The Impasse of Metaphorical Essentialism

1 Introduction

If we review the literature on metaphor study of the past several decades, we witness a spate of theses and monographs on this topic from scholars adhering to different theoretical positions, including the cognitive theory of metaphor, which abandons the earlier socio-historical perspective and has dominated so much of our contemporary discussions of metaphor since the publication in 1980 of Metaphors We Live By. My addition to the already innumerable publications, therefore, calls for explanation. Through the years, Lakoff and Johnson’s cognitive approach has spurred hundreds of papers and books. However, not all these responses are supportive. Major critiques on the cognitive theory can be found in Keller (1998), Haser (2005), and Ding (2008, 2010, 2015). And with a reexamination of the cognitive theory, several queries may naturally arise in readers’ mind:

Is Lakoff and Johnson’s categorization of metaphors sound enough to live up to its ambitious intellectual undertaking in the first place?

Why should conceptual metaphors have priority and superiority over ordinary metaphors?

Are conceptual metaphors empirical or metaphysical?

Is the semiotic movement between tenor and vehicle bidirectional or unidirectional as the cross-domain mapping theory suggests?

Why should the interpretation of a metaphor stop at the threshold of conceptual cross-domain mapping?

In other words, the current state of research on metaphor calls for a serious anatomy of the cognitive theory that hopefully can redress some of the problems that beset us today.

2 The cognitive theory of metaphor

Major arguments of the cognitive theory of metaphor can be found in Lakoff and Johnson (henceforth L/J) (1980), even though Lakoff (1987) further elaborates his theory of categorization and philosophical grounding (internal realism). Taking a psychological point of view and partially influenced by Max Black’s theory on domains (although this is not acknowledged by the authors themselves), L/J (1980) criticize the traditional theories of metaphor (especially the comparison theory) by drawing a distinction between their cognitive approach and traditional ones. From their cognitive perspective, metaphor is a matter of conceptualization rather than rhetoric and our ordinary conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical (L/J 1980: 3). They also criticize traditional views on the distinction between literal and figurative languages. In this way, they hope to draw researchers’ attention away from everyday language so as to concentrate on the role of metaphorical concepts in our overall conceptual system. Like Chomsky, although they may not appreciate such comparison, L/J (1980) also discuss the surface expressions and root concepts of metaphor as well as their cross-domain mapping in the conceptual system. For them, the choices of metaphorical expressions we make are not random; rather, “they are determined by a set of fundamental metaphors or ‘conceptual metaphors’ that lie deep in our collective unconscious” (in Ding 2015: 9). In other words, conceptual metaphors are deemed as a pre-existing schema underlying ordinary metaphorical expressions. More specifically, our everyday metaphors are organized by an idealized cognitive model or ‘gestalt’ (Lakoff 1987: 68).

Lakoff and Johnson reiterate their cognitive theory of metaphor in a second edition of Metaphors We Live By published in 2003. Except for adding some empirical evidence in the afterward, the original content of the book remains unchanged in the new version. In a more recent paper, Lakoff (2008) lists 18 results from the old theory (17 from Metaphors We Live By and one from “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor”, 1993) that he thinks have stood the test of time. However, not all scholars agree with him. Powell (1987), for example, points out that the cognitive theory of metaphor goes to unnecessary lengths to emphasize the ways in which ordinary language metaphors may enter into entailment (or truth-conditional) relationships that are based on propositional content, and that they do not take the subjective basis of meaning into account. Powell (1987) argues that the cognitive theory is only partially different from the traditional Anglo-American theories on metaphor in that it still adopts an objective scientific methodology.

As the cognitive theory grows more “metaphysical” in its research, the number of its critics has increased. In fact, some cognitive linguists themselves (Gibbs et al. 1990; 1995; 1996) have also recognized the need to prove the psychological reality of conceptual metaphor through launching related empirical studies, but the existing research findings are far less than satisfactory. Gibbs and his colleagues (1990; 1996) have carried out numerous experiments to support the idea that conceptual metaphors are the underlying motivation for the understanding of idioms. Their study is sharply challenged by Keysar and Bly (1999), who argue that idioms cannot be used to prove the existence of conceptual metaphors. Dews and Winner (1999) and Giora and Fein (1999) refute the cognitive idea that abstract concepts are understood in terms of concrete ones by holding the point that the processing of literal meaning and non-literal meaning are dependent on salience. Glucksberg and McGlone (1999) point out that interpreting metaphor through the mapping between two domains is inadequate and lacks empirical evidence. Shen (1999) and Titone et al. (1999) further track down some contradictory linguistic data that could not be explained by the cognitive model of cross-domain mapping. While L/J (2003) believe there are at least seven types of evidence derived from various empirical methods, none of them seem to provide an adequate resolution to the questions and problems mentioned above.

3 Through the Peircean looking glass

Lakoff and Johnson (2003[1980]) assume that the core ideas in their cognitive approach are fresh, and they therefore make the following statement in the preface to Metaphor We Live By:

Mark had found that most traditional philosophical views permit metaphor little, if any, role in understanding our world and ourselves. George had discovered linguistic evidence showing that metaphor is pervasive in everyday language and thought – evidence that did not fit any contemporary Anglo-American theory of meaning within either linguistics or philosophy.

(Lakoff & Johnson 2003[1980]: ix)

As a matter of fact, before Lakoff and Johnson, Max Black (1955) had a similar misunderstanding in terms of previous philosophers’ views on metaphor, which might have misled L/J in this respect:

I should like to do something to dispel the mystery that invests the topic; but since philosophers (for all their notorious interest in language) have so neglected the subject, I must get what help I can from the literary critics. They, at least, do not accept the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not commit metaphor’, or assume that metaphor is incompatible with serious thought.

(Black 1955: 273)

These arguments by L/J and Black are certainly not applicable to the American philosopher and semiotician, Charles S. Peirce, who views iconic reasoning essential to our understanding of the world. In fact, Peirce made it very clear a long time ago that our thinking is either indexical (metonymical) or iconic (metaphorical), which also long predates what Lakoff and Johnson have considered as their “most important claim”, i.e., “human thought processes are largely metaphorical” (L/J 2003[1980]: 6).

If we take a long-term view of western philosophy of language, L/J’s idea that metaphor is more than rhetoric is even less “innovative”. As Jakel (1999) has pointed out, there is a long tradition in linguistics and philosophy anticipating the core ideas stated in the cognitive theory of metaphor. Names of the scholars on Jakel’s list include Kant, Blumenberg, Weinrich, and Whorf. In fact, we could go further back in time to Giambattista Vico or even Aristotle on this topic. By contending that metaphorizing well implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in the dissimilar, Aristotle implies the metaphor user’s manipulation over two seemingly unconnected entities, i.e., to make the dissimilar similar. In this process, the metaphor user’s mental association is considered indispensible. This capacity for creative association is further defined and reexamined by Vico (1948) in terms of poetic logic through which the competence of metaphorization plays a vital role in human cognitive activities. Viewing metaphor as a fundamental and primal instrument of thought, Vico recovers the connection between verbal language and the senses. The insights of all these philosophers and linguists on this topic have, to a great extent, lessened the originality of the cognitive approach.

Following Vico, Peirce developed an effective method of meaning interpretation through his theory of the sign. Of all the Peircean semiotic propositions, his trichotomous division of signs into index, icon, and symbol seems to be the most useful and insightful to the study of metaphor whose formation and interpretation is based on iconic reasoning. Peirce referred to this trichotomy as “the most fundamental division of signs” (CP 2.275). For Peirce, metaphor is the result of making links between things or states of affairs on the basis of similarity. He defined this process as “iconic reasoning”, which is one of the two forms of abduction, the other being indexical reasoning. Even after human beings have developed verbal language, they continue to reason iconically, which result in metaphors. One prominent feature of iconic reasoning is that it is open ended and heterogeneous and therefore no particular metaphorical pattern can be said to claim a monopoly over the structuring of our thinking and behavior. Such a theoretical position is quite different from Lakoff and Johnson’s metaphor theory.

Looked at from the angle of Peircean semiotics, the most salient and controversial features of L/J’s cognitive theory of metaphor are as follows:

Lakoff and Johnson presuppose a well-structured gestalt that determines the formation of metaphors. In that sense, their conceptual metaphors are like Plato’s ideas that exist all by themselves and then are realized in different sets of metaphorical expressions. Both of them are theoretical assumptions that are yet to be justified.

L/J’s theory does not make any distinction between icons (metaphors) and symbols (lexical items) so that when they think they are discussing metaphors, they are actually talking about normal words and phrases that no longer require iconic reasoning. Their re-iconification of lexical items is a good exercise for linguists but does not reflect the real process of language use.

L/J’s theory does not pay enough attention to the diversity of metaphorical vehicles, which leads them to the controversial conclusion that we live by certain sets of conceptual metaphors. By taking the position of metaphorical essentialism and experiential determinism, the cognitive theory is incompatible with the polysemous nature of the sign and does not square with the fact of arbitrary iconicity.

By focusing on only a small number of ‘master tropes’, the explanatory power of the cognitive theory of metaphor becomes too limited. We are yet to be convinced that other metaphors are not equally important and that the metaphors deemed relevant by L/J really have the fundamental conceptual significance they assume.

We shall respectively refer to all of these features as this paper develops in the next part.

4 Metaphorical essentialism in the cognitive theory of metaphor

Lakoff and Johnson (2003[1980]) and Lakoff (1987) have criticized what Putnam called “metaphysical realism”, arguing that a new realism that adopts the view of internal consistency should replace that of external reality. However, the internal realism they propose is also based on the acknowledgment of the ontological existence of a certain “reality-in-itself”. By viewing certain master tropes as fundamental and prerequisite schemas that shape human thought, Lakoff and Johnson presumes the ontological existence of some metaphorical concepts. In this sense, their cognitive theory seems to follow the Platonic line of ontological realism, which holds the idea that concepts expressed in a language correspond to real states of things, or affairs that exist independently of language. The following statement, for instance, reveals L/J’s metaphysical notion of conceptual metaphor:

Metaphors as linguistic expressions are possible precisely because there are metaphors in a person’s conceptual system. Therefore, whenever in this book we speak of metaphors, such as ARGUMENT IS WAR, it should be understood that metaphor means metaphorical concept.

(Lakoff & Johnson 2003[1980]: 6)

By contending that “there are metaphors in a person’s conceptual system”, L/J presuppose the ontological existence of a metaphorical concept ‘ARGUMENT IS WAR’ in people’s conceptual system. On the other hand, they also attempt to equate “metaphor” with “conceptual metaphor”, which are very different things. In the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor, the meaning projection of ‘war’ onto ‘argument’ is considered to be fundamental for people to understand the word argument. In that sense, we can say that L/J’s experientialist notion of metaphor is a kind of metaphorical essentialism.

It is interesting to note that Lakoff (1987), when criticizing what he calls “objectivism”, also gives his definition of essentialism as follows:

ESSENTIALISM: Among the properties that things have, some are essential; that is, they are those properties that make the thing what it is, and without which it would not be that kind of thing. Other properties are accidental – that is, they are properties that things happen to have, not properties that capture the essence of the thing.

(Lakoff 1987: 161)

He then describes essentialism as a “metaphysical assumption” accompanying the “objectivist metaphysics” he refutes. Ironically, what he had shown us in the conceptual metaphor theory is also an essentialist point of view. Such a metaphorical essentialism is, however, incompatible with the polysemous nature of the sign. For example, Lakoff and Johnson have postulated LIFE IS A JOURNEY as a master trope, but the fact is that life as a topic can be discussed in relation to numerous other vehicles such as book, stage, poetry, and wine among which no particular category has priority over others. We are yet to be convinced that LIFE IS A JOURNEY is a conceptual metaphor while LIFE IS A BOOK is not. Keller (1998) is right in contending that linguistic signs “are not a prerequisite for our communicative attempts; they are their (usually unintended) result” (Keller 1998: vii). Indeed, no particular sign is so fundamental to have the monopoly over our mind, and those “conceptual metaphors” are merely results rather than prior conditions of our communication.

At the most general level, L/J’s metaphorical essentialism entails their following assumptions on this issue:

1. A well-structured gestalt structures people’s thought and determines the formation of metaphor.

2. There exist universal categories with ordered hierarchies for one gestalt.

3. There is a coherent system under every conceptual metaphor.

As pointed out earlier, Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of metaphor presupposes a well-structured gestalt and such a pre-existing gestalt intrinsically requires universal categories with ordered hierarchies and a coherent system of signification under one conceptual metaphor. However, all of these assumptions are problematic and deserve close scrutiny. To begin with, Lakoff and Johnson make it very clear in the following statement, and also many others, that some metaphors structure our mind:

Primarily on the basis of linguistic evidence, we have found that most of our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical in nature. And we have found a way to begin to identify in detail just what the metaphors are that structure how we perceive, how we think, and what we do.

(Lakoff & Johnson 2003[1980]: 4)

This is actually where Lakoff and Johnson’s mistake begins. They try to locate a small number of metaphors that structure what we perceive and do. The following is an example they use to show how the structuring happens:

Many of the things we do in arguing are partially structured by the concept of war. Though there is no physical battle, there is a verbal battle, and the structure of an argument— attack, defense, counterattack, etc.—reflects this. It is in this sense that the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor is one that we live by in this culture; it structures the actions we perform in arguing.

(Lakoff & Johnson 2003[1980]: 4)

In actual situations, however, many of the things we do and perceive in arguing are also structured by many other objects or events than war. For this simple reason, the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor is not that important, at least no more important than other ordinary metaphors that have similar a cognitive function. Lakoff and Johnson’s subsequent statement about argument and dance below further shows that they tend to define something on the basis of their own presupposition or imagination:

Imagine a culture where an argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, experience them differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently. But we would probably not view them as arguing at all: they would simply be doing something different. It would seem strange even to call what they were doing “arguing.” Perhaps the most neutral way of describing this difference between their culture and ours would be to say that we have a discourse form structured in terms of battle and they have one structured in terms of dance.

(Lakoff & Johnson 2003[1980]: 5)

Once again, Lakoff and Johnson’s statement does not hold true. As is pointed out by Haser (2005) and Ding (2015), dance can mean many different things, including those that are negative or undesirable. The notion of dance is, in fact, “a complex entity that consists of a large number of semantic components and any one of them or any combination of them could be selected as relevant to a particular situation of verbal communication” (Ding 2015: 10). Likewise, people may view argument in various other ways like seeing it as a futile activity, and no culture is so limited as to view argument only from one single perspective. Thus, L/J’s example provides the ground for an argument against their own hypothesis.

Regarding the issue of categorization, Lakoff and Johnson have a tendency to collect concepts and expressions together so as to form a universal category. For instance, they categorize all the following expressions under one ‘universal’ category ARGUMENT IS WAR:

To give some idea of what it could mean for a concept to be metaphorical and for such a concept to structure an everyday activity, let us start with the concept ARGUMENT and the conceptual metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR. This metaphor is reflected in our everyday language by a wide variety of expressions:

1. ARGUMENT IS WAR

2. Your claims are indefensible.

3. He attacked every weak point in my argument.

4. His criticisms were right on target.

5. I demolished his argument.

6. I’ve never won an argument with him.

7. You disagree? Okay, shoot!

8. If you use that strategy, he’ll wipe you out.

9. He shot down all of my arguments. (Lakoff & Johnson 2003[1980]: 4)

There are, however, several problems with these examples in the above statement. To be more specific, the first example could be about basketball, and so is the first half of the second example. The second half of the second example could be about shooting, while the third example could be about construction and so on. Even if all these expressions can be put into the same category as related to war, they are not necessarily reflections of a pre-existing category. Rather, “ARGUMENT IS WAR” is an abstraction of what these expressions have in common, that is, a meta-linguistic construction done by scholars. Let’s take the “HUMAN IS ANIMAL” metaphor as another example. When someone says “David Wong always wags his tail when his boss comes around”, will he or she have to go back to the “HUMAN IS ANIMAL” pattern to find the lower category “HUMAN IS MAMMAL” in order to understand the “HUMAN IS DOG” metaphor at the lowest level of the hierarchical system? There is no evidence that one particular way of linking things takes precedence over others or is in any way superior to them. This further explains the futility of the so-called universal categories.

In fact, many scholars have already noticed the arbitrary nature of human categorization. Hayek (1956) compared the grouping of things and events with the naming of them, and stressed the arbitrariness of categorization:

It is anything but self-evident that things and events are grouped together in the same way as they are with the names that we impose upon them; much experience is latent in the inclusion of essentially different things under the same name.

(Hayek 1956: 517)

In line with Hayek, Keller (1998) made a more detailed and insightful argument on human categorization:

The categories formed through our communicative practice survive according to the degree of their functional suitability within the respective culture. Logically, nothing would stop us from creating a category that includes all living things that lay edible eggs: chickens and other birds, sea urchins, ants, sturgeons and other fish. We could also create a category of all things that can be transported by bicycle. In our language, there are no words that generate these classifications. This is not because of the “ridiculousness” of such categories, but solely because there is evidently no recurring need for them in our form of life. Words and concepts are (in a certain sense) tools for communication and thought. Tools are a means of providing standard solutions for recurrent problems. Logically and technically, it is entirely possible that there be a tool for getting tennis balls out of milk bottles. It is solely because a solution to this problem is too infrequently required that no such instrument exists. If there were cultures with religions that worship egg-laying animals, or systems of transportation in which bicycles are important, the appropriate vocabulary and correspondent categories would have arisen in those cultures. From a logical perspective, the categories produced by a natural language often are rather confused and crazy. What counts in evolutionary processes is not logic, but utility. Linguistic evolution is ad hoc and shamelessly utilitarian.

(Keller 1998: 65)

What Keller emphasizes here is that human categorization is culture-specific and subject to utilitarian considerations, and effective categories are established inter-subjectively. In other words, there are no such things as absolute universal categories. As a matter of fact, Keller’s “functional suitability” may be illuminated with Peirce’s categorization of signs into index, icon, and symbol, which provides an effective typology for the cognitive approach to metaphor study. As previously mentioned, Lakoff and Johnson do not make any distinction between icons (metaphors), and symbols (lexical items). Consequently, they often have to de-symbolize (or re-iconify) dead metaphorical expressions such as you are wasting my time and you need to budget your time in order to back up their conceptual metaphor “TIME IS MONEY”. These expressions, however, are actually lexical items and therefore symbols in the Peircean sense, that is, metaphors that have already been conventionalized or lexicalized in the English language, and no one experiences any active metaphorical association in mind while using them. Their re-iconification of symbolic signs may be a good exercise for linguists but does not reflect the real process of language use. Thus, the Peircean trichotomy exposes how fuzzy the definition of metaphor is in L/J’s cognitive theory of metaphor.

Also problematic is the assumed coherent system of signification structured under one conceptual metaphor. For instance, for the conceptual metaphor “ARGUMENT IS WAR”, Lakoff and Johnson assume a systematic projection from “war” to “argument”.

We saw in the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor that expressions from the vocabulary of war, e.g., attack a position, indefensible, strategy, new line of attack, win, gain ground, etc., form a systematic way of talking about the battling aspects of arguing.

(Lakoff & Johnson 2003[1980]: 6)

This is, however, not true. Words and expressions like “attack”, “win”, “indefensible”, “strategy”, and “gain ground” are not limited to the vocabulary of war and therefore cannot form a stable system in terms of war. The only possibility of them being systematic is that there is a pre-existing gestalt of war in Lakoff and Johnson’s minds, in light of which they interpret these words and expressions. In fact, Lakoff and Johnson do discuss in detail the systematicity and the entailment relationship between metaphorical concepts and frequently mention what they call “coherent system”, as is stated in the following two paragraphs:

The metaphorical concepts TIME IS MONEY, TIME IS A RESOURCE, and TIME IS A VALUABLE COMMODITY form a single system based on subcategorization, since in our society money is a limited resource and limited resources are valuable commodities. These subcategorization relationships characterize entailment relationships between the metaphors. TIME IS MONEY entails that TIME IS A LIMITED RESOURCE, which entails that TIME IS A VALUABLE COMMODITY. We are adopting the practice of using the most specific Metaphorical concept, in this case TIME IS MONEY, to characterize the entire system. …This is an example of the way in which metaphorical entailments can characterize a coherent system of metaphorical concepts and a corresponding coherent system of metaphorical expressions for those concepts.

(Lakoff & Johnson 2003[1980]: 9)

What is being described here may seem coherent and systematic, but it is the result of contingent language choices. Concepts like “TIME IS MONEY”, “TIME IS A LIMITED RESOURCE”, and “TIME IS A VALUABLE COMMODITY” do not construct a coherent system; rather, they are just expressions that Lakoff and Johnson collate under one heading, which can prove nothing but the fact that one can find some commonalities among a group of metaphors. In fact, metaphors we use in real life situations do not form a systematic whole but are separate episodes of our understanding of the outside world. Thus, systematicity is not a condition for the formation of metaphor. As has been argued above, people can view things from various perspectives rather than from one angle. In terms of a human lifespan, time is often compared with limited resources. But from the perspective of a person who is anxiously waiting for something to happen, time is viewed as being eternal. Lakoff and Johnson merely emphasize one angle and deem this angle to be fundamental and a priori for others.

Looked at from the Peircean perspective, L/J’s metaphorical essentialism is partially caused by the logical confusion of using the inductive results achieved by earlier empiricist linguists as the starting point of their hypothetical deduction. For instance, they repeatedly highlight “TIME IS MONEY” as a systematic structure that subsumes a series of “related” metaphorical concepts such as “TIME IS A LIMITED RESOURCE”, while ignoring examples of “time is life”, “time is a snail”, or other possible metaphors. In this way they turn the simple inductive result “TIME IS MONEY” into an a priori schema. And because they deduce from an inductive result, their hypothesis on metaphor becomes almost unfalsifiable. What they ignore is that metaphor is actually a result of iconic reasoning in which the same metaphorical meaning can be expressed through diverse vehicles. To convey the meaning of “John is tall” metaphorically, for example, one can choose vehicles such as tree, mountain, wire pole, giraffe, Yao Ming (the Chinese basketball player), or even a Titan, who all possess the semantic marker of ‘being tall’. Therefore, we may hear people say John is a cedar, John is as tall as an Alp, John is like a wire pole, John is a giraffe, John is a Yao Ming, John is a living Titan, etc. As such, the vehicles for expressing tallness can be living creatures, lifeless objects, or even imaginary figures. Clearly, no conceptual metaphor is needed. From this perspective, the conceptual metaphor theory is both unproductive and unnecessary. Of course, different vehicles in the above examples may entail some other associative meanings besides “tallness”, but on the single issue of “John is tall”, all the above vehicles highlight the same metaphorical meaning “tallness” in a specific context and hide other semantic markers they may have respectively.

Due to the unproductive meta-linguistic nature of conceptual metaphors, Lakoff and Johnson gradually lose their point on what their “meta-” is for. In fact, their logic in the cognitive theory often leads to puzzling conclusions. To take the conceptual metaphor “MORE IS BETTER” as an exemplified case, they frequently refer to this master trope and provide some “evidence”, many of which are lexical items (lexicalized metaphors) rather than real metaphors, to prove its ontological existence. If we think their argument through to the end, however, we would also come to the conclusion of “LESS IS BETTER” since “less” surpasses “more” in the English idiom less is more. Similarly, the Chinese traditional art of ink painting also holds the philosophy of “less is more” as its golden doctrine, in which “less” also surpassed “more”. This proves that “MORE IS BETTER” is not a universal concept that takes the precedence of individual minds. There is a Chinese idiom saying when a thing is rare, it becomes precious ‘物以稀为贵’ which also contradicts this conceptual metaphor that Lakoff and Johnson hold so dear. Since the two concepts “MORE IS BETTER” and “LESS IS BETTER” coexist and are equally important in both Chinese and English culture, we should not emphasize one concept while neglecting the other. Instead, whether more is better or less is better is determined by a particular mind in a specific situation, and making such abstraction as “MORE IS BETTER” a rather meaningless and unproductive work.

As stated above, conceptual metaphors in Lakoff and Johnson (2003[1980]) are results of their essentialist view rather than evidence of universal cognitive patterns. They are merely meta-linguistic abstractions that tell us nothing but a dry and empty formula “A IS B”. In this way, they divert people’s attention away from the social and cultural context in which metaphors are rooted, and spend their time collecting abstract conceptual metaphors that are not very important. The following paragraph clearly shows how empty and meaningless those conceptual metaphors are (some are not even metaphors):

We saw in our discussion of the IDEAS ARE FOOD metaphor that, although the metaphor was based on similarities, the similarities themselves were not inherent but were based on other metaphors – in particular, THE MIND IS A CONTAINER, IDEAS ARE OBJECTS, and the CONDUIT metaphors.

(Lakoff & Johnson 2003[1980]: 214)

As elsewhere, “IDEAS ARE FOOD” is not a metaphor; rather, it is a metalinguistic category constructed by Lakoff and Johnson. The same is true for “THE MIND IS A CONTAINER” and “IDEAS ARE OBJECTS”. Indeed, what makes the cognitive metaphor theory an efficient tool for abstracting meta-linguistic categories is precisely what makes it less suited to found a productive theory of metaphor, less able to interpret the process of metaphorization, and less able to account for the factors and relations that constitute the metaphorical meaning.

5 Coda

To conclude, I wish to reiterate the following points:

First, conceptual metaphor theory as a form of metaphorical essentialism is in contradiction with the polysemous nature of the sign. To be more specific, vehicular diversity and multivalency are two important features of metaphor that cast serious doubts on the hypothesis of ‘conceptual metaphors’ which, being meta-metaphorical constructs, can tell us nothing but a dry and empty formula “A is B”.

Second, there are no universal categories that determine our way of speaking and writing: Conceptual metaphors are shown to be superfluous by abundant variations at all levels of categorization and conceptualization, which lies at the heart of human cognition.

Last but not least, it should be pointed out that metaphorical thinking is not determined by some unconscious neurological structures presumed by Lakoff and Johnson. What is missing from their cognitive theory of metaphor is a structural space for dynamic interpretation on the part of metaphor users. Peirce’s theory of the sign, on the other hand, can remedy this deficiency through introducing the concept of “interpretant” as a mediating thirdness, where innumerable semantic features of objects or life situations are rhizomatically linked on the basis of encyclopedic knowledge shared by members of a particular culture. Dependent on the logic of similarity, metaphor creates new symbols and novel concepts, thus serving as an important vehicle for ever-changing communicative situations.