Metaphors We Live by

Rating:
Summary: A Revolutionary Insight
Review: If we talk about relationships we might say: "She was in the driver's seat" but we "reached a fork in the road" and now we're "on the rocks" and we may "go our separate ways." Lakoff and Johnson point out that each of these expression uses some version of a metaphor that "Love is a Journey" -- where the journey may be by boat, by car, or walking. Metaphors like these are not special poetic creations, but are part of the day to day way we talk and think about relationships. In the same way, prices "go up", people "get close", the future is "down the road" and cognitive scientists "defend" their "positions." Metaphors like these are not simply a playful use of words. They are part of the way that we think.

This is some of Lakoff and Johnson's fascinating description of the pervasive role of metaphor in human cognition. To this reader, it has all the hallmarks of a great scientific discovery: it is original, profound, simple, and obviously true. For this reason alone, the book deserves five stars.

However, the book fails to give it's marvelous subject the treatment it deserves. The writing, while clear and full of common sense, is often uneven. The organization is lopsided -- much of the book is devoted to attacking straw men and and hand waving attempts to expand their discovery into some kind of murky philosphical revolution. This is confusing, easy to criticize, and a waste of time. Worst of all, they blunt the greatest weapon of any truly great idea: its simplicity.

If Lakoff and Johnson really want to start a revolution they should take a lesson from the master: Darwin. His Origin of Species presented only the things he could prove: his evidence and his discovery. Lakoff and Johnson would have included a critique of the Bible.

Rating:
Summary: The Way We Think ... & Talk
Review: Lakoff & Johnson demonstrate that metaphor is a basic function of human thought, and therefore of language, rather than something added to speech or literature to make it more beautiful, powerful, or poetic. Using the basic (or "conceptual metaphor"--their term) that 'argument is war', they demonstrate how our cultural assumption that war helps us understand arguments actually shapes our arguments--we argue (and discuss our arguments) as though we were fighting a war (e.g., "I shot down his main point", "She outflanked his argument", "We defeated their ...").

The point of "conceptual metaphor" is that unstated [implicit] basic, fundamental, or large-scale metaphors (such as 'argument is war') *make it possible* for us to describe argument in terms of armed conflict.

They then show that most of our speech (and therefore thought) is metaphorical, giving many examples of conceptual metaphors and how they show up, or are realize"d" (my term) in actual speech.

This book has set the tone for the discussion of metaphor since its publication, and continues to be cited widely in the literature of metaphor. It is therefore vital for any discussion of the modern view(s) of metaphor, and most highly recommended for anyone interested in communication, language, the mind, and, of course, metaphor.

On the other hand, I have found George Lakoff & Mark Turner's work (_More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Literary Metaphor; ISBN 0226468127) even more helpful, since they discuss how metaphors show up in, and what they mean, in literature, beginning with an extensive (56pp) discussion of literary metaphors for death (and time). This is a scintillating & stimulating book, that, IMHO, will capture the imagination of most readers of literature far more effectively than _Metaphors We Live By_.

Rating:
Summary: The Way We Think ... & Talk
Review: Lakoff & Johnson demonstrate that metaphor is a basic function of human thought, and therefore of language, rather than something added to speech or literature to make it more beautiful, powerful, or poetic. Using the basic (or "conceptual metaphor"--their term) that 'argument is war', they demonstrate how our cultural assumption that war helps us understand arguments actually shapes our arguments--we argue (and discuss our arguments) as though we were fighting a war (e.g., "I shot down his main point", "She outflanked his argument", "We defeated their ...").

The point of "conceptual metaphor" is that unstated [implicit] basic, fundamental, or large-scale metaphors (such as 'argument is war') *make it possible* for us to describe argument in terms of armed conflict.

They then show that most of our speech (and therefore thought) is metaphorical, giving many examples of conceptual metaphors and how they show up, or are realize"d" (my term) in actual speech.

This book has set the tone for the discussion of metaphor since its publication, and continues to be cited widely in the literature of metaphor. It is therefore vital for any discussion of the modern view(s) of metaphor, and most highly recommended for anyone interested in communication, language, the mind, and, of course, metaphor.

On the other hand, I have found George Lakoff & Mark Turner's work (_More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Literary Metaphor; ISBN 0226468127) even more helpful, since they discuss how metaphors show up in, and what they mean, in literature, beginning with an extensive (56pp) discussion of literary metaphors for death (and time). This is a scintillating & stimulating book, that, IMHO, will capture the imagination of most readers of literature far more effectively than _Metaphors We Live By_.

Rating:
Summary: Landmark! - A sense of recognition sets in
Review: Many of the examples oversimplify. The authors provide no formal empirical basis for their claims. However, upon reading this book, a sense of recognition sets in. They have succeeded in illuminating as much as one can through discourse alone, the cognitive underpinnings of our language and the way we think. Very little if anything in the way of ideological bias clouds the mirror through which the reader can recognize the authors' thesis. Although not explicitly written for purposes of self-development or consciousness raising, the very act of consciously recognizing these metaphorical cognitive mechanisms may give the reader a greater sensitivity to and command of the language. It certainly has for me.

The authors later went on to write ''Philosophy in the Flesh.'' If you are a stickler for more formal empirical verification, in that tome you will find good discussions about, and references to some empirical confirmation which followed on the thesis developed in this book. In ''Philosophy in the Flesh'', however, the authors inevitably allow more play with their ideological leanings (liberal) which may prove a distraction to some readers who would find ''Metaphors We Live By'' much freer from these ideological musings. Clearly the revelations we find in ''Metaphors We Live By'', transcend ideology, including the authors' ideologies.

The implications of widespread cognitive metaphor throughout our language, culture, and even our sciences, presents us with the landmark tip of an iceberg, whose deeper implications spread far beyond and below the more obviously poetical uses that we typically recognize when we think of the metaphorical. This causes us to rethink everything in ways which I am sure even exceed the authors' scope of speculation, though they have done an excellent job in pointing the way. The ideas developed here, cry out for -- even demand -- further elaboration. This book itself only points to the tip of the iceberg and calls it what it is -- an iceberg. In this job, it proves remarkably easy to read, explanatory, to-the-point, and no longer than necessary. Anyone literate can read and understand it, though exploring and understanding all of its ramifications could easily become a whole science yet to be born.

If you have either a professional or an intense lay interest in cognitive science, this book provides an excellent introduction to ''Philosophy in the Flesh'', though ''Philosophy . . .'' certainly does not provide a conclusion to ''Metaphors We Live By.'' If you find ''Philosophy'' a difficult read, you may try this instead. If you find this book intriguing, then more illuminating speculations lie ahead in ''Philosophy'', but don't expect a grand satisfying conclusion. The authors try for too much there, overshooting themselves and thus occasionally slipping into more ideological speculations where the empirical presentation leaves off. I highly recommend both books, but this one first and foremost. I would give it six stars if Amazon permitted.

Rating:
Summary: Metaphors we think by.
Review: Metaphor is usually seen as an aspect of words, a linguistic trick we use to increase the effect of our words. Lakoff sets out to show that metaphors are a fundamental part of our thought processes whenever we try to think abstractly. His book does not provide a rigorous scientific proof, but it does present a lot of evidence in favor of the thesis. However, a full treatment of the issue would take a much thicker and less readable book than this one.

Lakoff gives examples from life for various metaphors, for example, TIME IS MONEY (or TIME IS A VALUABLE COMMODITY), and shows how we use these metaphors in our everyday thoughts and actions ("Spending time", "wasting time", "saving time", etc). He shows how many different ideas can be expressed with simlar metaphors, ie HAPPINESS IS UP / SADNESS IS DOWN, HEALTH IS UP / SICKNESS IS DOWN, and so on.

Lakoff sets forth his case clearly and coherently, and with some of his examples, quite entertainingly. If you want some insight into how we think, buy this book.

Rating:
Summary: Belaboring the obvious
Review: The human cognitive system is predisposed towords catagorizing, both for computational and storage efficiency, it seems. New perceptual and experiential experiences are increasingly encoded not as unique instances, but as links to existing instances, and from that, categories are formed. This is all Cog Psych 100, and as far as it goes, true- perhaps trivially so, at least to today's crop of psychologists.

But not to George Lakoff. Finding himself the aging bad boy of structural linguistics, he, like Noam Chomsky and other refugees from a dying field, has recast himself in the role of a social theorist. The problem is that the methodlogy that served him well in linguistics doesn't fly here.

In the 1960s, linguistics was turned upside down by an influx of new converts who, in the wake of Chomsky, didn't seek to extend existing linguistic theory so much as to replace it with an entirely new field. They weren't interested in descriptions of geographical distribution of fricatives in the Amazon basin; instead, they had an entirely new model that was based around building a universal grammer of thought and mind. They built this field from nothing, quoting each others' works and ignoring historical studies.

This was a period of revolutionary science, and a quite exciting one it was. But in the end, while they contributed a lot to understanding of grammers and structure, their real aim- that of producing a definitive deep grammer of thought- failed. The numbers of new graduate students dropped off as bright young people went into nerosciences, cognitive psychology, philosophy and computer science, leaving the once-young radicals without a mission.

As many of the young radicals were also fond of the far left (see the "Fetschrift for James McCawley on the occasion of his thirty-first or thirty-second birthday" for some hilarious examples) they gravitated naturally to political and social theory.

Problem was they attempted to carry with them the same methodology they used in linguistics. Forget the old stuff, they cried; we're got a new, better theory! New insights, new truths, all better than before.

As you might expect, what they produced instead was, on the whole, historically ignorant and theoretically shallow. Lakoff published parts of what became this book around ten years ago as essays passed around UUNet, and it appears he heasn't done much reading since. He's apparantly completely unaware of the explosion in the fields of political philosophy, choice theory and cognitive sciences of the past two decades.

In the end, Lakoff's analysis is shallow, ahistorical and generally unconvincing.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: This book could be considered to be one of the most intellectually honest of any book in print, for it unashamedly deals with commonsense notions of how the human mind deals with the world. One sometimes gets the impression that some works, especially on the philosophy of mind, tend to mystify or glamorize the workings of the mind. This book gives much weight to the use of metaphors for this purpose, and in doing so is faced with just how efficacious these metaphors are. The ordinary human conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical it argues, and that metaphors are the predominant mode of cognition. The evidence for their assertion comes primarily from linguistics, and they give numerous examples of the metaphors that are employed by humans in everyday discussion and interactions with others. The authors emphasize though that metaphor is not just a linguistic notion, but that human thought processes themselves are largely metaphorical. So how do we study the metaphorical nature of thought? The author's answer is simple: we use metaphorical linguistic expressions to study the nature of metaphorical concepts. This will allow an understanding of the metaphorical nature of our activities.

The authors are careful to point out that the use of metaphors does, possess a notion of entailment, and that metaphorical entailments are able to characterize a coherent system of metaphorical concepts. Thus this system is not loose and unstructured, but rather similar in fact to the many systems of logic that one finds in computer science and in research in artificial intelligence. However, being able to view one aspect of a concept in terms of another will mask other aspects of this concept, and the authors give several interesting examples of this. When a concept is structured by a metaphor it is always partially structured, for otherwise the metaphor and the concept it is trying to understand would be identical. The metaphorical concepts can be extended however, and be deployed in a way of thinking traditionally called "figurative."

Along with these structural metaphors, the authors discuss `orientational metaphors', that serve to organize an entire system of concepts with respect to one another. As their name implies, these metaphors usually involve spatial orientation, and originate in human cultural and physical experience. Several examples of orientational metaphors are given, and they give what they consider to be plausible explanations of how they arise in experience. They remind the reader though that these explanations are not set in stone. However they clearly believe, and they emphasize this in the book, that metaphors cannot be understood or represented independently of its experiential basis. A metaphor is inseparable from its experiential basis.

The philosophical reader will probably want to know how the metaphorical nature of thought connects with a "theory of truth". The authors don't resist flirting with the boundaries of philosophy, and give a rather lengthy discussion of metaphors and "truth." The authors clearly do not believe in the traditional Western notion of objective, absolute, and unconditional truth. They do however vigorously put forward a notion of truth which they believe meshes with their paradigm of metaphor.

Truth, the authors believe, depends on "categorization", which means that statements are only true relative to some understanding of them, that understanding always involves human categorization arising from experience and not from inherent properties, that statements are true only relative to the properties emphasized by the categories used in the statement, and that categories are not fixed and not constant.

The authors then put forward an explanation of how a sentence can be understood as true, before tackling the general case of metaphors. To understand a sentence as being true in a particular situation involves both having an understanding of the sentence and of the situation. But to understand a sentence as being true it suffices to understand only approximately how it fits the understanding of the situation. Thus the authors introduce a metric, i.e. a notion of closeness between the situation and the sentence that fits this situation. Obtaining this fit may require several things to happen, such as "projecting" an orientation onto something that has no inherent orientation, or providing a background for the sentence to make sense.

Having detailed what is involved in understanding a simple sentence as being true, the authors then state that including conventional metaphors does not change anything. The understanding of truth for conventional metaphors can be done in terms of metaphorical "projection" and in terms of nonmetaphorical "projection". In metaphorical projection understanding of one thing is done in terms of another kind of thing, whereas in nonmetaphorical projection only one kind of thing is involved. The case of new metaphors does not involve essentially anything more than the case of conventional metaphors.

The authors summarize their "experientalist" theory of truth as the understanding of a statement as being true in a given situation when the understanding of the statement fits the understanding of the situation closely enough for the purposes at hand. This theory, they say, does mesh with some aspects of the correspondence theory of truth but rejects the notion of a "correspondence" between a statement and some state of affairs in the world. The correspondence between a statement and that state of affairs is mediated they say by the understanding of that statement and the state of affairs. In addition, truth is always relative to the conceptual system used to understand situations and statements. Further, the understanding of something involves putting it into a coherent scheme relative to a conceptual system. The author's theory of truth is thus reminiscent of the familiar coherence theories of truth. In addition, understanding is always grounded in experience, with the conceptual systems arising from interaction with the environment. Their theory of truth does not require a notion of "absolute" truth, and most interestingly, and most provocatively, individuals with different conceptual systems may understand the world differently, and have different criteria for truth and reality.

The key word is "different": an interesting project would be to quantify this.

Rating:
Summary: A Wonderful Introduction to Epistemology
Review: This book marks the beginning of a real, live epistemology which everyone can understand. By means of everyday phrases that we all use, Lakoff and Johnson gradually develop the argument that everything we know is based in our body's interactions in the world, to which we associate phrases. And when you understand why it is that "up" means "up," and similar fundamental relationships, you are well on your way to understanding how it can be that we know anything at all.

Equipped with an actual, real live epistemology, philosophy will finally come to grips not only with the age-old questions whose answers have proved so elusive; but will also understand why it is philosophy has failed up until now.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent thesis, clear presentation
Review: This book will change the way you look at language. Often, when we think we are being literal and direct, we are using metaphors. And we don't even know it. After reading this book you will catch yourself in metaphorical folly. This will help you think more clearly and argue better; you will be better able to spot false analogies and arguments based on misleading metaphors. This book is a bit dated now, but still worth a read.

Rating:
Summary: What the others have said is true, but........
Review: This book, although lacking empirical evidence (thank God we dont have to wade through that), is a good book for a particular audience - writers. The book is simplified but if you take the time to abstract its contents - there is a richness that will facilitate organization, clarity, and conciseness in your writing. In essence, you need to abstract your writing to the level of a few choice metaphors and then write to them. It is an exercise in frustration but the pay off is worth it. The result is a subtlety that most of your readers will not be able to pinpoint but acts like a glue to bind the entire writing into a satisfying gestalt. The book is about cognition and linguistics but take it for what it really is - one tool (a good tool) to help structure your thoughts and prose.