 From an article I wrote in September 2004:
Metaphor is a comparative
device used to assert substantive equivalence or similarity between
something that is somewhat complex and abstract, and something that is
much simpler or more concrete. Examples:
- Business is war or sport; business is 'organic', information has an 'ecology'
- A leader is a country or a company ("Russia says...", "The White House responded...", "ExxonMobil believes...")
- Collectively, the documents of an organization are its
'corporate memory'.
- The change needed in human culture and behaviour is a
metamorphosis from today's larval stage to the future butterfly adult
stage.
- America under Bush is like a family that has been repeatedly brutalized by a drunk father.
- Ideas and beliefs and behaviours can spread like viruses, 'infect' others and even lead to 'epidemic' change.
We use metaphors to make difficult concepts easier to understand. We misuse metaphors to oversimplify and to distort.
George
Lakoff describes how the inability of our brains to conceive things
that are not manifested, directly or metaphorically, in the 'real'
world, explains the attraction and necessity of metaphor:
When
Mark Johnson and I [studied] the cognitive sciences in detail, we
realized that there were three major results that were inconsistent
with almost all of Western philosophy (except for Merleau-Ponty and
Dewey), namely: The mind is inherently embodied. Most thought is
unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.
The differences [when you approach philosophy from a cognitive science
perspective] are differences that matter in your life. Starting with
results from cognitive semantics, we discovered a lot that is new about
the nature of moral systems, about the ways that we conceptualize the
internal structure of the Self, even about the nature of truth... We
are neural beings. Our brains take their input from the rest of out
bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world
thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think
just anything - only what our embodied brains permit.
Metaphor appears to be a neural mechanism that allows us to adapt the
neural systems used in sensory-motor activity to create forms of
abstract reason. If this is correct, as it seems to be, our
sensory-motor systems thus limit the abstract reasoning that we can
perform. Anything we can think or understand is shaped by, made
possible by, and limited by our bodies, brains, and our embodied
interactions in the world.
Read the whole article.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
