Metaphor in the Mind: The Cognition of Metaphor

The most sustained and innovative recent work on metaphor has occurred in cognitive science and psychology. Psycholinguistic investigation suggests that novel, poetic metaphors are processed differently than literal speech, while relatively conventionalized and contextually salient metaphors are processed more like literal speech. This conflicts with the view of “cognitive linguists” like George Lakoff that all or nearly all thought is essentially metaphorical. There are currently four main cognitive models of metaphor comprehension: juxtaposition, category-transfer, feature-matching, and structural alignment. Structural alignment deals best with the widest range of examples; but it still fails to account for the complexity and richness of fairly novel, poetic metaphors. 1. General Issues in the Study of Metaphor Philosophers have often adopted a dismissive attitude toward metaphor. Hobbes (ch. 8) advocated excluding metaphors from rational discourse because they “openly profess deceit,” while Locke (Bk. 3, ch. 10) claimed that figurative uses of language serve only “to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheats.” Later, logical positivists like Ayer and Carnap assumed that because metaphors like (1) How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!2 involve category mistakes, they have no real meaning or verification conditions. Thus, they too mentioned metaphor only to place it beyond the pale of rational discourse. Starting in the 1960s and 70s, philosophers and linguists began to take more positive interest in metaphor. Black argued forcefully that metaphors do have a distinctive, essentially non-propositional meaning or cognitive significance, which is produced by the “interaction” of the “systems of associated commonplaces” for the metaphor’s “primary” and “secondary” subjects (e.g., with moonlight and sleeping sweetly). Other theorists were more friendly to the idea that metaphorical and literal meaning are of the same essential kind. Many of them proposed that the literal absurdity of metaphors © Blackwell Publishing 2006 Philosophy Compass 1/2 (2006): 154–170, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2006.00013.x