphor as loose talk presupposes that metaphorical language only resembles speaker's thoughts rather than being a direct reflection of ideas or concepts that are actually constituted by the speaker. (p. 232)

The second sentences obviously only constitutes an argument against relevance theory if one agrees that metaphors "reflect ideas." In any case, trying to explain meaning as relation between a thought—be it in terms of resemblance or identity—seems like a non-starter to me.

Bidirectional Metaphor
In the chapter on Max Black's theory ("The interactive view"), Gibbs briefly mentions that the metaphor PEOPLE ARE MACHINES is bidirectional or reversible (p. 238). This is followed by a generic reference to More Than Cool Reason, without any page number.

He explains this by saying that "different things get mapped" without getting any more into the issue.

Gibbs vs. Gentner
Gibbs sees the theories of Ortony and of Dedre Gentner as elaborations of Black's interaction theory. In particular, he suggests that they may be compatible (p. 245), unlike what Gentner seems to think. However, he rejects both on the grounds that none of them

is especially informative about metaphor understanding as an early on-line process, because they primarily focus on explaining the results, or late products, of that understanding. (p. 246)

He doesn't give any further evidence for this claim.

After thus having rejected the salience imbalance model and the structure-mapping model, he goes onto present Glucksberg's class inclusion model as a patch on this "problem" (p. 246-48).

He finds this model "appealing" for its focus on process (p. 247) but rejects it because "it might very well be the case that such metaphorical groupings [= Glucksberg's ad hoc concepts] already exist as part of our everyday conceptual structures" (p. 247). And of course, if one believes that assertion, one should go for cognitive metaphor theory rather than Glucksberg's picture.

Gibbs On Poetry and Freshness
In his presentation of the cognitive theory of metaphor, Gibbs finds himself in a strange two-way situation with respect to the freshness of metaphor:

The conceptual view of metaphor also explains why people find such great beauty and power in poetry and literary prose. Verse embellishes the more mundane ways of thinking about our worldly experiences. (p. 249-250)

In fact, cognitive metaphor does exactly the opposite: It explains the intelligibility of metaphor by assuming that there is nothing new in a metaphor. As Lakoff and Turner claims, poetry uses the same metaphors as everyday discourse.

If this were really true, it seems very difficult to explain why they would sometimes seem fresh, beautiful, and thought-provoking, while at other times mundane, flat, and uninteresting. Almost as an aside, Gibbs tries to do so by driving wedge in between the mapping and its instantiations:

The view of metaphor as conceptual structure is particularly valuable as a linguistic theory of metaphor because it suggests a difference between having a metaphorical mapping of two disparate domains already existing as a unit in one's conceptual system and the mental act of putting together the same metaphor for the first time. (p. 251; my graying out)

That's quite confusing given that the whole theory relies on metaphors to be unsurprising and effortless. In particular, does Gibbs mean "the same [conceptual] metaphor" or "the same metaphor[ical mapping]" in the last sentence? That makes quite a large difference for the theory.

This is partly, but only partly, cleared up later on the same page:

Of course, many linguistic metaphors specify new twists on some conventional conceptual metaphor and may require additional inferential processing to be properly understood. This additional inferential processing often operates on the products of earlier comprehension processes (i.e., is part of metaphor interpretation rather than comprehension per se). (p. 251)

So yet another distinction has to be introduced to save the theory, this time between "interpretation" and "comprehension per se." Again, this pushes to conceptual mapping to some background role where it virtually has no observable qualities.

Quotes from some reviews of Philosophy in the Flesh and More Than Cool Reason

Two quotes from Joseph Ulric Neisser's review (2001) of Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) in Language:

They [= Lakoff and Johnson] characterize basic metaphors as unconscious and automatic.A fairly rigid structural determinism ensues. (p. 167)

Like latter-day psychoanalysts, L & J spend several hundred pages unmasking the root metaphors which have dominated the minds of unwitting philosophers. (p. 167)

From Michael O'Donovan-Anderson's review of the same book (2000) in Review of Metaphysics:

Although they spend a great deal of time developing an "embodied realism," it is nothing like acceptable in its current formulation. (p. 943)

... their very strange and programmatic chapters on the history of philosophy do not constitute philosophical attention ...(p. 943)

From Richard Taylor's review (1991) of More Than Cool Reason (1989) in The Modern Language Review:

Next time, however, one can only hope that a style somewhat less irritatingly flat and awkward might be used. [...] Schoolbook strategies are even more out of place in so sophisticated an argument; now boys and girls: 'Let us look at the list of basic conceptual metaphors that we have encountered in this chapter.' (p. 653)

From Thomas Leddy's review of the same book (1990) in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism:

Unfortunately, individual theorists and their specific positions are not discussed. [...] It turns out that in a final chapter titled "More on Traditional Views" the various positions are in fact identified with actual theories of actual authors. [...] Yet in some cases the match is hard to see and in others it is incorrect. (p. 260)

Actually, the similarities between Black's position and Lakoff and Turner's are more striking than the differences. (p. 261)

We are told that death is night draws on the semantically autonomous concept of night which is grounded in what "we experience night to be" (p. 113), i.e., as "dark, cold, foreboding, and so on" (p. 113). Yet although it is difficult to conceive of a night that is not dark it is certainly not the case that nights are always cold and foreboding. The combination of dark, cold and foreboding seems like a fairy-tale, adventure story, or monster movie view of night. In short, although itself without temporal components, it seems to be connected with a type of narrative fiction. (p. 261)

Users of this chapter [ch. 3] should however carefully attend to the authors' cautionary note that this analysis "does not constitute a literary-critical treatment of the poem" and that it is only intended to be "a prerequisite to any such discussion" (p. 159).  (p. 261)