Philosophy in the Flesh (review)

This is a book with a good idea, poorly executed. Roughly, Lakoff and Johnson’s idea is that the categories of cognition are structured by the contingent facts of our embodied situation. The ground of conceptual reasoning is to be found in bodily experience, which lends coherence to abstract thought by means of a metacognitive mapping. L & J call this process metaphor and make it fundamental to a whole philosophy. Metaphor, they argue, is a neglected but important process at the heart of conceptual thought. But although the basic idea is true and interesting, skeptics won’t be convinced for substantive as well as stylistic reasons. And those like me, already in basic agreement, will find it even more frustrating.

L & J are primarily interested in a particular kind of metaphor which has sometimes been called ‘root metaphor’. Whole conceptual and discursive fields are often structured by a single underlying metaphorical relation which generates multiple inferences and secondary metaphors. In the text, a favored example of root metaphor is Life is a journey. By conceptualizing life in terms of a journey, we adopt a heuristic device to aid reasoning and discourse. A whole set of relations which are meaningful for journeys becomes so for life as well: She’s in her own private cul-de-sac, I’m spinning my wheels, We’re at a crossroads, and so forth. The authors argue persuasively that root metaphors are not merely fanciful ways of speaking. Rather, they function as cognitive templates which are used in the construction of new mental representations and which play an active role in reasoning about new conceptual domains. If you wish to draw inferences in a field which is largely unknown to you or very abstract, try to think about it in terms of something concrete and familiar. L & J rightly believe that this is an important clue to the nature of embodied cognition.

Next, the authors generalize this notion to include metacognitive projections from perceptual representations to abstract concepts. Metacognition can be understood as a second-order mechanism which operates on the cognitive system itself rather than directly on first-order representations (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). Root metaphor, they argue, is not only operative between concepts but also across the perceptual and conceptual domains. Relations which hold among physical objects such as containment, force, and path, also subtend our representations of abstract ideas. Even logical relations like entailment ultimately derive their structure from our experience in concrete contexts. Thus, the contingent features of our embodied situation function as a kind of schematism for conceptual cognition. Because the structure of embodied experience is a human universal, metaphorical projections rooted therein are the primitive, prelinguistic, cross-cultural source for conceptual content. L & J call these embodied universal ‘basic metaphors’.

Apart from the neo-Kantian element just described, the approach to metaphor in Philosophy in the flesh owes much to that of Max Black (1962). L & J propound variations both on the notion that metaphors evoke a system of associated commonplaces and, more importantly, that metaphors can generate models for less well-known domains of thought. In the text, Exhibit A is the computational model of mind, which the authors construe as a root metaphor which has guided reasoning in cognitive science for over 30 years. Interpreting metaphors as models clearly shows how metaphorical reasoning can have an important role in scientific theory building and philosophical analysis.

But although they invoke this modeling function of metaphor, L & J don’t emphasize its productive and creative dimension nor its value in the hands of the right scientist. They characterize basic metaphors as unconscious and automatic. A fairly rigid structural determinism ensues. Most cognition, the authors believe, should be understood as a surface reflection of the underlying basic metaphors that drive it. This is true both of everyday cognition and theoretical discourse. Like latter-day psychoanalysts, L & J spend several hundred pages unmasking the root metaphors which have dominated the minds of unwitting philosophers. The works of Plato...