Customer Reviews

Metaphors We Live By

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After hearing nearly every anthropology professor I've ever had reference the work of Lakoff and Johnson in some way, I decided to try reading this book for myself. I'm very glad I did, because it completely changed my view of language, thought, and truth.

Starting with the (deceptively) simple premise that the way we talk about certain things shapes the way we think about them, Lakoff and Johnson launch into a stimulating deconstruction of what they term "conceptual metaphors", and the complex way in which they interact to structure our experience of reality. These aren't just metaphors in the rhetorical sense though; the authors examine how common ways of speaking and thinking actually reflect a relatively coherent metaphorical system.

For example, you might not think that the statement "He strayed from the line of argument" is metaphorical is any significant way, but it is grounded in the metaphor that AN ARGUMENT IS A JOURNEY, and the assumption that A JOURNEY DEFINES A PATH. Put them together, and you get AN ARGUMENT DEFINES A PATH; a path which can be strayed from. Lakoff and Johnson explore these interactions in great detail, and suggest some fascinating philosophical and political implications.

This book is very readable (nice short chapters) and I highly recommend it if you are at all interested in anthropology, linguistics, or philosophy.

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.

So, I picked up this book awhile ago thinking that it would be a good survey of one part of linguistics. Yes, it is that. BUT, after reading several chapters, I discovered an unintended consequence, or perhaps an unexpected consequence. Since of the several reviews I read, no one addressed this isse, I thought I would.

Simply put: This book has improved my writing and the impact of my writing. Now, I might normally hit upon the perfectly crafted sentence eventually, but this book highlights so many issues in language that I believe it will help sooner and more effectively. Not like a style manual or how-to-write book, but in the context of the metaphor, the subtle implications of the sentence and the inferences readers might make from its construction. This is pretty exciting.

Many reviewers evaluate the book from a far more intellectual perspective than I, but for the more pragmatic of you that think it can have this unintended consequence, it might be just right for you. At the same time, your grasp of this concept will have a much stronger framework and structure bringng happiness to the linguistic engineers in the crowd. And your language will improve with cool words or phrases like "homonymy", "metonymies", or "experiential gestalt". So I am not that literate.

So enjoy, it is a very nice, informative read!

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.

There are systems of metaphors repeated through our everyday language, and Lakoff identifies and explains many of them and their relationships to each other and to our culture. Upon reading these insights, they seem so obvious -- but I never would have thought to put those elements together to draw those conclusions. Lakoff explains the concepts quite clearly. Everything makes sense, and the book inspires more thought and questions.

*Metaphors We Live By* seminally remarked that language is metaphoric at a much deeper and more pervasive level than had previously been understood. For example, the metaphor ``time is money'' is built into the language: we spend time, invest time, waste time, squander time, borrow time, and so on. It further argued that humans reason using metaphors that ground abstract concepts (like time) in concrete ones (like money, which you can hold in your hand). We use these metaphors in an extended way (both borrowing time and spending it) and coherently (merging different metaphors to reach sensible conclusions). These conclusions have stood the test of time and if anything increased in impact over the years. Lakoff, Johnson, and their students have followed in later work with preliminary models of how neural circuitry for controlling motor actions is reemployed in other thinking, thus shedding light on how thought is grounded, on how the working of neural circuitry acquires meaning.

Roughly a third of *MWLB* is devoted to philosophy, arguing that because thought is so heavily metaphoric, ``there is no reason to believe there is any absolute truth or objective meaning''. They have since rethought this conclusion, and their 1999 book *Philosophy in the Flesh* claims to have accepted the existence of objective reality, but still argues that there is no objective metaphysics of such phenomena as time, causality, or morality. Since many different metaphors are used in understanding causation that each describe something different, they argue there can be no essential causality. This is such a radical conclusion that we should be loath to accept it without strong evidence, but from their perspective it appears inescapable.

These ideas also feed into Lakoff's book *Moral Politics*. Conservatives often argue that liberals are emotional and irrational-- a noteworthy magazine of the right is thus called *Reason*. Lakoff, because he doesn't believe in an objective reality or an objective morality in any ordinary sense, accedes to this without firing a shot. Rather than dispute that liberals are emotional and irrational, he argues that rationality is a mirage.

*Metaphors We Live By* greatly impressed me, and was an important stimulus for my 2004 book *What is Thought?*. *WiT?* proposed fundamental organizing principles of thought, from which Lakoff and Johnson's empirical observations regarding metaphor emerge in a natural way. *WIT?* explains ''understanding'' as the computational exploitation of the underlying structure to the world, and argues (based on discoveries in computer science made in the 20+ years since *MWLB* appeared) that it is produced through evolving a compact computer program. This program can only be so compact yet so powerful by reuse of meaningful subroutines-- which gives rise to metaphor. Thus simple fundamental principles that explain many other aspects of thought also organize and cause Lakoff and Johnson's observations. Note however that my proposal, rather than denying the existence of Platonic structure as do Lakoff et al's various books, is built on top of it: the underlying compact Platonic structure explains how understanding is possible. Yes we have many different metaphors for dealing with causality, but they all exploit the fact that there is a very simple description of the physics of the world, and this simple description presumably includes or implies ''essential causality''.

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.

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.

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.

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_.