essay metaphors we live

Review of George Lakoff Mark Johnson (reviewed by Peter Norvig, UC Berkeley) Wayne Booth [Booth] has written that, judging from the recent jump in interest in metaphor, if we extrapolate to the year 2039, there will be more students of metaphor than people. Linguists, philosophers, and psychologists have been quick to jump on the metaphorical bandwagon, but so far AI researchers have not. Lakoff and Johnson's ``Metaphors We Live By'' (henceforth ``MWLB'') is an important contribution to the study of metaphor that presents a number of controversial points. Investigating these points provides a good backdrop for presenting the state-of-the-art of metaphor in AI work. First of all, ``Metaphors We Live By'' is an accessible and thought-provoking source of examples demonstrating the range of metaphor in everyday language and thought. This is not a technical book; it is aimed at a general audience. There is very little terminology, nary a greek letter, and no lists of `starred' ungrammatical sentences. Instead, the arguments are stated simply, and are illustrated by examples which are usually phrases one has heard, or at least could imagine someone actually saying. The examples show that metaphor is not just a rhetorical device of poets. It is metaphor to speak of arguments in terms of battles, as in ``I demolished his argument'' or ``his claims are indefensible.'' It is metaphor to use spatial prepositions to describe non-spatial relationships, as with ``Harry is in love'' or ``Harry is in the Elks'' or ``Harry is in trouble.'' It is metaphor to personify, as when we say ``Cancer finally caught up with him.'' After demonstrating the pervasiveness of metaphor, the second contribution of Lakoff and Johnson is in showing a small number of highly productive metaphor schemata that underly much of language understanding. As an example, one particularly pervasive and productive.
For printer friendly version, click below (downloads automatically) Personal summary of metaphors we live by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson 1980. London, University of Chicago Press A personal summary This highly influential book was written after the two authors met, in 1979, with a joint interest in metaphor, and a shared concern about the way Western philosophy and linguistics treats meaning (they felt it had little to do with what “people find meaningful in their lives”). This is a very brief summary of a 175 page book. There is no substitute for reading the original! The focus of the book is on the subconscious conceptual structures that govern the way we think, act, communicate and live. The authors’ premise is that these conceptual structures, although generally present only on a subconscious level, can be explored through the medium of language. They use a lot of linguistic research evidence, which shows that most of the ordinary conceptual structures revealed in our language are metaphorical in nature. It is important to recognise the difference between these metaphors which structure our conceptual systems, and what might be called “poetic metaphors”. It is also very important to recognise that Lakoff and Johnson are not suggesting that these “ordinary” metaphors are simply devices of language. On the contrary, they propose that human thinking and sense-making relies on metaphor, which is then revealed in language. Structural metaphors An examination is made of the structured and systematic way that metaphorical concepts work, with a number of examples (such as “Rational Argument is War” and “Time is money”) to demonstrate the “entailments” (ie the systematic relationships between metaphors and their subcategories – for example “Time is money” entails that “Time is a limited resource”, which entails that “Time is a valuable commodity” etc). The authors are.
In this book written for the layman, linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson cogently argue that metaphor is integral, not peripheral to language and understanding. Furthermore, metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. (p. 3)The authors adopt a broad definition of metaphor, examine common phrases for metaphorical interpretation, and offer a classification system of metaphor. For example, orientational metaphors are found in our ordinary language and are part of the spatial organization of our lives. When one says, He dropped dead or He's at the peak of health, one is using the orientational metaphor that we live by: Health and life are up; sickness and death are down. This orientation is not arbitrary; the authors point out that one lies down when one is ill.Other types of metaphors categorized by the authors are structural and ontological (e.g., making a non-entity into an entity: We need to combat inflation, or setting a boundary on a non-entity: He's coming out of the coma ). The authors also differentiate metaphor from other figures of speech, such as metonymy, which relies more completely on substitution: The ham sandwich wants his check. The second half of the book address issues more philosophical in nature, such as theories of truth and how we understand the world, including the myths of objectivism, subjectivism, and experientialism. These theories are reviewed with metaphor in mind. For example, objectivism relies on the separation of man from the environment and the subsequent mastery over the environment. Hence objectivism is rife with metaphors which confirm such ideas as knowledge is power. The authors conclude by stating that metaphors provide the only ways to perceive and.