Abstract

This paper is an attempt to understand metaphors in themselves and in our cognitive economy. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) characterized metaphors in terms of processes of analogical transference. Metaphors, so considered, appear to respond to a natural tendency of the mind that would be common to both necessary and inductive reasoning and, apparently, even to insane ones. However, it is important to understand these analogical transference procedures as a whole and see the extent to which metaphors respond to the model, comparing thereby the similitudes and differences in the various cases. I first analyse necessary and inductive transference processes coming to a common formal model for both. I then contemplate the extent to which or in what way metaphors fit the model. In this second part, I notice some difficulties in Steinhart’s understanding of metaphorical analogies in terms of shared functional structures, as well as with an alternative proposal by Glucksberg, who sees them as having a dual role as abstract categories beyond their specific use as particular terms. This leads me to explore a different path along Wittgenstein's Rule Following Considerations and the Idea of Family Resemblance. The resulting position allows a reformulation of analogical transference by metaphors, keeping to the proposed cognitive model common to necessary and inductive transference procedures. Additionally, it provides an alternative explanation to the usual account in Steinhart, and also in Lakoff & Johnson and like-minded positions, of why the mapping processes by metaphors work.