Metaphors We Live By

by George Lakoff; Mark Johnson

• ISBN13: 9780226468006
• ISBN10: 0226468003
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-12-19
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Summary

The now-classicMetaphors We Live Bychanged our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them.In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.

Author Biography

George Lakoff is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of, among other books, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things and Moral Politics, both published by the University of Chicago Press. Mark Johnson is the Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon. He is the author of The Body in the Mind and Moral Imagination, both published by the University of Chicago Press. Johnson and Lakoff have also coauthored Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought.

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Concepts We Live Bye

The Systematicity of Metaphorical Concepts

Metaphorical Systematicity: Highlighting and Hiding

Orientational Metaphors

Metaphor and Cultural Coherence

Ontological Metaphors

Personification

Metonymy

Challenges to Metaphorical Coherence

Some Further Examples

The Partial Nature of Metaphorical Structuring

How Is Our Conceptual System Grounded?

The Grounding of Structural Metaphors

Causation: Partly Emergent and Partly Metaphorical

The Coherent Structuring of Experience

Metaphorical Coherence

Complex Coherences across Metaphors

Some Consequences for Theories of Conceptual Structure

Definition and Understanding

How Metaphor Can Give Meaning to Form

New Meaning

The Creation of Similarity

Metaphor, Truth, and Action

Truth

The Myths of Objectivism and Subjectivism

The Myth of Objectivism in Western Philosophy and Linguistics

How Metaphor Reveals the Limitations of the Myth of Objectivism

Some Inadequacies of the Myth of Subjectivism

The Experientialist Alternative: Giving New Meaning to the Old Myths

Understanding Afterword References

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