El nostre sistema conceptual es basa en la metàfora
Cassos: metàfores d’orientació, substància.
Nous significats
Epistemologia, objectivisme, subjectivisme, experiencialisme
La importància de les metàfores amb què vivim
Resum
El nostre sistema conceptual es basa en la metàfora
Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish—a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.
exemple: arguments is war
Traslladem l’estructura i propietats d’un domini a un altre. Això n’il·lumina alguns aspectes i n’amaga uns altres.
Les metàfores més bàsiques es basen en la nostra experiència en el món [ com a cos tridimensional sota gravetat ] [ les formes a priori de Kant ] (For example, the concepts OBJECT, SUBSTANCE, and CONTAINER emerge directly. We experience ourselves as entities, separate from the rest of the world—as containers with an inside and an outside. We also experience things external to us as entities—often also as containers with in-sides and outsides.)
(1) orientació. Spatial orientations like up-down, front-back, on-off, center-periphery, and near-far provide an extraordinarily rich basis for understanding concepts in orientational terms.
exemples: happy is up, [ estic enfonsat ]
(2) Metàfores ontològiques de substància i contenidors en l’espai, considerar com una substància coses que no ho són. El nostre cos és un contenidor, l’habitació on som. La nostra experiència és la de moure’ns per diferents contenidors, també de substàncies que entren i surten del nostre cos. El camp visual, activitats i estats mentals també s’entenen com a contenidors o objectes. [ post sobre geografies emocionals ]
- caminem cap a la pau, augmenta la inflació
- THE MIND IS AN ENTITY IS elaborated in our culture.
- THE MIND IS A MACHINE, We’re still trying to grind out the solution to this equation. My mind just isn’t operating today. Boy, the wheels are turning now!
- THE MIND IS A BRITTLE OBJECT, Her ego is very fragile. You have to handle him with care since his wife’s death. He broke under cross-examination.
(3) personificació
Perhaps the most obvious ontological metaphors are those where the physical object is further specified as being a person. This allows us to comprehend a wide variety of experiences with nonhuman entities in terms of human motivations, characteristics, and activities. Here are some examples:
- His theory explained to me the behavior of chickens raised in factories.
- This fact argues against the standard theories.
(4) Metonimia
We are using one entity to refer to another that is related to it. This is a case of what we will call metonymy. Here are some further examples:
He likes to read the Marquis de Sade. (= the writings of the marquis)
(5) Més exemples
- THEORIES (and ARGUMENTS) ARE BUILDINGS: Is that the foundation for your theory?
- IDEAS ARE FOOD: What he said left a had taste in my mouth. IDEAS ARE PEOPLE: The theory of relativity gave birth to an enormous number of ideas in physics. IDEAS ARE PLANTS: His ideas have finally come to fruition. IDEAS ARE MONEY: Let me put in my two cents’ worth. IDEAS ARE CUTTING INSTRUMENTS: That’s an incisive idea.
- UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING
- LOVE IS A PHYSICAL FORCE (ELECTROMAGNETIC, GRAVITA-TIONAL, etc.)I could feel the electricity between us. LOVE IS A PATIENT: This is a sick relationship. LOVE IS MADNESS: 1’m crazy about her. LOVE. IS MAGIC: She cast her spell over me.
- THE EYES ARE CONTAINERS FOR THE EMOTIONS: I could see the fear in his eyes. His eyes were filled with anger.
- EMOTIONAL EFFECT IS PHYSICAL CONTACT: His mother’s death hit him hard.
- PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL STATES ARE ENTITIES WITHIN A PERSON: He has a pain in his shoulder.
- LIFE IS A CONTAINER: I’ve had a full life.
La possibilitat de nous significats, la metàfora en la poesia
The metaphors we have discussed so far are conventional metaphors, that is, metaphors that structure the ordinary conceptual system of our culture, which is reflected in our everyday language. We would now like to turn to metaphors that are outside our conventional conceptual system, metaphors that are imaginative and creative. Such metaphors are capable of giving us a new understanding of our experience. Thus, they can give new meaning to our pasts, to our daily activity, and to what we know and believe.
To see how this is possible, let us consider the new metaphor LOVE IS A COLLABORATIVE WORK OF ART. This is a metaphor that we personally find particularly forceful, insightful, and appropriate, given our experiences as mem-bers of our generation and our culture. The reason is that it makes our experiences of love coherent—it makes sense of them. We would like to suggest that new metaphors make sense of our experience in the same way conventional metaphors do: they provide coherent structure, highlighting some things and hiding others.
Metaphors may create realities for us, especially social realities. A metaphor may thus be a guide for future action. Such actions will, of course, fit the metaphor. This will, in turn, reinforce the power of the metaphor to make experience coherent. In this sense metaphors can be self-fulfilling prophecies.
For example, faced with the energy crisis, President Carter declared “the moral equivalent of war.” The WAR metaphor generated a network of entailments. There was an “enemy,” a “threat to national security,” which required “setting targets,” “reorganizing priorities,” “establishing a new chain of command,” “plotting new strategy,” “gathering intelligence,” “marshaling forces,” “imposing sanctions,” “calling for sacrifices,” and on and on. The WAR metaphor highlighted certain realities and hid others. The metaphor was not merely a way of viewing reality; it constituted a license for policy change and political and economic action. [ com quan la dreta qualifica de l’intent de referendum com a cop d’estat]
Metaphors, as we have seen, are conceptual in nature. They are among our principal vehicles for understanding. And they play a central role in the construction of social and political reality. Yet they are typically viewed within philosophy as matters of “mere language,” and philosophical discussions of metaphor have not centered on their conceptual nature, their contribution to understanding, or their function in cultural reality. Instead, philosophers have tended to look at metaphors as out-of-the-ordinary imaginative or poetic linguistic expressions, and their discussions have centered on whether these linguistic expressions can be true. Their concern with truth comes out of a concern with objectivity: truth for them means objective, absolute truth. The typical philosophical conclusion is that metaphors cannot directly state truths, and, if they can state truths at all, it is only indirectly, via some non-metaphorical “literal” paraphrase.
[En quin sentit pot ser veritat una metàfora nova? Ens aporta una nova manera de veure les coses]
Exemple: Let us now ask what is involved in understanding as true the nonconventional metaphor “Life’s . . . a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” This non-conventional metaphor evokes the conventional metaphor LIFE IS A STORY. If we in fact view our lives and the lives of others in this way, then we would take the metaphor as being true. What makes it possible for many of us to see this metaphor as true is that we usually comprehend our life experiences in terms of the LIFE IS A STORY metaphor. We are constantly looking for meaning in our lives by seeking out coherences that will fit some sort of coherent life story. And we constantly tell such stories and live in terms of them. As the circumstances of our lives change, we constantly revise our life stories, seeking new coherence.
Epistemologia, objectivisme i subjectivisme
Any adequate theory of the human conceptual system will have to give an account of how concepts are (1) grounded, (2) structured, (3) related to each other, and (4) defined. So far we have given a provisional account of grounding, structuring, and relations among concepts (subcategorization, metaphorical entailment, part, participant, etc.) for what we take to be typical cases. We have argued, moreover, that most of our conceptual system is metaphorically structured and have given a brief account of what that means.
[ la metàfora es basa en l’experiència i les similaritats – encara que ells ho rebutgen ], l’abstracció i l’homonímia no l’expliquen bé.
Concepts are not defined solely in terms of inherent properties; instead, they are defined primarily in terms of interactional properties.
What we are offering in the experientialist account of understanding and truth is an alternative which denies that subjectivity and objectivity are our only choices. We reject the objectivist view that there is absolute and unconditional truth without adopting the subjectivist alternative of truth as obtainable only through the imagination, unconstrained by external circumstances. The reason we have focused so much on metaphor is that it unites reason and imagination. Reason, at the very least, involves categorization, entailment, and inference. Imagination, in one of its many aspects, involves seeing one kind of thing in terms of another kind of thing—what we have called metaphorical thought. Metaphor is thus imaginative rationality. Since the categories of our everyday thought are largely metaphorical and our everyday reasoning involves metaphorical entailments and inferences, ordinary rationality is therefore imaginative by its very nature. Given our understanding of poetic metaphor in terms of metaphorical entailments and inferences, we can see that the products of the poetic imagination are, for the same reason, partially rational in nature.
[ l’objectivisme erra quan atribueix als objectes propietats independents de la nostra interació i experiència amb ells. El subjectivisme erra quan pretén que els conceptes i la imaginació poden ser arbitraris. ] [això no és nou, Piaget ja parlava d’assimilació i acomodació; és el mateix que en l’evolució i , modifiquem l’entorn i som modificats alhora quan ens hi adaptem]
La importància de les metàfores anb què veiem el món i vivim
How we think metaphorically matters. It can determine questions of war and peace, economic policy, and legal decisions, as well as the mundane choices of everyday life. Is a military attack a “rape,” “a threat to our security,” or “the defense of a population against terrorism”? The same attack can be conceptualized in any of these ways with very different military consequences. Is your marriage a partner-ship, a journey through life together, a haven from the out-side world, a means for growth, or a union of two people into a third entity?
The heart of metaphor is inference. Conceptual metaphor allows inferences in sensory-motor domains (e.g., domains of space and objects) to be used to draw inferences about other domains (e.g., domains of subjective judgment, with concepts like intimacy, emotions, justice, and so on). Because we reason in terms of metaphor, the metaphors we use determine a great deal about how we live our lives.
Resum
The theory of metaphor has come a long way from the humble beginnings presented in this slim volume. Yet, most of the key ideas in this book have been either sustained or developed further by recent empirical research in cognitive linguistics and in cognitive science generally. These key ideas are the following:
- Metaphors are fundamentally conceptual in nature; metaphorical language is secondary.
- Conceptual metaphors are grounded in everyday experience.
- Abstract thought is largely, though not entirely, metaphorical.
- Metaphorical thought is unavoidable, ubiquitous, and mostly unconscious.
- Abstract concepts have a literal core but are extended by metaphors, often by many mutually inconsistent metaphors.
- Abstract concepts are not complete without metaphors. For example, love is not love without metaphors of magic, attraction, madness, union, nurturance, and so on.
- Our conceptual systems are not consistent overall, since the metaphors used to reason about concepts may be inconsistent.
- We live our lives on the basis of inferences we derive via metaphor.