Metaphors We Live by

by Lakoff, George

• ISBN13: 9780226468013
• ISBN10: 0226468011
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-04-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

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	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
1. Concepts We Live By	3	(4)
2. The Systematicity of Metaphorical Concepts	7	(3)
3. Metaphorical Systematicity: Highlighting and Hiding	10	(4)
4. Orientational Metaphors	14	(8)
5. Metaphor and Cultural Coherence	22	(3)
6. Ontological Metaphors	25	(8)
7. Personification	33	(2)
8. Metonymy	35	(6)
9. Challenges to Metaphorical Coherence	41	(5)
10. Some Further Examples	46	(6)
11. The Partial Nature of Metaphorical Structuring	52	(4)
12. How Is Our Conceptual System Grounded?	56	(5)
13. The Grounding of Structural Metaphors	61	(8)
14. Causation: Partly Emergent and Partly Metaphorical	69	(8)
15. The Coherent Structuring of Experience	77	(10)
16. Metaphorical Coherence	87	(10)
17. Complex Coherences across Metaphors	97	(9)
18. Some Consequences for Theories of Conceptual Structure	106	(9)
19. Definition and Understanding	115	(11)
20. How Metaphor Can Give Meaning to Form	126	(13)
21. New Meaning	139	(8)
22. The Creation of Similarity	147	(9)
23. Metaphor, Truth, and Action	156	(3)
24. Truth	159	(26)
25. The Myths of Objectivism and Subjectivism	185	(10)
26. The Myth of Objectivism in Western Philosophy and Linguistics	195	(15)
27. How Metaphor Reveals the Limitations of the Myth of Objectivism	210	(13)
28. Some Inadequacies of the Myth of Subjectivism	223	(3)
29. The Experientialist Alternative: Giving New Meaning to the Old Myths	226	(3)
30. Understanding	229	(10)
Afterword	239	(2)
References	241	(2)
Afterword, 2003	243