The Strange Logic of Metaphor

Geometry and the City-Man There is a famous moment in Plato’s Meno where Socrates encounters an unschooled slave boy who, upon questioning, proves to know geometry. Socrates takes him through a series of questions, each of which the boy is able to answer, eventually reaching the correct conclusions regarding the figures and forms Socrates has laid out in the dirt. It is the boy’s capacity for thinking geometrically, for employing abstract definitions and rules, that interests

The Phenomenology of meaning Cognitive theory is a process of examining our experience and its meaning in order to identify the cognitive operations we carry out to establish such meaning. Meaning is always established, in part or whole, via cognitive acts. Although the default operation for most cognitive theory is conception, we can see that there are other operations behind the meaning we experience. In perception, for example, we can identify at least two distinct opera

It amazes me sometimes that I have studied metaphors for three decades and have never asked the simplest questions. Metaphor is such a fascination and perplexing thing, once you notice it in every nook and cranny, that you can spend all of your time figuring out how it works. Since we see that we think metaphorically almost all of the time, we want to know: How does this odd form of thought work? And why does it happen this way and not that? And where does it come from? But i

The defining characteristic of metaphor is its conflation of two things. We think of one as the other. His career is flaming out. If we work hard, the project can hit its target. It was difficult, but I stood up to their criticisms. Careers, projects, self-regard understood as flames, arrows, standing up. This is an act of conflation, or it is nothing. We think about one thing as if it were another. We understand this moment in a career in a very specific way: it is a flame a

One of the fundamental insights concerning metaphor we have made over the past several decades is its "directionality." Metaphor exhibits a wild variety of forms that range across all human subjects, and yet there is one pattern that stands almost universally true: in metaphor, we think about more abstract things in terms of the more concrete. Meaning moves from the concrete to the abstract. Friends leave a party abruptly, after some awkward exchanges, and we wonder, Did they

From the very beginning (i.e., Metaphors We Live By), metaphor theory has recognized that metaphors seem to seek a greater understanding of abstract things. We do not normally use metaphors to understand concrete, physical, and perceptual dimensions of our experience. Instead, we use concrete structures, which Mark Turner calls "little stories," to make sense of things in the distinctly human world--psychology, social life, relationships, history, power, authority, ethics, va