Metaphor
Metaphorical Relations between Two Categories or Two Schemas
An interesting aspect of associative memory is that we can be reminded of some things by others in totally different areas of experience.
This happens when aspects of what we are currently experiencing or thinking are somehow correlated to aspects of some other thing in long-term memory Opens in new window. This is a much more common feature of thought than we might initially think (Lakoff and Johnson 1980).
Although no two situations are absolutely identical, we can still make generalizations that function across different situations.
Imagine, for example, learning as a child to use the word “close” both to describe closing your eyes and closing a door. The relation between these two uses of the word “close” requires making a connection between two different types of experience. This way of experiencing one thing in terms of another is referred to as metaphor.
Note that this definition of metaphor is not just limited to literature Opens in new window, and indeed does not necessarily imply the use of language.
Metaphors not couched in natural language are referred to as nonpropositional metaphors. That is, either or both the experience that cues the reminding, and the memory of which one is reminded, while they may or may not be describable in language, do not necessarily originally occur as statement in language Opens in new window.
They may be connections between any kinds of experiences or memories, such as those of sounds, images, and smells, and some of the memories may be implicit (nondeclarative), taking the form of the basic perceptual representations discussed here.
Metaphor is therefore a relationship between two memory structures.
This is true even when we create a metaphor from “direct” experience because our understanding of that experience still comes from long-term memory Opens in new window.
More precisely, a metaphor is a relationship between two categories or two schemas. This relationship has been referred to as a “mapping” of one category or schema onto another (see Lakoff, 1987: 270-278).
For example, if we say “a melody is a path,” we are mapping the image schema of a path onto the more abstract concept of a melody.
Both paths and melodies proceed step by step, and both have a direction, with twists and turns in them. Note, however, that not all of the details of either term in this metaphor map onto the other.
Melodies, for example, do not have anything corresponding to grass growing on them, and paths do not have accompaniments.
Image Schemas
Recent theory has suggested that metaphorical mappings are not arbitrary, but are grounded in fundamental embodied cognitive structures generalized from recurring physical experiences, especially the experience of our own bodies.
These cognitive structures have been referred to as image schemas. Image-schemas are thought to be derived from commonalities in different experiences that seem related; as such, they are believed to form a basis for our conceptual systems, indeed to connect our perceptual experiences and concepts.
Image schemas represent the most stable constancies and structures we all share as human beings, derived from dynamic patterns of interaction with our environment. They may be thought of as a kind of perceptual abstraction. A perceptual abstraction in this sense associates a number of different perceptual experiences into a schema (Barsalou, 1993).
The actual cognitive form that image schemas are thought to take is somewhere between concrete, specific visual images and abstract concepts.
That is, image schemas are often derived from types of situations that we can visually imagine, but that are more abstract than any particular image.
Our understanding of an image schema such as “up” and “down,” for example, is not purely linguistic and involves mental imagery of some sort, although it is not necessarily imagery of specific things.
This is why it may often be difficult to explain the meaning of image schemas using only words. (Try to imagine explaining the meaning of up and down without using some sort of visual images or physical gestures referring to our own bodies.)
Although image schemas are not so abstract that we cannot form any kind of image in relation to them, the image we do form may have components that are not strictly visual. This is another way in which image schemas are different from either visual images or abstract concepts—they can have a kinesthetic component and represent muscular sensations in relation to particular experiences; they can have a particular physical “feel” to them. This suggests that image schemas are at least in part implicit knowledge; hence our understanding of them is often metaphorical.
Although we cannot directly describe our implicit knowledge, it can sometimes be associated with other explicit knowledge we have through metaphor. Indeed, I believe that music itself can be one form of metaphor that may express image schematic implicit knowledge (see Blacking, 1995: 239-242).
Unlike language, image schemas do not consist of arbitrary symbols having little intrinsic relation to what they represent. Rather, image schemas are thought to be directly grounded in perceptual experience (Harnad, 1993); they are nonarbitrary in that they represent experience by drawing directly from perceptual categories.
It is believed that very young infants develop image schemas as their first representations of the world (see Mandler, 1992; Endelman, 1989: 140-148).
The original function of image schemas may be to connect motor sequences together to begin the formation of a coherent picture of the physical world. For instance, our of activities such as falling down, watching other things fall down, lifting things, and watching other things rise, a generalized image schema of up and down could emerge.
Some of these representations may later determine the structure of language. That is, language, as it develops, might structure itself along the lines of preverbal preconceptual structures like image schemas. Image schemas may therefore serve as a bridge between experience and conceptualization.
Among the rudimentary human experiences generalized into image-schematic form are those of up and down, of spatial centeredness, of one event being linked to another through some sort of causal connection, of moving along a path toward a goal, and of containment or “inside” and “outside” (Johnson, 1987).
All of these image schemas require some sort of imaginary “space” in order to make sense, but they need not consist (detailed) discrete images.
So basic are they to our idea of how the world works that they are used not only literally but also metaphorically to represent many other, more abstract types of ideas. We use image schemas many times every day without thinking about it as all (this is of course a property of schemas in general).
For example, when we say, “taxes have gone up,” we are using a metaphor that refers to our gravity-based experience of spatial orientation.
To make it comprehensible, a very abstract and nonphysical concept, a change in taxes, has been referred to in terms of a basic spatial experience that everyone shares and understands, namely, that a pile of things gets physically higher as the number of things in it gets larger. In fact, this type of metaphorical usage of language is very common, and constitutes a major way we understand many different abstract ideas.
Note that the example of an image schema that I have given refers to operations in physical space. This is true of many image schemas. It is as though our conceptual “space” is built on a prior model of physical space, and forces tend to operate in the same way in both kinds of space.
To understand abstract concepts, we must refer to them metaphorically in terms of something more concrete (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: 56-59).
An interesting finding that has recently emerged in relation to the above is that a part of the brain known to be central in establishing the sense of spatial position in many mammals (the hippocampus) also appears to play an important part in establishing long-term memories in human beings.
It is possible that this is another example of an evolutionary phenomenon observed in other cognitive areas—an organism’s ability to adapt old specialized information processing systems to new purposes.
This may explain why we frequently use spatial and physical metaphors to understand more complex abstract concepts. Thus systems of conceptual metaphors can emerge out of preconceptual image schemas, and different kinds of conceptual spaces can be metaphorically structured by referring back to the same image schema.
