The Question Of The Relationship Between The Ultimate Reality Of The Universe, And Its Proximate Reality As Experienced By Us, Is Apt To Boggle The Mind. Nevertheless, The Hindu School Of Philosophy, Known As Advaita Vedanta, Tries To Render It Comprehensible At The Level Of The Individual Through Everyday Analogies Like Mistaking A Piece Of Seashell For A Piece Of Silver.

Current research findings on metaphor in language and thought may be interpreted as producing a paradox of metaphor; that is, most metaphor is not processed metaphorically by a cross-domain mapping involving some form of comparison. This paradox can be resolved by attending to one crucial aspect of metaphor in communication: the question whether metaphor is used as deliberately metaphorical or not. It is likely that most deliberate metaphor is processed metaphorically (by comparison), as opposed (...) to most nondeliberate metaphor, which may be assumed to be typically not processed metaphorically (that is, by categorization). This resolves the paradox of metaphor because it suggests that all “metaphor in communication” (all deliberate metaphor) is processed metaphorically. Detailed comments are offered on the notion of metaphor deliberateness and on the nature of a three-dimensional model of metaphor in discourse involving metaphor in language, thought, and communication. (shrink)

This paper has two interconnected themes. First, it is a study of metaphor of love in classical Chinese poetry. Second, Josef Stern’s semantic account on metaphor interpretation will be explored. By analyzing the common grounds and remaining differences in Chinese and English, I will try to challenge the view that metaphor is simply a function of semantics, specifically the analogy between metaphors and demonstratives. I will argue that metaphorical interpretation is not solely a semantic matter. With regard (...) to metaphor in classical Chinese poetry, one of the pragmatic factors, Yi Xiang (the cultural image) should also be taken into consideration. (shrink)

How does science work? _Making Truth: Metaphor in Science_ argues that most laypeople, and many scientists, do not have a clear understanding of how metaphor relates to scientific thinking. With stunning clarity, and bridging the worlds of scientists and nonscientists, Theodore L. Brown demonstrates the presence and the power of metaphorical thought. He presents a series of studies of scientific systems, ranging from the atom to current topics in chemistry and biology such as protein folding, chaperone proteins, and (...) global warming. These case studies provide the basis for far-reaching conclusions about science as an intellectual and social practice and about the nature of scientific truth. (shrink)

“Neural coding” is a popular metaphor in neuroscience, where objective properties of the world are communicated to the brain in the form of spikes. Here I argue that this metaphor is often inappropriate and misleading. First, when neurons are said to encode experimental parameters, the neural code depends on experimental details that are not carried by the coding variable. Thus, the representational power of neural codes is much more limited than generally implied. Second, neural codes carry information only (...) by reference to things with known meaning. In contrast, perceptual systems must build information from relations between sensory signals and actions, forming an internal model. Neural codes are inadequate for this purpose because they are unstructured and therefore unable to represent relations. Third, coding variables are observables tied to the temporality of experiments, whereas spikes are timed actions that mediate coupling in a distributed dynamical system. The coding metaphor tries to fit the dynamic, circular, and distributed causal structure of the brain into a linear chain of transformations between observables, but the two causal structures are incongruent. I conclude that the neural coding metaphor cannot provide a valid basis for theories of brain function, because it is incompatible with both the causal structure of the brain and the representational requirements of cognition. (shrink)

Fictionalist theories of metaphor hold that metaphorical utterances aim at fictionality. Fictionalism successfully explains speaker judgments about the truth and aptness of metaphorical utterances, and it also accurately predicts the data around metaphor and autistic individuals (who have deficits in both imaginative play and metaphor comprehension). But fictionalism is not a viable theory of metaphor, despite these merits, because of (what I call) the problem of semantic entailment: semantic entailments that are normally valid fail under metaphorical (...) interpretation, but fictionalism predicts otherwise. I argue this to ultimately show that theorists of metaphor should reject the linguistic side of the fictionalist story; but this leaves open the possibility of accepting psychological fictionalism, i.e., the hypothesis that fiction/make-believe is central to the cognitive processing of metaphor. Coupling psychological fictionalism with a different theory of metaphorical meaning and content (such as contextualism) promises to keep the explanatory upsides of traditional fictionalism while avoiding the problem of semantic entailment. (shrink)

The theory that all processes in the universe are computational is attractive in its promise to provide an understandable theory of everything. I want to suggest here that this pancomputationalism is not sufficiently clear on which problem it is trying to solve, and how. I propose two interpretations of pancomputationalism as a theory: I) the world is a computer and II) the world can be described as a computer. The first implies a thesis of supervenience of the physical over computation (...) and is thus reduced ad absurdum. The second is underdetermined by the world, and thus equally unsuccessful as theory. Finally, I suggest that pancomputationalism as metaphor can be useful. – At the Paderborn workshop in 2008, this paper was presented as a commentary to the relevant paper by Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic " Info-Computationalism and Philosophical Aspects of Research in Information Sciences". (shrink)

This paper offers a review of the argumentation-theoretical literature on metaphor in argumentative discourse. Two methodologies are combined: the pragma-dialectical theory is used to study the argumentative functions attributed to metaphor, and distinctions made in metaphor theory and the three-dimensional model of metaphor are used to compare the conceptions of metaphor taken as starting point in the reviewed literature. An overview is provided of all types of metaphors distinguished and their possible argumentative functions. The study (...) reveals that not all possible argumentative functions of metaphor have been taken into account, such as the role of conventional direct metaphors in standpoint and starting point. Novel direct metaphor as part of an analogy argument has received most attention, while indirect metaphor can constitute argumentative moves as well, such as the introduction of a standpoint, starting point or connection premise. The overview also shows that certain combinations of variables seem to be impossible of unlikely to occur. These results have a bearing on the analysis of metaphors in argumentative discourse and show the omission in current studies of metaphor. Being aware of these dimensions of metaphor ánd of its potential in argumentation would enrich argumentation studies and metaphor studies alike. (shrink)

Aiming to circumvent metaphor-prone properties of natural language, Chapman, Kim, Susskind, and Anderson (2009) recently reported evidence for morally induced activation of the levator labii region (manifest as an upper lip raise and a nose wrinkle), also implicated in responding to bad tastes and contaminants. Here we point out that the probative value of this type of evidence rests on a particular (and heavily contested) account of facial movements, one which holds them to be “expressions” or automatic read-outs of (...) internal states. We also observe a largely neglected difference between morally induced disgust and moral disgust proper, arguing that data such as Chapman et al.’s (2009) provide evidence only for the former. (shrink)

The acknowledged difficulty and even impossibility of finding a literal paraphrase for most metaphors is offered by [Donald] Davidson1 as evidence that there is nothing to be paraphrased - that a sentence says nothing metaphorically that it does not say literally, but rather functions differently, inviting comparisons and stimulating thought. But paraphrase of many literal sentences also is exceedingly difficult, and indeed we may seriously question whether any sentence can be translated exactly into other words in the same or any (...) other language. Let's agree, though, that literal paraphrase of metaphor is on the whole especially hard. That is easily understood since the metaphorical application of terms has the effect, and usually the purpose, of drawing significant boundaries that cut across ruts worn by habit, of picking out new relevant kinds for which we have no simple and familiar literal descriptions. We must note in passing, though, that the metaphorical application may nevertheless be quite clear. For just as inability to define "desk" is compatible with knowing which articles are desks, so inability to paraphrase a metaphorical term is compatible with knowing what it applies to, And as I have remarked elsewhere,2 whether a man is metaphorically a Don Quixote or a Don Juan is perhaps easier to decide than whether he is literally a schizoid or a paranoiac. · 1. In "What Metaphors Mean," Critical Inquiry 5 : 31-47.· 2. In "Stories upon Stories; or, Reality on Tiers," delivered at the conference Levels of Reality, in Florence, Italy, September 1978. Nelson Goodman, emeritus professor of philosophy at Harvard, has written The Structure of Appearance; Fact, Fiction, and Forecast; Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols; Problems and Projects; and, most recently, Ways of Worldmaking. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "The Status of Style" , "Twisted Tales; or, Story, Study, and Symphony" , and "The Telling and the Told". (shrink)

Metaphor is commonly taken to be an elliptical simile. This article offers a rational reconstruction of two types of simile theories of metaphor: reductive and non-reductive. Careful analysis shows the differences between these theories, but in the end, neither does the explanatory work it sets out to do. In assimilating metaphor to simile and simile to literal comparison, the reductive simile theory obscures what is most important to an account of metaphor: an account of what it (...) is to interpret a bit of discourse metaphorically. The reductive simile theory fails because the reduction to literal comparison fails. The non-reductive simile theory faces most of the same problems that undermine the simile theory, particularly problems generating a corresponding simile when the metaphor contains quantificational terms and other linguistic complexities. Analysis of the non-reductive simile theory highlights the troublesome assumption (inherent in all simile theories) that metaphor and simile play the same linguistic role: making or prompting us to make comparisons. In both guises, the simile theory mistakes the task of explaining what a metaphor means with how metaphor (in general) has meaning; it confuses explanation with explication. In diagnosing and arguing against the simile theory, this article sets out a framework for understanding the difference between literal and metaphorical interpretation. (shrink)

This paper analyses the use of metaphor in discourses around the “superweed” Palmer amaranth. Most weed scientists associated with the US public agricultural extension system dismiss the term superweed. However, together with the media, they indirectly encourage aggressive control practices by actively diffusing the framing of herbicide resistant Palmer amaranth as an existential threat that should be eradicated at any cost. We use argumentative discourse analysis to better understand this process. We analyze a corpus consisting of reports, policy briefs, (...) and press releases produced by state extension services, as well as articles from professional and popular magazines and newspapers quoting extension specialists and/or public sector weed scientists or agronomists. We show how the superweed discourse is powered by negative metaphors, and legitimizes aggressive steps to eradicate the weed. This discourse reinforces the farmers’ techno-optimism master frame, contributes to deskilling of farmers and sidelines ethical concerns. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhen faced with hardship, how do we emotionally appraise the situation? Although many factors contribute to our reasoning about hardships, in this article we focus on the role of linguistic metaphor in shaping how we cope. In five experiments, we find that framing a person’s cancer situation as a “battle” encourages people to believe that that person is more likely to feel guilty if they do not recover than framing the same situation as a “journey” does. Conversely, the “journey” (...) frame is more likely to encourage the inference that the person can make peace with their situation than the “battle” frame. We rule out lexical priming as an explanation for this effect and examine the generalizability of these findings to individual differences across participants and to a different type of hardship—namely, an experience with depression. Finally, we examine the language participants produced after encountering one of these metaphors, and we find tendencies to repeat and extend the metaphors encountered.... (shrink)

The book will serve as an excellent graduate-level textbook in cognitive psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence.

This paper argues that the semantic facts about ‘because’ are best explained via a metaphorical treatment of metaphysical explanation that treats causal explanation as explanation par excellence. Along the way, it defends a commitment to a unified causal sense of ‘because’ and offers a proprietary explanation of grounding skepticism. With the causal metaphor account of metaphysical explanation on the table, an extended discussion of the relationship between conceptual structure and metaphysics ends with a suggestion that the semantic facts about (...) ‘because’ tell against grounding-causation unity. (shrink)

On the relevance-theoretic approach outlined in this paper, linguistic metaphors are not a natural kind, and ―metaphor‖ is not a theoretically important notion in the study of verbal communication. Metaphorical interpretations are arrived at in exactly the same way as literal, loose and hyperbolic interpretations: there is no mechanism specific to metaphors, and no interesting generalisation that applies only to them. In this paper, we defend this approach in detail by showing how the same inferential procedure applies to utterances (...) at both ends of the literal-loose-metaphorical continuum, and how both literal and metaphorical utterances may create poetic effects. (shrink)

Martin Davies; V*—Idiom and Metaphor, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 83, Issue 1, 1 June 1983, Pages 67–86, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelia.

In this article, we argue for the need to further incorporate the study of metaphor with the newest tendencies within cognitive science. We do so by presenting an ecological view of cognition as a skull-and-body-transcending activity that is deeply entangled with the environment. Grounded in empirical examples we present and examine four claims fleshing out this ecological perspective on cognition and metaphor: (a) metaphor is a product of an organism-environment-system, rather than merely a product of an inner (...) mental process, (b) metaphoric meaning is relational. It emerges from projections of structure between a living organism and its perceived or imagined environment, (c) underlying metaphor is the notion of metaphoricity, which is a scalar value involving a doubleness in experience, and (d) metaphoricity relies on experiential affordances that can be directly perceived or felt in the environment. Overall, we propose that metaphor should be understood and thought about in terms of affordances rather than mental ability. Studying metaphor as affordances is to focus on metaphor as part of our active doings that equally involve cognitive, social, and linguistic dimensions. Within an ecological framework, there is no contradiction between studying the details of linguistic, multimodal, and embodied behavior in situational contexts while considering the cognitive dimensions of this behavior too since cognition is re-conceptualized as constituted by actions in an environment. (shrink)

What I am calling for is not as radically new as it may sound to ears that are still tuned to positivist frequencies. A very large part of what we value as our cultural monuments can be thought of as metaphoric criticism of metaphor and the characters who make them. The point is perhaps most easily made about the major philosophies. Stephen Pepper has argued, in World Hypotheses,1 that the great philosophies all depend on one of the four "root (...) metaphors," formism, mechanism, organicism, and contextualism, and they are great precisely because they have so far survived the criticism of rival metaphors. Each view of the totality of things claims supremacy, but none has been able to annihilate the others. They all thus survive as still plausible, pending further criticism through further philosophical inquiry. In this view, even the great would-be literalists like Hobbes and Locke are finally metaphorists—simply committed to another kind of metaphor, one that to them seems literal. Without grossly oversimplifying we could say that the whole work of each philosopher amounts to an elaborate critique of the inadequacy of all other philosophers' metaphors. What is more, the very existence of a tradition of a small group of great philosophies is a sign that hundreds of lesser metaphors for the life of mankind have been tested in the great philosophical—that is, critical—wars and found wanting. · 1. World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence . In Concept and Quality: A World Hypothesis , Pepper suggests that "the purposive act" is a fifth root metaphor. Wayne C. Booth's is the author of, among other works, Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Kenneth Burke's Way of Knowing" , "Irony and Pity Once Again: Thais Revisited" , "M. H. Abrams: Historian as Critic, Critic as Pluralist" , "'Preserving the Exemplar': Or, How Not to Dig our Own Graves" , "Notes and Exchanges" , with Wright Morris: "The Writing of Organic Fiction: A Conversation" , and with Robert E. Streeter, W. J. T. Mitchell: "Sheldon Sacks 1930-1979". (shrink)

Willpower is a metaphor that is widespread in both common usage and expert literature across disciplines. This paper looks into willpower as a ‘metaphor we live by’, analyzing and exploring the consequences of the tacit information content of the willpower metaphor for agentive self-understanding and efficacy. In addition to contributing to stigma associated with self-control failures, the metaphor causally contributes to self-control failures by obscuring available self-control strategies and instructing agents to superfluous self-control efforts.

This article discusses some of the claims of the earlier and later versions of the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor (CTM) and addresses some of the criticism that has been leveled against it. It is argued that much of this criticism arises from common misconceptions as to the real claims made by the theory. However, CTM is still in need of further exploration and empirical support. In this connection, we identify some areas where research is still needed and supply our (...) own developments. We argue for a more complex classification of metaphor types, which takes into account various complementary taxonomic perspectives, including the nature of source and target and the genericity and complexity of the metaphoric operation. We also explore metaphor in relation to cognitive prominence and conceptual interaction issues. Finally, we deal with the problem of constraints on metaphor and make a proposal for three complementary kinds of constraint. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this article we investigate structural differences between “literary” metaphors created by renowned poets and “nonliterary” ones imagined by non-professional authors from Katz et al.’s 1988 corpus. We provide data from quantitative narrative analyses of the altogether 464 metaphors on over 70 variables, including surface features like metaphor length, phonological features like sonority score, or syntactic-semantic features like sentence similarity. In a first computational study using machine learning tools we show that Katz et al.’s literary metaphors can be successfully (...) discriminated from their nonliterary ones on the basis of response measures, in particular the ratings for familiarity, ease of interpretation, semantic relatedness, and comprehensibility. A second computational study then shows that the classifier can reliably detect and predict between-group differences on the basis of five QNA features generalizing from a... (shrink)

Previous studies claim there are few olfactory metaphors cross-linguistically, especially compared to metaphors originating in the visual and auditory domains. We show olfaction can be a source for metaphor and metonymy in a lesser-described language that has rich lexical resources for talking about odors. In Seri, an isolate language of Mexico spoken by indigenous hunter-gatherers, we find a novel metaphor for emotion never previously described – “anger stinks”. In addition, distinct odor verbs are used metaphorically to distinguish volitional (...) vs. non-volitional states-of-affairs. Finally, there is ample olfactory metonymy in Seri, especially prevalent in names for plants, but also found in names for insects and artifacts. This calls for a re-examination of better-known languages for the overlooked role olfaction may play in metaphor and metonymy. The Seri language illustrates how valuable data from understudied languages can be in highlighting novel ways by which people conceptualize themselves and their world. (shrink)

In standard Relevance Theory, hyperbole and metaphor are categorized together as loose uses of language, on a continuum with approximations, category extensions and other cases of loosening/broadening of meaning. Specifically, it is claimed that there are no interesting differences between hyperbolic and metaphorical uses. In recent work, we have set out to provide a more fine-grained articulation of the similarities and differences between hyperbolic and metaphorical uses and their relation to literal uses. We have defended the view that hyperbolic (...) use involves a shift of magnitude along a dimension which is intrinsic to the encoded meaning of the hyperbole vehicle, while metaphor involves a multi-dimensional qualitative shift away from the encoded meaning of the metaphor vehicle. In this article, we present three experiments designed to test the predictions of this analysis, using a variety of tasks (paraph. (shrink)