During the early phase of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, there was much focus on the principles of metaphor universality and conventionality based on the assumption that our conceptual system is dominated by primary metaphors which are inspired by our shared recurrent physical experiences. However, as this theory started to become more influential, an increasing interest in adopting a more pragmatic approach to conceptual metaphor emerged. In this account I will deal with two notions that were introduced as an alternative to the
73
claims of the universality and conventionality of conceptual metaphor. These notions are: the ‘Invariance Principle’ and the ‘Toolmakers Paradigm’ both of which emerged as a response to the notion of the ‘Conduit Metaphor’ which was adopted by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) in their research about Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The Conduit Metaphor was introduced by Reddy (in Ortony 1993) as a conceptual frame for communication, perceived in terms of ‘transmitting’ or carrying something over. According to the model of the Conduit Metaphor, language is viewed as a carrier of ideas, feelings and attitudes which are packed in words and transmitted to the hearer/reader whose role is to open the message and read its content. Reddy based his analysis of the metaphor of ‘LANGUAGE AS A CARRIER’ on a variety of metaphoric expressions about communication taken from everyday English. The analysis of the examined expressions revealed that the communication process in English is highly dominated by the conceptual pattern of the Conduit Metaphor which sees ‘LANGAUGE AS A CARRIER’. The following passage provides a brief description of the Conduit Metaphor account:
“The speaker puts ideas (objects) into words (containers) and sends them (along a conduit) to a hearer who takes the idea/objects out of the word/containers.” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 10)
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) believed that Reddy’s model was an inspiration for Conceptual Metaphor Theory as it showed how our everyday language is dominated by metaphors we live by, and how those metaphors are conventionalized in our conceptual system by virtue of their frequent occurrence. However, they criticized Reddy’s analysis for being a very objectivist account of the requirements of the process of communication reducing it to a simplistic conceptual frame which “does not fit cases where context is required to determine whether the sentence has any meaning at all and (…) what meaning it has” (Lakoff and Johnson 1982: 12). Consequently, Lakoff and Johnson concluded that communicating via a Conduit Metaphor makes our message vulnerable to misinterpretation explaining that “when
74
a society lives by the CONDUIT metaphor on a large scale, misunderstanding, persecution, and much worse are the likely products” (Lakoff and Johnson 1982: 231).
Alternatively, Lakoff and Johnson introduced their notion of the Invariance Principle, which rules out the possibility of stretching a single conceptual metaphor to cover the entire spectrum of the cognitive content of a concept. The Invariance Principle is based on the assumption of “systemacity” (Bailey 2003: 65; 66) between the conceptual content of a metaphor and its context. For example, if we use a conceptual metaphor like ‘LOVE IS A JOURNEY’ in a certain context, it is possible to have a variation in the different representations of that metaphor in terms of conceptualizing ‘LOVE’ as being ongoing, advancing, obstructed, blocked, etc. However, this variation should not imply conceptual incongruity between the various representations as it should support, rather than contradict, the context. Lakoff summarized the Invariance Principle in the following passage:
“Metaphorical mappings preserve the cognitive topology (that is, the image-schema structure) of the source domain, in a way consistent with the inherent structure of the target domain.” (in Ortony 1993: 215)
In response to the need to contextualize his account of the Conduit Metaphor, Reddy proposed the Toolmakers Paradigm as an alternative. The Toolmakers Paradigm is a huge wheel-like compound which is divided into various sectors that stand for multiple environments. Different environments share certain common features but none is identical with the other. In order for individuals to survive in their own environments, they have to be aware of the native cognitive content of that environment, including its concepts, thoughts, feelings, perceptions and physical properties. However, if the inhabitants of different environments want to communicate with each other, the processing of the communication requires the parties involved to exert an effort making use of the conceptual tools that are available to them in their own sector. Reddy’s alternative to the Conduit Metaphor shifted the focus of the communication process from the message sender to the message receiver
75
because “it may be that the fault in a communication failure does not lie with the speaker. Perhaps, somehow, the listener has erred” (Reddy in Ortony 1993: 168). Unlike the principle of the Conduit Metaphor, the Toolmakers Paradigm makes it plain that there is no conceptual content in books or libraries unless it is experienced and reconstructed carefully according to the needs of our conceptual system; and what is preserved in libraries is an opportunity for us to carry out this process of conceptual reconstruction and extract the cognitive content of the environment which we are interested in. According to Reddy, we do not preserve ideas by building libraries and recording voices. The only way to preserve culture is to train people to rebuild it and grow it in its native environment as the word ‘culture’ suggests.
The need to contextualize the uses and functions of conceptual metaphor was not limited to the arguments about the notion of the Conduit Metaphor. There were other arguments that touched upon the pragmatic function of metaphor and emerged in response to the claim about the universality of our metaphoric thinking. Proponents of these arguments maintained that the belief in the university of our metaphoric thinking should not exclude socio-cultural and socio-political approaches to metaphor. The reason behind this claim is that the cognitive role of metaphor is not restricted to conceptualization and reasoning processes; and that metaphor plays an equally important cognitive role in “creating realities” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 145; 156). In view of its conceptual role in creative cognition, metaphor can leave a positive or negative effect on our conceptual system. In other words, metaphor is thought to be capable of effecting a positive change in our attitudes or producing negative schemas because they “serve to organize and interpret experience” (Traugott in Paprotté and Dirven 1985: 49). An example of the positive effect which metaphor leaves on our lives is its role in solving social problems, in what was described by Schön (in Ortony 1993) as ‘generative metaphor’. This feature makes metaphor enrich our conceptual system with “new perspectives of the world” (ibid., 138), thus enabling us to find solutions to problems by conceptualizing them in
76
terms of the ‘SEE-AS’ conceptual metaphor. Another account of the positive role of metaphor in our conceptual system is evident in the prolific use of metaphor in poetics, as poets and men of literature use metaphor to describe, criticize and introduce new images of the world around us. This poetic role of metaphor makes its use associated with a positive change which we can effect:
“Poets can appeal to the ordinary metaphors we live by in order to take us beyond them, to make us more insightful than we would be if we thought only in the standard ways. Because they lead us to new ways of conceiving of our world, poets are artists of the mind (…) poets are both imaginative and truthful.” (Lakoff and Turner 1989: 210)
Nevertheless, the creativity of metaphor is not positive all the time as metaphors can be manipulated by political systems to exercise hegemony on cultures or cultural groups by creating ‘scenarios’ or ‘image schemas’ which are meant to privilege a certain cultural group while oppressing another, as discussed by Musolff (2004). This means that language users have a role to play in “the emergence of scenario-based argumentative traditions, irrespective of whether they ‘defend’ or ‘attack’ a scenario and its evaluative bias” (ibid., 143). In other
words, if we take all the metaphors which are presented to us at face value and “without thought or consideration, we are furthering their use and perhaps lengthening the shadows of what they conceal” (Young 2001: 621). By way of dealing with the manipulative function of metaphors in creating biased realities, Musolff came up with the technique of ‘negotiating scenarios’ which works by presenting a detailed account of the politics of metaphor in its
relevant socio-pragmatic field. Musolff introduced this technique based on his analysis of Hobbes’ account of the influence of metaphors in grounding realities, as explained in the following excerpt:
“What Hobbes does recommend is for speakers to signal unambiguously any metaphorical intrusion in the arguments they propose, e.g. by way of their formulation as ‘similitudes’, so that the grounds for the analogical conclusion to be drawn can be explicated and if need be criticized.” (2005: 111)
77
The argument about the need to contextualize our approach to conceptual metaphor is closely related to the role of metaphor in categorization. Dealing with metaphor in terms of its cognitive ability to categorize is functional for our understanding of our conceptual system and how it operates, as it reveals how our ideas and objects are understood, classified, related to each other and distinguished from each other. The human conceptual system relies on categorization in analysing the conceptual relations between concepts, on the one hand, and objects and experiences, on the other hand. In Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, Lakoff dwelled on the significance of categorization stressing that “understanding of how we categorize is central to any understanding of how we think and how we function, and therefore central to an understanding of what makes us human” (1987: 6).
The first to deal with the concept of categorization was Plato in the Statesman Dialogue, but this notion was elaborated by Aristotle in his Categories. According to Aristotle, language is made up of a hierarchal system of categories with one dominating category at the top of the hierarchy and sub-categories under each category. Aristotle introduced the ten categories of substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, situation, state, action and passion (Abraham 1975: 45), based on grouping concepts and entities according to distinct properties and common features shared by all members of every individual set. This implies that categories are clearly delineated and discretely distinguished from each other. For example ‘MAN’ and ‘STONE’ are both substances as they refer to particulars; ‘NUMBER’ and ‘LENGTH’ are quantities; and ‘MARKET’ and ‘HOUSE’ are places. Accordingly, it is assumed that the attributes shared by the members of the category of ‘SUBSTANCES’ single them out from the two other categories of ‘QUANTITY’ and ‘PLACE’. A substance such as ‘STONE’ refers to a particular with clear semantic features which exclude this entity from the category of ‘PLACE’. However we notice that ‘HOUSE’ which belongs to the category of ‘PLACE’ might also be classified under ‘SUBSTANCE’.
78
There is a general assumption among the proponents of the Cognitive School that the classical view of taxonomy followed an absolute system of classification which does not account for “category gradation” (MacLaury 1991: 61) and that “there is more than one way of appealing to classification” (Nogales 1999: 30-31). Lakoff indicated that Aristotle’s categories were criticized by Ludwig Wittgenstein for being too rigid and not allowing for overlapping across classes. According to Wittgenstein, there is a shortfall in the classical theory claim that meaning exists in an objective world. Alternatively, meaning is not limited to the objective presence of things in an isolated world. Rather, it belongs to a more realistic system of thought as it is possible for categories to overlap reflecting the experiential nature of our thinking. Wittgenstein provided the group of ‘GAMES’ as an example of a category whose individual members do not all share the same essential characteristics. For instance, a game like basketball involves competition where we have winners and losers, whereas joggling does not involve competition. Furthermore if we apply the logic of Aristotle’s categories we can classify ‘GAMES’ under two groups: ‘ACTION’ in terms of being an activity and ‘QUALITY’ in terms of being entertaining boring violent harmful motivating etc.:
“The classical category has clear boundaries, which are defined by common properties. Wittgenstein pointed out that a category like game does not fit the classical mold, since there are no common properties shared by all games. Some games involve mere amusement (…). Some games involve luck, like board games where a throw of the dice determines each move. Others, like chess, involve skill. Still others like gin rummy involve both.” (Lakoff 1987: 16)
The other model of categorization that was criticized by the Cognitive School is the notion of the ‘Great Chain of Being’. This theory categorizes all things along a vertical scale starting with inanimate objects and ending with animate beings where ‘higher’ beings and entities exist at the top of the scale and ‘lower’ beings and entities at the bottom of the scale. The great chain scale has also primary categories and subcategories which fall under them. For example, the category of human-beings comprises subcategories such as intellect, senses and
79
physical attributes. Accordingly, the great chain metaphor is defined in terms of conceptual, physical and behavioural attributes which are arranged according to the following hierarchy, from the top downwards: human beings (higher-order attributes and behaviour), animals (instinctual attributes and behaviour), plants, complex objects (structural attributes and functional behaviour), natural things (natural physical attributes and behaviour). In More than
Cool Reason, Lakoff and Turner criticized the great chain model based on the claim that it
can be politically manipulated by the strong against the vulnerable where its classification functions as a device of segregation, hegemony and oppression, as manifested in the following passage:
“(…) a chain of dominance it can become a chain of subjugation. It extends over centuries, linking the causes of anti-colonial Americans and antiroyalist French to those still bound by it- from Blacks to Women to Untouchables to aborigines to the environment, from whales and eagles to snails and species of lettuce, to the integrity of rivers.” (1989: 213)
As an alternative to the preceding models of categorization, Lakoff developed the cognitive model of gradable categories based on the notion of ‘basic human categorization’ which was also known as “the theory of prototypes” (Lakoff 1987: 39; Lakoff and Turner 1989: 166-213) and which was first introduced by Rosch in 1978 (see MacLaury 1991). According to Rosch, there are basic categories which are considered the point of departure in any process of categorization. However, the boundaries between those categories are fuzzy and not fixed as their features tend to overlap constantly as a result of the experiential interaction between our physical system, neural system and conceptual system. This makes our conceptual categories also subject to personal experiences, social factors and cultural considerations.
According to the Cognitive School, the notion of gradable categorization involves two models. The first is perceptual because it emerges directly from our physical experiences and “neural system” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 14). For example, when we hear the phrase
81
‘small gun’ the sensorimotor system is mobilized directly to examine the object its dimensions, shape, etc. The second model of categorization is functional based on our conception of the object in question or how we use it for a certain purpose. If we apply this assumption to the previous example, we could come up with a description of the ‘gun’ as being ‘a dangerous device’. Therefore both ‘small’ and ‘dangerous’ apply to an entity such as ‘gun’ although they are two different ways of categorizing this entity (perceptual and functional categorization). This method of categorization applies also to events and actions. In other words, categorization is not a rigid process of classification, but rather a clustered form of conceptualization whereby a category is seen as a gestalt with multiple dimensions and interactive conceptual features. This argument shows that our categories are not static, as they are not restricted by the inherent properties of the object; instead, they are defined by their experiential properties.
The inseparability between our categorization and experiences suggests that our reasoning is not absolutely objective but, rather, contextualized by our subjective and individual involvement with the world around us. Every conceptual process we perform goes through what is known as ‘frame-based’ reasoning, which means reasoning by depending on conceptual frames, i.e. prototypes. These prototypes are the result of the interaction between our neural system and bodies, on the one hand, and the immediate physical environment, on the other. However, our prototype-based conceptual processes are hardly noticed by us as they tend to take place spontaneously and subconsciously. To prove that our concepts do not reflect objective external realities but emerge as a result of the interaction between our bodies, experiences and brains, Lakoff and Johnson discussed the three conceptual groups of: ‘COLOUR’ ‘BASIC-LEVEL’ concepts and ‘SPATIAL-RELATIONS’ concepts. Their empirical study showed that these concepts are created as a result of the interaction between the human biological system and the surrounding physical and conceptual system.
80
Consequently, they concluded that the only realism which human beings experience is an ‘embodied realism’. Our reasoning faculty acquires its concepts perceptually and conceptually in terms of our bodily orientations and physical interaction with already-existing conceptualized frames.