E46: How do metaphors work?

Oddly Influenced

Conceptual metaphor is a theory in cognitive science that claims understanding and problem-solving often (but not always) happen via systems of metaphor. I present the case for it, and also expand on the theory in the light of previous episodes on ecological and embodied cognition.

This episode is theory. The next episode will cover practice.

This is the beginning of a series roughly organized around ways of discovering where your thinking has gone astray, with an undercurrent of how techniques of literary criticism might be applied to software documents (including code).

Books I drew upon

• Andrew Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought (2/e), 1993 (four essays in particular: see the transcript).
• Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 1980. (I worked from the first edition; there is a second edition I haven't read.)

Two of the Metaphor and Thought essays have PDFified photocopies available:

• Reddy's "The Conduit Metaphor – A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language About Language"
• Lakoff's "The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor"

Other things I referred to

• Helper T cells
• Richard P. Gabriel's website
• "Dead" metaphors
• The history of "balls to the wall"

Credits

The image of an old throttle assembly is due to WordOrigins.org.