Raymond W. Gibbs Why Do Some People Dislike Conceptual Metaphor Theory?
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Raymond W. Gibbs University of California at Santa Cruz Why Do Some People Dislike Conceptual Metaphor heory? Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) is the dominant force in the contemporary world of interdisciplinary metaphor studies. Over the past thirty years, scholars working within the CMT framework have gathered an impressive body of empirical research using a variety of linguistic, psychological, and computational modeling methods that supports key parts of the theory. However, CMT has also been widely been criticized – both as a theory of metaphor use and for its claims about the embodied, metaphorical character of abstract thought. This article describes some of the reasons people dislike CMT and suggests ways that CMT scholars may alter some people’s misunderstandings and address their legitimate concerns about the theory. Key words: conceptual metaphor theory (criticisms), embodied cognition, psycholinguistics, metaphor identification, inferring conceptual metaphors. 1. IN RODUC ION The thirty years since conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) first came onto the metaphor scene has been a period of intense theoretical and empirical activity, as scholars from many academic disciplines e.g., psychology, linguistics, philosophy, literature, law, marketing, politics, nursing, music have investigated the myriad ways e.g., language processing, reasoning, decision-making, memory, learning, concepts, emotion that metaphor shapes language and thought. Although the idea that metaphor may be part of thought and not just language has been around for centuries1, Lakoff and Johnson‘s 1980 book Metaphors We Live By first defined what counts as a ”conceptual‘ metaphor and provided an empirical method for uncovering conceptual metaphor from analysis of everyday language. The vast interdisciplinary literature suggests that CMT has become the dominant perspective on metaphor. It has touched dozens of academic fields and topics. Yet there are many skeptical questions about CMT from D Address for correspondence: Dept. of Psychology, Social Sciences 2, Room 367, UC Santa Cruz, 11 6 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA 9 064 USA; email: [email protected]. WHY DO SOME PEOPLE DISLIKE CMT? | 15 critics, including people whose research has otherwise little to do with metaphor (e.g., Murphy 1996, Pinker 2007). This article explores some of these criticisms, describes possible reasons for negative reactions to the theory, and suggests ways that CMT scholars may address continuing misunderstandings and legitimate concerns. I do this primarily from the perspective of cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics: fields that aim to offer a realistic, psychological account of speaking, understanding, thinking, and acting in metaphorical ways. 2. )E IMPAC O, CM CMT has had major impact on four broad concerns in the humanities and cognitive sciences. First, CMT has played a significant part in the rise of cognitive linguistics with its efforts to offer a new way of thinking about linguistic structure and behaviour. Abandoning the traditional generative approach to linguistics, which embraces autonomy of language from mind, cognitive linguistics explicitly seeks out connections between language and cognition and, more deeply, language and experiential action. This new vision of linguistics stresses the importance of incorporating empirical findings from a wide variety of cognitive and biological disciplines to create a theoretical description of language. CMT has been especially significant in showing in concrete detail something about the contents of linguistic meaning and the substance of fundamental abstract concepts in terms of ”image schemas‘. CMT provides a substantive alternative to classic modular views of language that mostly worry about the architectural qualities of isolated language devices. It shows how the study of metaphor offers insights into the overall unity of human conceptual structures, bodily experience, and the communicative functions of language. Second, CMT offers both a theoretical framework and an empirical method for understanding the pervasiveness of metaphorical language and thought across a wide range of cognitive domains and cultural and linguistic environments. The traditional view of metaphor claims that metaphorical figures express temporary, ”one shot‘ construals of objects and ideas that do not impact the fundamental, literal contents of human thought and language. Metaphor may be extraordinarily useful for thinking about ideas in new ways and communicating these thoughts in a vivid manner, yet human knowledge is primarily constituted in literal terms. CMT, on the other hand, demonstrates that metaphor is neither a relatively rare, purely linguistic phenomenon nor simply characterized as a pragmatic aspect of language use. Instead, work originating in cognitive linguistics and extending to many other fields has demonstrated that metaphor is properly recognized as a fundamental scheme of thought (Gibbs 2008; Kovecses 2002, 2005) serving many cognitive and social ideological functions (Gibbs 2008). Third, the claim that significant parts of abstract thinking are partly motivated by metaphorical mappings between diverse knowledge domains has altered the scholarly conception of the relationship between thought and language. Prior to Lakoff and Johnson (1980), most discussions of how language WHY DO SOME PEOPLE DISLIKE CMT? | 16 shapes thought focused primarily on questions relating to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, particularly within the domain of colour. Cognitive science research in the 1960s and ”70s demonstrated an increasing interest in semantic memory, showing how conceptual knowledge was both necessary for language understanding and analyzable in various structural formats (Norman & Rumelhart 1975, Schank & Abelson 1977). However, this work gave most emphasis to the architecture of conceptual knowledge and far less to the actual contents of what people know. Most notably, there were few attempts explicitly to model highly abstract knowledge domains. CMT provided a way to think about how abstract concepts are established and how they influence different domains of human thought, as well as ordinary language use and understanding. Finally, especially in the last 20 years, CMT has played a leading role in what Lakoff and Johnson have termed (1999) the ”second revolution‘ in cognitive science: namely, interest in the study of embodied cognition. In particular, cognitive linguistic analyses of language and gesture and psycholinguistics research have played a prominent role in showing the significant degree to which metaphorical concepts are rooted in recurring patterns of bodily activity, serving as source domains for people‘s metaphorical understanding of many abstract concepts. The great irony is that metaphor, rather than emerging only from rare and transcendent imaginative thought, provides excellent evidence for the embodied foundations of abstract thinking and action (Gibbs 2006a, Lakoff & Johnson 1999). CMT has significantly enhanced understanding of the dynamic links between bodily experience, pervasive patterns of thought, culture, and linguistic structure and behaviour. I am willing to argue that no single theoretical perspective in all of cognitive science has as much explanatory power as does CMT. No matter what one may believe about its value, one clearly must acknowledge that CMT has brought metaphor centre stage, to the highest levels of theoretical discussion in cognitive science. 3. )E EMPIRICA- S A US O, CM Over the years, proponents of CMT have collected an amazing array of empirical evidence that, they claim, supports conceptual metaphor. Cognitive linguistics especially maintains that there are, at the very least, nine broad areas of research whose findings establish the cognitive reality of entrenched metaphorical thought (Lakoff & Johnson 2003). These include systematic patterns of conventional expressions across a number domains and languages (both spoken and signed), lexical generalizations, generalizations across novel cases, historical change, gesture, child language acquisition, metaphorical discourse, psycholinguistic findings, and neural computational models of metaphor.2 This collection of findings and the diverse methods used in conducting the research e.g., standard linguistic analyses, a [ . D WHY DO SOME PEOPLE DISLIKE CMT? | 17 corpora studies, psychological experiments, computational modeling provide CMT with a strong empirical base, according to most of its proponents. At the same time, CMT from the earliest stages of development to the present has been the focus of tremendous critical scrutiny. Both advocates and critics have raised numerous questions about its empirical adequacy as a theory of metaphor and its broader theoretical claims on the relations between minds, language, bodies, and culture. In some academic quarters, CMT is ridiculed, dismissed, or ignored (Haser 2005, Pinker 2007, McGlone 2007). The reasons for these reactions are complex but partly stem, in my view, from a failure to read the growing body of research on CMT. One difficulty with many of the debates is that critics seem not to have read much beyond Metaphors We Live By; they have only a cursory understanding of more contemporary versions of CMT and the empirical evidence supporting them. Critics typically attack only Lakoff and Johnson (1980)3, never bothering to delve into the huge literature that has applied their ideas to uncovering metaphorical concepts in a vast number of domains. Nevertheless,