Brugman raises five questions re Lakoff's IH article: 1) he appears to use image-schematic and topological in an equivalent sense--are they? 2) How much plasticity does an image schematic structure have? 3) When must source and target properties be preserved? When are properties created? 4) Are properties mapped transitively? 5) What mappings are preferred? She also focuses in on whether some concepts can be entirely structured by metaphorical mappings.
Chernus' article is one of the core arguments of his book Dr. Strangegod: On the Symbolic Meaning of Nuclear Weapons. He points out that we do imagine nuclear war (or at least the experts do) and that the problem is not that nuclear holocaust is unimaginable but in the ways that it is being imagined. The failure to recognize the imaginative qualities in technostrategic discourse stems from the Objectivist oppression of imagination, myth and fantasy in the names of 'literal' truth and 'scientific' reality.
Chilton has a wide knowledge of contemporary theories of metaphor in semantics from Lakoff and Johnson to Brown and Levinson, Schank and Abelson, and Schonberg. He spends considerable time working out an aesthetic formulation of the logic of militarization metaphors, and then discusses the role this sort of metaphoric reasoning plays in legitimizing nuclear policy. The writing is sometimes dense and theoretically daunting, but he begins to expose the systemacity of nuclear language.
Cohn decimates the rational veneer of the defense intellectual, exposing the roots of the cognitive dissonance between being a caring family member and generally decent human being one one hand and a cold, calculating planner of hypothetical nuclear destruction on the other. She has a brilliant analysis of what learning to speak the language of technostrategic discourse does: it provides a Nietzchean 'cognitive mastery' over the catastropic potentialities of nuclear weaponry and war. Also includes observations on the displacement of human survivability from the center of the discourse and the replacement concept of weapons system survivablity.
Dyson has two superb moves. In his stunning opening chapters, he observes that he lives in two worlds: at work, in the world of the warriors; at home and church, in the world of victims. If there is to be an effective debate on nuclear issues there must evolve a common language. With his unique vantage point as respected nuclear physicist and peace activist, he brings considerable conceptual acuity to the debate. Second, he has a remarkable observation about the ways in which group behavior makes possible ethical atrocities which no one member of the group would engage in alone. The individual does not go to war alone--war is a group activity. However, he does quite push this point as far as I'd like.
The core of Foucault's retelling of European history is in his analysis of power from pages 94-98. To summarize: 1) power is not a thing acquired, seized or shared but exercised from innumerable points; 2) power is not exterior to other relationships (economic, knowledge, sexual), but is immanent in them; 3) power comes from below, and is not something possessed by the ruler and lacking in the ruled--there is no binary and all encommpassing opposition between rulers and ruled; 4) while power is never exercised without aims or objectives, it does not necessarily result from individual choice or decision--while its logic may be perfectly clear and its aims decipherable, it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them, and few who can be said to have even formulated them; 5) where there is power there is resistance, but there is no locus of great Refusal, no one soul of revolt which can be said to be the source of all rebellions-- resistance, like power, is local in origin and is transformed and expressed thorough associations, institutions and groups.
He intends this radical redefinition as an escape from the system of the Law and Sovereign of political thought. The question regarding sex is not: What law presided over sexual behavior and what was said about it? but "In a specific type of discourse on sex, in a specific form of extortion of truth, appearing historically and in specific places (around the child's body, apropos of women's sex, in connection with practices restricting births, and so on), what were the most immediate, the most local power relations at work?" (p.97) It is only with power conceived in terms of multiple force relations that sexuality may be understood.
Despite its appetizing title, the lead-off article to the special issue on language and war is rather sparse. Galtung does have interesting chart titles "langauages as carriers of cosmology" comparing European, Chinese and Japanese conceptions of space, time, knowledge, and person-nature, person-person, person-transpersonal relationships. There may be more information available on this as he is summarizing a previous article.
In this article Gentner argues that scientific analogies and metaphors both rest on strucutre mappings between domains of knowledge and hence are more alike than different. She distinguishes the two however on the bases of specificity, clarity, richness, systemacity/abstractness, scope and validity. The most important feature of a scientific metaphor is that the base domain be well understood and fully specified. To be clear scientific analogies tend have isomorphic mappings, while expressive metaphors have one to many mappings. Richness has to do with how many predicate mappings are made, and systemacity is interrelatedness of the mapped predicates-- how tightly constrained by the analogy the mapped predicates are. A scientific analogy should apply to a number of cases to be useful (scope) and it should lead to a degree of correct inferences (validity). Her examples (Galileo's earth/ship falling stone analogy, Eliot's voices as dried grass in The Hollow Men and Shakespeare's "It is the east and Juliet is the sun!" metaphor) are excellent for sorting out what she means by these criteria. A good, uncomplicated but deep article.
An anthology with some very revealing case studies, including Gentner & Gentner on structure mapping in mental models of electricity and Hutchins on measurement and the bird's eye-view of western navigation v. the micronesian analogical method.
This is the key article which lays out the theory of structure mapping in analogy which later is picked up and transformed into conceptual mappings of metaphors in Lakoff and Johnson's work.
Gumpel's work is interesting in that it tries to blend a phenomenological linguistics (qua Ingarden & Heidegger) with a Piercian semiotic analysis, but her work is made nearly utterly inaccessible due to her obtuse and polemical writing style. Nonetheless, the preface, introduction and especially the bibliography make interesting reading.
Abstract reads: "To gain a better sense of the metaphorical nature of the scientific research paper, the author reviewed 89 journal articles taken from the top 400 most-cited documents in the Science Citation Index database for the period 1945-1988. Metaphorical constructions were found in a variety of forms: conceptual models, experimental designs, technical analogies, standard technical names, conventional figurative expressions, and even original figurative language normally associated with more-literary writing. Examples are given for each mode of metaphor."
Hausman's book treats much of the recent history of analytic thought about metaphor from Bearsley and Black through Searle and Boyd. He takes as his starting points the questions of how creativity can be irreducible, unpredictible and not deducible, and how metaphors can create their own referents. Very thorough but technical writing.
In brief, the paper argues (in an at least vaguely-Lakoffian manner) that the language of American law is moving from its traditionally-strong bias in favor of visually-evocative metaphors towards a certain preference for aurally-evocative metaphors. It goes on to suggest a number of cultural, sociological and phenomenological reasons for this shift. (annotation by Hibbits).
An excellent piece regarding the effects of the 'nuclearization' of language. Well researched data from the mouths of strategists. Includes observations on weapons life cycle, male narcissism, Humanizing damage, and strategic terminology. Hook rejects the view of metaphor as mere common euphemisms, investigating instead "how they contribute to the maintenence of the nuclear political system....In this case, the danger of nuclear war may be obfuscated instead of highlighted, precluded from thought instead of thought about, and accepted as normal instead of an aberration." (p.68)
This wonderful article tackles some important questions about the bias implicit in western culture and rationality toward measurement. The article focuses on conceptual differences between Micronesian navigation and western navigation, pointing out how the western bias toward measurement and a bird's eye view kept anthropologists from understanding the Micronesian's account of thier navigational techniques. Hutchins also has a book in the Harvard Press CogSci series (Culture and Inference: A Trobriand Case Study).
Johnson-Laird is a British cognitive psychologist (at the University of Sussex in 83) whose writing is sharper than a tack. This book is both incisive and insightful and is a must read to do work on the cognitive science of logic and how we learn to handle propositional inferences. He outlines a number of experiments he and colleagues have performed which argue against a view of the mind which reduces all mental opeerations to a propositional logic and also against image-based accountings for arguments about the formation of propositional logic, including work that has been done exploring wheter propositions arise from analogies with Euler circles and Venn diagrams. Instead he claims that propostional reasoning rests on knowledge representations he calls mental models which are spatial tableaus. A good strong critic of Fodor and other nativist- rationalists who can deal with them in terms of their own theories.
Kovecses' work is an extension of case study #2 in Lakoff's WFDT. He works with the emotions for anger, fear, pride, respect, and romatic love. He begins to tackle some fairly important issues about personhood via the container, object and physical force metaphors in chapters 9 and 10.
This is an excellent introductory work for use in English classes. The most interesting analyses are at the end of the book when the authors discuss proverbs. How is that an expression which seems to have no explicit connection with the present situation can apply to it? The answer lies in the image-schematic structure of the proverb and the present situation. The GENERAL IS SPECIFIC metaphor then extends the proverbial situation to stand for the general kind of situation we are presently experiencing (ie, between a rock and a hard place). The other development is the analysis of the GREAT CHAIN metaphor where humans are seen as the highest order things which have all the attributes of lower order thinggs such as animals, plants, complex objects, and natural physical things.
Levin summarizes his view as different from other theories on metaphor in holding (1) that the metaphoric expression is to be taken literally and (2) accepting the epistemological consequences that follow from this literality (p. 4). Typical approaches avoid the literality problem by supposing that the deviant metaphoric language translates into actual literal language which can refer truthfully to the actual world. Instead Levin argues that metaphors create metaphoric worlds in which they have literal and true referents, and this literalness of conception is what is at the core of how poetic metaphor works. He proceeds to attempt to distinguish his theory from those of Lakoff and Johnson, Donald Davidson, and Paul Riceour using (1) and (2) above. He argues that L& J, in treating almost all language as metaphorical, have made a move of questionable validity (p. 11) as many of their examples of metaphors have become entirely lexicalized. Thus Levin argues the fact that we do ordinarily speak of time as a resource does not require us to conceive of time as a resource, as conventionalized metaphors do not cause us to conceive of anything new. By contrast, poetic metaphor does--it causes us to imagine a metaphoric world in which "trees actually do weep." Thus Lakoff and Johnson do not satisfy Levin's assertion that conceptual metaphors are to be taken literally. Similarly, he distinguishes his theory from Davidson's in pointing out that Davidson, while asserting that metaphors are to be taken literally, argues it is their "patent falsity" that instigates a process in the reader to construe them as metaphorical and divine their truth-value by reconstructing the poetic intent. In addition to pointing out problems with the notion of "patent falsity," Levin argues that Davidson's account also robs poetic metaphors of their ability to create metaphoric worlds, as ultimately the truth-value (the meaning) of the metaphor has to do with the hearer's cognitive reconstruction of the poet's has to do with the words relation with the actual world. Poetry, Levin argues, is an attempt to describe literally extraordinary experiences (such as that of sublime beauty). Naturally, ordinary language is not adequate to such experiences, and thus a successful poetic metaphor brings us a conception of a metaphoric world to which the words are literally true.
Liebert's work on German language metaphors closely parallels Lakoff and Johnson's theory. An excellent German language introduction to the study of cognitive linguistics.
MacCormac has an interesting attack on L& J in chapter 3, essentially claiming their position for his version of a modified Objectivism, while simultaneously refuting it. He claims (1) they have an emergence basic metaphor (as contrasted with his computational metaphor), (2) their refutations of Objectivism are non-refutations since no Objectivist actually holds these positions, (3) their position necessarily collapses into linguistic relativism when they claim all language is metaphorical. Hence, he tries to save the literal/metaphorical distinction--defining the literal as the ordinary use of language. A metaphor uoon his view, is a metaphor more by virtue of its apparent dissimilarities than its innovative similarities. However, he readily admits that his project is caught in a circular paradox between the necessary and inescapable use of basic metaphors in all surface language and his belief in underlying Chomskyian deep structures of syntactical truth relations (which he thinks are ametaphorical).
An exploration at tracking a dissonant voice in the nuclear arms debate. Includes a remarkable passage where the effects of being co-opting by using the language and metaphors of the dominant 'technostrategic' voice in the debate is discussed. Effectiveness and legitimacy are contrasted with the pressures for a new and nurturing voice in the debate.
An anthology of mixed--but sometimes quite excellent--value: "On taking metaphor literally," FT. Moore. "Metaphor and Cognitive Structure," Roger Tourangeau. Understanding literary metaphors, Stein Haugom Olsen. "Metaphor as Synergy," Micheal Apter. "Friedrich Nietzsche: The Uses and Abuses of Metaphor," Paul Cantor. "Metaphor in Science," J. Martin and R. Harre. "Are Scientific Analogies Metaphors?" Dedre Gentner. "The Metaphorical Plot," Patricia Parker. Articles are generally written clearly and are uncomplicated.
Contains everything in the first edition and then some. Excellent article by George Lakoff on the contemporary theory of metaphor.
This incredible book examines how in highly complex systems such as a nuclear reactor or a research lab, the interaction of multiple component failures can cause normal (or system) accident, which can be disaster when the systems are not just complex and interactive but tightly coupled Tight coupling is characteristic of systems like the nuclear power plant or air traffic without much slack or alternative ways of fixing something--while the research lab without production pressures, deadlines and schedules is loosely coupled. Perrow's book is extraordinarily rich in detailed examples of accidents in the nuclear power industry, the petrochecmical industry, the airplane and air traffic industry, ship accidents, modifying the ecosystem (dams, quakes, lakes, and mines), the space program, biotechnology and the nuclear weapons industries. This is an example of the best sort of empirical work where the theory simply leaps forward from the detailed presentation of data. Then, in summing up his work, Perrow uses his analysis to pose serious questions not just about the social benefits of high-risk technologies, but about the rationality of risk assessment. Is it right to assess risk in terms of bare numbers and statistics (as the professional risk analysts often do), or does the fact that ordinary people consistently and reliably assess risk differently than the experts suggest that the experts might be overlooking something? This is the old debate about the usefulness of expert knowledge from Plato's Protagoras--are we to place blind faith in the expert possessor of the expert knowledge? Can an expert be wrong? Much of the evidence from cognitive psychology--and some of the best work on risk assessment (such as the Slovic and Fischhoff work Perrow cites)--recognizes that ordinary people reason differently than experts, and the difference is reliable, numerically meaureable and predictable, and perhaps explainable. But it is explainable only in terms which do not lend themselves easily to numbers. Instead, they are explainable only in terms of a thick description (Geertz) as opposed to the thin quantitative descriptions of the experts. This suggests to Perrow and myself that there is more than one kind of rational assessment--the absolute and objective rationality of the experts, achieved by standing outside the problem, a bounded (or limited) rationality which, after admitting our cognitive abilities are limited, suggests that the experts' numbers need to be supplemented with appropriate heuristics to overcome these deficiencies, and social or cultural rationality which takes into account the messy and hard to describe logic of our ordinary reasoning and the limits on our cognitive abilities (pp. 316- 323). The former two types, Perrow suggests, are thin rationalities--only the third is a thick rationality.
The 1991 Persian Gulf War dramatically punctuated the importance of metaphor to our everyday life and our reasoning about politics. Did the Gulf situation more closely resemble Vietnam or World War II? One's choice of metaphor yielded different practical inferences about what the United States and the world community ought to do in response to the Iraqi invasion. Using the Public Papers of the President series I investigate the metaphors used by former U.S. President George Bush to conceptualize the political situation in the Persian Gulf during the pre-war period of August 1990 through January 1991. I argue the analogical reasoning behind the "new world order" rests on a complex system of metaphors and on Bush's assertion that the expression "the rape of Kuwait" is literal (non-metaphorical) language. The practical outcome of accepting Bush's metaphors and his metaphorically projected inferences was the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf.
A cross-cultural investigation into the political metaphors used in accounts of three peacemaking attempts in Central and Latin America from 1967 to 1987. Contrasts metaphors used by Spanish and English speakers to characterize international politics.
This is an attempt to use Lakoff and Johnson (1980) to analyse the metaphors of family counseling. It is a practical work with real focus on using metaphors to reconstruct a patient's understanding of the family in therapy, as well as a fairly broad survey of the types of metaphors already in use in the counseling literature.
Sweetser has important philosophical moves in two respects: First, she has a beautiful analysis of how the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is refuted by work on color perception and translates this to observing that the directionality of metaphor is largely from the physical to the mental (pp. 6-7). Second, she has analyses of modality, conjunction and conditionality which suggest that necessity, probability, causality, and the like are based on a projection from spatio-temporal force dynamics. She suggests that the conjunctions and, or and but are ordered iconically to a various spatio-temporal processes, although the ordering changes when changing between different linguistic domains (p.111). The book unfortunately does not make much more than a passing speculation to follow up Fauconnier's 1985 idea that when we change linguistic domains (ie from the root to the epistemic to the speech act) we are imagining different cognitive worlds to which are grammar refers.
Turner asks what constrains a metaphoric mapping? The IH as stated by Lakoff is simply put too strongly--he rephrases the Invariance Hypothesis as to transfer only that part of the source's topology which does not violate the target's topology and as much of it as possible.
Turner argues for a radical reconception of the study of English literature using methods borrowed from cognitive linguistics. Instead of concentrating on giving ever more novel readings of literature, he offers an account in which he tries to make sense of the common aspects of literary works. In doing so, he makes an important point about originality: the author's originality--to whatever extent it is present, makes use of a vast unoriginal background. By concentrating on the unoriginal apparatus--the metaphors and metonymies that are the "stock-in-trade" of the author-- he hopes offer a new paradigm to which future work in the English profession can look. The three chapters on the poetry of connections (and especially ythe third) are the real gems in this book. His analysis of XYZ metaphors such as "money is the root of all evil" and "language is fossil poetry" is important work in metaphor theory. The tenth chapter on the inadequacy of cultural literacy lists like E.D. Hirsch's Dictionary is an excellent example of drawing out some of the social examples of metaphor theory.
A content analysis of the Senate debate over U.S. involvement in the Gulf. Unfortunately the analysis excluded dead metaphors and treated metaphor as figurative instead of constitutive, so the article does not penetrate too deeply into the inferential structure and topological coherencies of metaphoric systems. Nonetheless, the data set is impressive.
A rather straightforward but interesting first investigation into the language used to characterize computer systems by their programmers. I see much room for follow-up on the role these metaphors play in their debugging process, not to mention their generative role in creating operating systems, word-processing systems and the like.
Wertsch's concern is to develop a taxonomy of modes of discourse in the nuclear arms debate. Beginning from Dyson's warrior/victim distinction, he posits two dimensions of discourse: scope of identification and form of legitimation. The scope of identification is whether one privileges arguments which assume that all humans "are in this together" when it comes to the nuclear predicament (a "universal" perspective) or priviliges arguments where it is assumed that the fundamental interest of one social group, such as a nation, can be separated from others (a "particularistic" perspective). The form of legitimation is whether one priviliges arguments which are "decontextualized" abstractions from any concrete situation and is characterized by the use of formal logic and an Objectivist view of rationality, or privileges "contextualized" modes of expression where the analysis of highly concrete factors are highlighted, particularly their emotional aspects. He gives well-known examples of works which fit the intersections formed by each of these dimensions, but suggests that it is the particularistic, decontextualized discourse which dominates official technostrategic discourse. He concludes by tracing out how the bias toward this mode of discourse as that assumed by any "rational" actor led Carter into a political blunder re the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Winter is the leading proponent of the cognitive semantics revolution as it changes legal theory
and our understanding of law.
A discussion of the implications of embodiment, metaphor, and cognitive
theory generally for law and legal theory.
On the metaphorical nature of our conception of power and an analysis of
the concept of "power" focussing on feminist theory.
Based on Lakoff and Johnson's theory of metaphor, the author analyzes and
criticizes the Western model of the "Internal Self," constituted by a system
of not unifiable but reifying metaphors. Both experts (psychologists,
philosophers, etc.) and lay persons draw upon this model when they refer to
the self. The reification of the self into separate entities leads to
contradictions in the futile attempt to bridge the subject-object gap. The
work points to social constructionism as an alternative language game that
may help us overcome the confusions intrinsic to our present conceptualization
of the self.
--abstract submitted by author