THE ANATOMY OF SOCIAL METAPHOR

Robert N. St. Clair, University of Louisville

 

Introduction

For years, scholars did not place much emphasis on value of metaphorical thinking.  Philosophers, for example, argued that such structures are merely figures of speech that have no value in logical thought.  They considered the literal use of language to be of great value and dismissed any serious consideration of metaphor, metonymy, and other figures of speech.  This pejorative attitude towards metaphor has been around for over two millennia.  This is why many scholars are surprised to discover that recently the second generation of cognitive linguists (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) have challenged these trite assumptions about metaphors and other forms of figurative speech (Ortony, 1994).  Why did this change in attitude take place?  What events led to this change of mind among contemporary scholars?   

As noted previously, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) shared their innovative ideas about metaphor in an influential book, Metaphors We Live By.  In that publication, they argued that metaphors play an important role in cognition.  People think metaphorically. They use analogies in creating their thoughts. Furthermore, these metaphors are responsible for the creation of symbolic networks around which people organize their lives. Other scholars have even taken these assumptions further and wenton to argue that metaphors stand behind the theoretical models of the natural sciences (Jones, 1982), and that metaphors even orchestrate historical movements by creating common social systems of belief (Brown, 1977). Furthermore, metaphors can be shown to provide a substantial role in the epistemological foundations of social systems (St. Clair, 2004).

 

METAPHOR OF THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING

In order to understand how a metaphor can encapsulate a whole age, one must turn to the writings of Arthur Lovejoy (1936).  He maintains that the whole social structure of the Middle Ages could be readily summarized by one historical metaphor, “the great chain of being.” The genesis of this metaphor, he noted, can be found in Plato's distinction between this world of material beings and the other world of spiritual forms. 

This world of material beings, he explains, consists of an unstable, imperfect, and evil realm, which is always in the process of decaying.  But, the other world is a realm that is not only stable, perfect, and good, it is also eternal.  Lovejoy contends that this dichotomy between the two worlds was visualized by the metaphor of the Great Chain of Being; and this spatial root metaphor dominated from the rise of the Middle Ages and down to the late eighteenth century.  The void between these two systems, Lovejoy explains, was gradually transformed into a continuum that was occupied by an infinite number of linkages that were arranged in a hierarchical order.  This continuum ranged on the lowest level from the exiguous or from the most meager kinds of existents, through every possible grade of beings, to the highest possible kind of creature, which is called the ens perfectissimum (the most perfect being).  Embedded in this metaphor is a cast system dominated by the clergy.  This caste system was called the three earthly estates.

 

 

It was this cardinal or root metaphor of spatial concatenation that dominated medieval life and kept the great mass of individuals within their social and spiritual place in the great order of things.  The Pope, needless to mention, who ruled this theocracy, was deemed to be a greater being, an ecclesiarch, and his position was superior to those of the order of the cardinals beneath him; and, the cardinals were also judged to be higher in the ecclesiology than the numerous Priests and acolytes who worked beneath their command. Obviously, the disenfranchised, the poor, the weak, and the lame were at the bottom of this plenitude of beings.  This idea may not have been readily apparent in the social fabric of the fifth century, but it was to be eventually instituted and legitimated in the writings Augustine, the church's philosophical representative.  He argued in logical terms that this was God's plan, for He did not make all people equal.  Another philosophical representative of the church was Thomas Aquinas who also affirmed this same principle of plenitude in his Summa Theologica, viz., the universe is a continuum of beings. But, the concept was not limited to theologians. It can be found among scientists such as Roger Bacon who referred to the earth as the Middle Kingdom, a place between Heaven and Hell.  He noted that the top of the chain of creation is where the higher beings dwelled and the bottom of creation where the dregs and baser elements of humanity sank, an in between these two there exists the Middle Kingdom of earth.  This idea remained after the Middle Ages as evidenced by the writings of Montaigne.  In his essays, he describes man's dwelling as a place of filth and mire. He infers that this is because humans dwell on the lower edges of the world, a place that is closer to the realm of sin and depravity — the lower realm of Hell.  Hence the world located in "the bottom story of the house" (Lovejoy, 1936: 102).                      

What is significant about such root or cardinal metaphors is that they enable students of sociology, linguistics, and social history to gain reasonable insights into the use of symbols within various societies and how they are manifested and legitimized through time.  This informative role of metaphor in divulging social structures and in explicating their associated values within an epistemological system is the focus of this expository treatise. But, this peregrination into metaphorical worlds requires a few necessary excursions into related fields of thought.

 

CONCEPTUAL EXPLANATIONS

Prior to an explication of the root metaphors, it is necessary to discuss some important background assumptions and concepts reported in Chapter One that are related to this investigation.  The first of these assumptions deals with the dichotomy between rhetoric and dialectics.  In the annals of scientific historiography, they have interesting implications for the study of root metaphors in both positivistic and phenomenological models of science.  Rhetoric, it can be argued, administers the status quo. It has to do with the legitimized and formalized structures of a current epistemological system.  It presents the current socially constructed reality.  Dialectics, on the other hand, is an attempt to break out of the current system of belief.  New metaphors are engendered in the domain of dialectics and not in rhetoric.  They emerge because the old language and its epistemological constructs fail when a new social reality needs to be articulated; metaphors provide this linguistic role.  Consequently, dead metaphors belong to rhetoric; and, new metaphors belong to dialectics.

Another important concept, which requires some elaboration and illustration, is the idea of the root metaphor and its related terminology, a vocabulary of motives.  This preliminary section will include numerous examples of how metaphors form the basis of more complex structures by bringing together numerous related concepts that form a coherent semantic domain, as for example, the metaphor of growth.  The main concept provides a canopy or a semantic label that is referred to as a root or cardinal metaphor.  The related lexical items under this archetypal label are characterized as the vocabulary of motives.  In other words, the metaphor itself provides the semantic domain (plant growth) and the vocabulary of motive forms the various components within that domain (the vocabulary of motives of leaves, branches, roots, buds, and flowers). This use of metaphor for the organization of knowledge is significant in the area of literary expression where the root metaphor is captured by the title of a novel and where this overriding theme is further explicated by the various chapters of the book which deal specifically with the various aspects of this metaphor.  But, one does not have to look towards literature for a clear understanding of this phenomenon.  It can be found readily in the scientific writings of some sociologists such as Erving Goffman who openly used the metaphor of the stage as his root metaphor for sociological research.  He spent most of his academic life researching the vocabulary of motives that related to the stage metaphor.  Hence, his works dealt with the person as an actor (the presentation of self in everyday life), the mask (the creation of a social persona), social roles, the use of props and scenery, and the analysis of theatrical frames.  In the natural sciences, a similar use of cardinal metaphors can be found.  In high energy physics, for example, the old metaphor of the solar system was the dominant model for the study of the atom.  It was later replaced by the metaphor of the Goddess Shiva, the creator of energy.  These shifts in metaphor represent epistemological transformations and it will be argued in this volume that the Kuhnian paradigmatic shifts are, in reality, metaphorical transitions.

Finally, there is the concept of metaphorical structure and the various attempts by scholars to explicate the relationship of literal language use versus metaphorical expression. Many linguists, for example, consider metaphor to be outside of the realm of normal language behavior.  In most instances, metaphors are seen as mere literary devices, one of the major tropes.  The position espoused in this essay is that metaphor plays significant roles in dialectical thought and in the formalization of theoretical concepts; and, consequently, it should not be merely relegated to the status of being no more than a literary device.  Metaphor, it will be argued, plays a major cognitive role in concept formation (Barsalou, 1992, 1998; Fauconnier, 1994, 1997; Gibbs, 1994; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Langacker, 1991, 1999a, 1999b).  This is especially true in the case of episodic memory, which forms the basis for semantic memory (Barsalou, 1998). 

 

RHETORIC VERSUS DIALECTICS

Most systems of thought are self-contained models.  They present a view of the world from a certain perspective (Brown, 1977) and they systematically exclude alternative mentalities.  Richard Brown (1977, chapter 4), a sociological theorist, argues that this fact simply reiterates his claim that all models of knowledge are metaphorical, and he also advocates the view that the sciences are mental constructs and have more in common with rhetorical mode of literary fiction than was previously thought.  But how can one argue that theoretical models are merely metaphors.  The answer to this, Brown (1977, 1987) notes can be readily found in the concept of the metaphor itself.

All knowledge is perspectival:  Anything we know is known as something; it is construed from some point of view.  In the broadest sense, metaphor is seeing something from the viewpoint of something else, which means, in terms of the arguments presented so far, that all knowledge is metaphoric.  (Brown, 1978: 77)

A metaphor is, as Richard Brown has noted, the seeing of something from a certain viewpoint.  It is a frame of vision.  And since models of science are simply ways of seeing a body of knowledge from a certain viewpoint or theoretical frameworks, these models are consequently metaphorical in nature.  This epistemological claim has numerous consequences for the study of both the arts and the sciences.  For in claiming that all knowledge is perspectival, there exists a very simple transition for Brown to append the argument that science is also a fiction, a literary creation, an intellectual conspiracy in which the various components have been carefully orchestrated and positioned into a systemic whole.  Consequently, Brown argues that there is an intrinsic relationship between the models of science and literary metaphors.

Metaphors provide the key to model building.  They begin within a discipline as illustrative devices.  Through the use of a new term or lexical connotation, the framework of the old system is shifted or transferred to a new perspective or context.  When physicists, for example, used the idea of the solar system as the basis for their new model of the atom (Jones, 1982), they were using an illustrative metaphor.  The new model (the concept of the atom) was based on an analogy to another model (the concept of the solar system).  Once scientists accepted this new perspective and its corresponding figures of speech, they continued to elaborate on the details, thereby expanding their knowledge base.  The result of this additive process is the eventual arrival of an iconic model.  As the details within this new system continue to proliferate, the remaining options for exploratory research are greatly attenuated.  At this stage, argues Brown (1977), the illustrative metaphor has become an iconic metaphor.  Some metaphors are so well accepted that with the passage of time they become entrenched within their own cultural framework as tacit knowledge.  Consequently they provide a fundamental image of the world, a Zeitgeist.  When this occurs, Brown (1977:78) adds, the iconic metaphor becomes a root metaphor.  These root metaphors provide the basis upon which newer perspectives are envisioned.  For this reason, they also function as reference metaphors (cf. chapter ten).  They constrain newer models by their influence in the terminology and in the construction of newer horizons of dialectic thought.  For his own field of sociology, Brown cites five of these principal or root metaphors:

Society seen as an organism (The Metaphor of Growth)

Society seen as a machine (The Metaphor of the Machine)

Society seen as a social drama (The Metaphor of the Stage)

Society viewed as a game (The Game Metaphor) and

Social conduct seen as language behavior (The Language Metaphor)

In a later work, Society as Text, Brown (1987) expands on his idea of social metaphors and describes how social discourse is rhetorical in nature, and how discord in society results from opposing models or conflicting metaphors of society. This approach to sociology has certain relevant consequences for an understanding of the role of metaphor across cultures.  Cultures differ, it can be argued, because they embody different root metaphors.

The political interpretation of the inner meaning of speech was not invented by Marxists or ethnomethodologists or political sociologists. Over two thousand years ago theories of discourse developed in legal, military, religious, and other public settings.  The name of this theory was rhetoric.... Its goals were to explain relationships between the practice of language and the exercise of power and to train elites to use speech effectively for political purposes.  Stylistic analysis was therefore a tool for political hegemony, because the correct use of stylistic devices enabled one to establish ideological dominance in the arenas that counted - in the tribunals, the public forums, and the military counsels.... literary criticism was not the scholastic pursuit it became it the Middle Ages, nor was it in the largely academic exercise that it is today.  Instead the criticism of speech and texts was entirely integrated with the public social relations of the ancient state.    (Brown, 1987: 81-82)

These cultural paradigms have become so embedded within the social history of its citizenry, that they provide not only a background of tacit knowledge (a root metaphor underlying all systems of belief) but also a plethora of social scripts or role behaviors on how to perform in public (episodic behavior, protocol statements, recipes for living).  Brown links the protection of the status quo with rhetoric.  The social and political implications of viewing a society as a text are discussed in his book (Brown, 1987).  He demonstrates how nations are in the business of symbolic control through language and literature.  His research is concomitant with other writings in political sociology and what gives his treatment greater explanatory power is the rhetorical metaphor of society as a text. But there is another important contribution that Brown provides through his model of metaphorical knowledge, viz., his understanding of scientific revolutions as metaphorical shifts, and the implications that these shifts constitute in the transition from dialectics to rhetoric.

In the narrowest sense, metaphor can be understood as an illustrative device whereby a term from one level or frame of reference is used within a different level or frame.  ... Metaphor is also the key to model building; indeed, a model may be thought of as a metaphor whose implications have been spelled out.  Metaphors are models of two sorts: analogic and iconic.  Analogic models, as with the illustrative use of metaphor, take a meaning unit from one context and employ it in another....   In contrast, iconic models create new objects of inquiry through the intersection of apparently disparate frames.  A third type of metaphor may be called "root metaphor," a fundamental image of the world from which models and illustrative metaphors may be derived. In sociology there are five principal root metaphors: society seen as an organism or as a machine, and social conduct viewed as language, the drama or a game.  (Brown, 1978: 77-78

Richard Brown is a sociologist who considers society as a text and feels that the principles of rhetoric apply to social systems as well as to literary texts.  Next, it is important to consider how his model can be incorporated into the historiography of science.   Thomas Kuhn (1962), a historiographer of the natural sciences, drew on the philosophical models of Norwood Hanson (1958) in constructing his theory of scientific revolutions.  Science advances, Kuhn noted, not by the mere accretion of knowledge, but through scientific revolutions. Kuhn differed from most previous historiographers by arguing that scientists do not add new knowledge to old knowledge as has been so often claimed, but they create progress by replacing old models within their respective disciplines with new ones.  He labels the old model as Normal Science.  And, he explains that it represents the established model of the scientific community.  It is the epistemological framework or the paradigm (Kuhn, 1972: 6) underlying a discipline.  But, normal science does not last forever and with the transition of time, certain anomalies eventually begin to appear in this supposedly stable framework of knowledge.  In some cases, definitions no longer work; in other situations, experiments fail or internal inconsistencies arise.  At first, these anomalies are denied.  They are seen as oddities, exceptions to the rule.  But, as these anomalies continue to mount a threshold is crossed and the scientific community begins to lose faith in their root established world views.  What follows is a period of crises, a metaphorical failure, whereby scientists actively search for an illustrative metaphor to replace the old iconic one that no longer serves their needs of problem solving.  Kuhn refers to these models as paradigms and the newer model or paradigm constitutes what he calls a revolutionary science.

 

Richard Brown (1977: chapter 4) has drawn some interesting inferences for the reinterpretation of Kuhn's model of scientific revolutions.  What Kuhn saw as normal science, can now be seen as an iconic metaphor — a model whose perspective has been so fully articulated that it lacks its original flexibility and further theoretical maneuvering; and, what Kuhn discussed as the paradigm of revolutionary science, can now be viewed as an illustrative metaphor — a newer model with different horizons and a maximum flexibility for theoretical play.  Furthermore, the period of crises between these two paradigms or epistemological metaphors, is nothing more than a transition from the old paradigm to the new, a metaphorical failure of the iconic metaphor and the metaphorical success of newer illustrative metaphors.  It is at this stage of transition, the period of crises, where the dialectic process appears to have its greatest dialogue of ideas. But, contrary to the expectations of most scholars who write about dialectics (cf. Karl Popper's model of scientific discovery or the literary model known as deconstruction theory), the freedom of thought associated with this process is rather limited.  It is limited, in essence, by the iconic root metaphor and its tradition of theoretical questions, sociopolitical values, and related epistemological claims.  These constraints occur because the normal science paradigm is also a reference metaphor.  It provides the basis from which the new concepts are judged in terms of their relevancy.  Consequently, the illustrative metaphors that constitute revolutionary science are far more controlled and constrained than previously realized. 

Now, how does all of this discussion of Thomas Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions and Richard Brown's model of society as a text relate to the dichotomy between rhetoric and dialectic; and why is this distinction significant for the understanding of cross-cultural metaphors?  Some of the answers to these questions can be found in the research of Lloyd (1990) on metaphors as mentalities or in the epistemes of Foucault (1969, 1971).   Lloyd (1990:20-22) asked why metaphors are viewed negatively by philosophers, and scientists whereas they are viewed positively by poets, littérateurs and ethnomethodologists.  The answer, he discovered goes back to Aristotle in the Posterior Analytics (Tredennick, 1960) and in the Topica (Forster, 1960) where he was establishing his own system of knowledge.  In these works, Aristotle spoke of bad metaphors.  He considered these claims eccentric claims to knowledge because they were not concomitant with his own perspective.  These metaphors transferred an unauthorized category from another system and were imposed in a contrary fashion on his unique epistemological framework.  Aristotle found it convenient to characterize his own position as one of logos and those of his opposition as either mythos or metaphor. 

My argument is, then, that in origin, the distinction between the literal and the metaphorical - like that between myth (as fiction) and rational account - was not just an innocent, neutral piece of logical analysis, but a weapon forged to defend a territory, repeal border, put down rival  (Lloyd, 1990:23)

It should be noted that the method of syllogistic reasoning employed by Aristotle in the Prior Analytics (Tredennick, 1967) and in The Categories (Cooke, 1967) was no more than an organon or an intellectual tool by which one could articulate the logic of his rhetorical system.  This approach differed from the dialectical approach of Plato (Cornford, 1940; Lee, 1955)). What is significant about this distinction with regard to current models of metaphor is that rhetoric deals with what Kuhn has called "normal science” and what Brown has labeled as the "iconic metaphor."  Hence, rhetoric articulates the structures of the status quo, the legitimated and established framework within a society.  Dialectics has to do with the imposition of a new system of thought upon the older established one (Fish, 1972).  It is interesting to note that many contemporary teachers of rhetoric and composition appear unaware of this distinction, especially when they discuss the use of invention as being equivalent to critical thinking.   Invention has to do with the use of a system to arrive at new products, reports, discussions, etc.  On the other hand, critical thinking is dialectical and attempts to replace the older system with a newer one.  Consequently, teachers of English are protectors of the status quo; and as a consequence, they teach convention, and traditional form.  Even when they are teaching "creative writing" they appear to adhere to formula and conventional expectations.

Richard Brown (1987) is well aware of the conventional nature of rhetoric when he argues that "society is a text," a self-contained system which harbors a certain mainstream perspective.  In other words, the functioning of society is rhetorical in that it operates on the organization of recipes of public knowledge, which has been legitimated by a ruling social metaphor. These social scripts have a normative outcome.  They constrain the possibilities of interpretation within the system, they dictate patterns of behavior in terms of prescribed roles, and they construct horizons of acceptability.  Anyone who steps out of the bounds prescribed by the rhetorical framework is seen as socially deviant (Becker, 1973), politically threatening (Douglas, 1966) or even mentally insane (Szasz, 1966).  Furthermore, the mainstream of social thought is focused on the maintenance of symbolic reality. It maintains and supports this fragile reconstruction of social reality through the use of political symbols, and the introduction and legitimation of civic attitudes and other structures of social value.

The contrast of rhetoric with dialects becomes important during times of social change, i.e., when change agents within a society attempt to replace the old system of deeds with new ones. The period of conflict between social paradigms is characterized as revolutionary, and the end result is a new framework, what Kuhn calls revolutionary science and what Brown terms an illustrative metaphor.  As noted earlier, those who are entrenched in the status quo see such changes as revolutionary.  Any change for them is a revolution.  But, when viewed from the larger perspective of metaphorical shifts, the change is limited and controlled by the reference metaphors in the culture.  When a culture is open to change, such modifications are seen as growth, but when a culture is closed and entrenched, such revolutionary changes are envisioned as being a form of death or decay.  Orrin Klapp (1978: chapter seven) is one of the few sociologists to address and to discuss this concept adequately within his information science theory of social noise.  

Differences between Rhetoric and Dialects
RHETORIC	DIALECTICS
Sustain the status quo, the old paradigm	Search for a new paradigm
Rhetorical Invention, the reformatting or variation of a traditional pattern.	Creativity as the search for new meanings and new forms of expression
Rhetoric is intrasystemic, it is a closed system	Dialectics is extrasystemic. It allows the opening up of the old system to new ideas and forms.  It allows the creation of a new system.
Research on the Status Quo	De Novo Research
Explication and elaboration of established ideas and concepts	Innovation, the creation of new ideas and concepts.

 

What is significant about this shift in epistemologies is that it is also accompanied by semantic and lexical shifts in language.  Innovators who want to speak about a new way of doing things are forced to coin many new terms or to use old ones in a new sense.  For example, when Martin Heidegger (1962, 1959) challenged the rhetorical models of philosophy with his new existential framework, he found the contemporary language of philosophy to be inadequate.  To convey his ideas adequately, he found that it was necessary to resort to the original etymological meanings underlying the ordinary and commonplace nomenclature of philosophy. The model that he advocated was Pre-Socratic.  It was Pythagorean in nature.  What were most revealing in his quest for a new system were his insights into the Greek language and how its basic concepts were changed by contemporary translators.  The Greeks perceived of knowledge in terms of vision, they witnessed events, and reported what they witnessed to others who understood the event as it became uncovered before their eyes. The words for theory [theoria], witnessing of events, [teatos], the events themselves [theatros], and the unveiling of the event or truth [aletheia] are all etymologically connected in the Greek world.   Within the Greek epistemological framework, to see is to understand.  An event, for example, is part of the theater of life.  A theory, for example, is that which was seen in this drama or theater of life.  The act of seeing or witnessing was shared with others who were not present at this event. When those who were not witnesses to the event, understood the event, the result was called “truth,” namely, the un-hidden-ness, that which is no longer occult or hidden.  In Roman epistemological framework, however, knowledge is to be found in the open fields of agriculture where knowledge is metaphorically grasped [comprehendere] and collected [intelligere] and stored for later distribution.  The harvest of knowledge is characteristically a Latin concept.  Consequently, if one is to physically grasp an object, or to handle something manually, he will come to know and understand it.  What is important about these differences in epistemes or mentalities is that when Greek concepts were translated into Latin, they were distorted in the process by the differing frameworks and resulted in disparate rhetoric of motives with their concomitant unfamiliar semantic domains.  For those who spoke Latin, the Greek language and its vocabulary were decidedly metaphorical; and, for those who spoke Greek, the Latin way of speaking about knowledge was also metaphorical.  Only one who was familiar with both systems could readily understand that these cross-cultural problems of translation were of a dialectal nature, and were due to a conflict of epistemologies. 

The Greek Epistemological metaphor is based on vision.  Knowledge depends on what is seen and understood. Events are social dramas that occur in public.  They are witnessed by others who convey what they have seen.  Those who were not at the events learn about them from those who were there and saw what happened.  When these reports are understood, they constitute truth.  They are no longer unknown and unseen (occult).  Interpretation is a Greek concept.  People may differ in their accounts of what was seen and their accounts may have to be compared with others.

The Roman epistemological metaphor is based on agriculture.  Knowledge is something that is grown, nourished, and harvested.  Knowledge can be stored and retrieved.  The concept of the library is a Roman concept.  The idea of investing in knowledge is a Roman concept.  Knowledge is planted, harvested and shared.  It is something that one ingests.  Knowledge is food for thought. 

It is important to note that much confusion still exists in the literature on metaphor because many academic professionals only see language usage only from their own perspective.  They do not see another system with its own epistemes and its need for a separate nomenclature.  What they see is essentially a failed use of language.  They lack the dialectical overview in which systems of language and thought co-exist rather than compete with each other.  Similarly, in dealing with metaphors across culture or metaphors across systems of thought, it would be delusory to interpret one's own culture and its models of knowledge as the sole basis for interpreting and understanding others and to concomitantly degrade the other system of values as being inferior.  But, one does not need to go to another culture in order to experience this condition of epistemological imperialism.  One only needs to view the role of the natural sciences and technology in Western culture to understand how it distorts other models or metaphors of knowledge.  This issue was noted by Wilhelm Dilthey (Hodges, 1952; Makkreel & Scanlon, 1987) who over a century ago challenged the model of Positivism or die Naturwissenschaften (Hayek, 1952) as being inadequate in dealing with the Human Sciences or Geisteswissenschaften (Nash, 1969).  This was a time, it should be remembered, when the Prophets of Paris were intent on basing all sciences on the model of physics.  Auguste Comte used this model to render human interactions within a society as nothing more than social facts.  Dilthey challenged this imposition of the natural science model on the human sciences, and rightfully so. Nevertheless, this bold historiographical excursion into the dominance of the natural science model over the languages of the humanities is important is important and will be more fully discussed in chapter two.  It is important because many negative claims which are made about metaphor stem from natural scientists and social scientists who employ this model (psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and linguists) in judging the language of the arts as being inferior to their own system of knowledge and its claims of reality.

 

METAPHOR AND SOCIAL REALITY

In the next chapter, the epistemological basis of metaphorical thought will be investigated.  This includes a discussion of the opposition of the human sciences versus the natural sciences, and the related antithesis between the sociology of knowledge versus Cartesian methodology and how these happen to play a significant role in the interpretation of metaphor. Within this informative background, an enlightening and critical discussion of the Neo-Humboldtian origins of Edward Sapir's model of language and culture is introduced and more fully discussed.  Other related concepts such as the Cartesian assumptions underlying the more recent cognitive model of the Expressiblity Hypothesis by Jerrold Fodor also lend themselves for more critical review.  What is significant about these sundry systems of Western thought, it can be argued, is that they separately provide different frameworks for the understanding of the role of metaphor in language. Consequently, each epistemological system makes substantially different claims about the nature and the use of metaphor in language.  And, more significantly, it is also argued in this essay that many scholarly criticisms of metaphor by linguists (Kittay, 1989; Sacks, 1978; Saddock, 1980), psychologists (Pollio, et al., 1972), philosophers (Henle, 1958), anthropologists (Sapir & Crocker, 1977), and literary critics (Richards, 1936) have missed the crucial fact that metaphors are used along with other figures of speech (simile, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, hyperbole, litote, and oxymoron) when advocating or explaining a new system of epistemological framework (critical philosophy, hermeneutics, or human sciences) within another older established system of thought (analytical philosophy, positivism, explication, or the logocentric tradition (Derrida, 1976; Norris, 1987) of contemporary  Western thought.  The exceptions to this rule can be found in the writings of some literary critics (Levin, 1977), some philosophers of language (Black, 1962; Johnson, 1987; Ricoeur, 1977), some computer scientists and social psychologists (Shank & Abelson, (1977), linguists (Fauconnier, 1994, 1997; Gibbs, 1994; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Langacker, 1991, 1999a, 1999b), and some sociologists (Brown, 1977).  What underlies all of these models is the distinction between self-contained rhetorical totalities (closed systems) and evolving or changing dialectical models (open system).  Cardinal metaphors constitute closed systems.  They function as root metaphors.

 

THE CARDINAL METAPHORS OF WESTERN CULTURE

This chapter is organized around the root metaphors of western thought.  There are several of these that merit discussion because they cluster together to create a cultural profile of European thought. These metaphors are so endemic to western culture that they are often accepted as social truths.  These deeply rooted social beliefs form cardinal metaphors.  Cultures may differ radically in how they structure metaphors into a profile that constitute an intrinsic part of their social epistemology.  The major focus of this book centers on the explications of these social metaphors in Western society.  Because these metaphors form a cultural profile on how Westerners view the world, the cluster of metaphors creating a profile can also is seen as social metaphors.

THE METAPHOR OF GROWTH

The Greeks were fascinated by the phenomenon of becoming (physis).  What they meant by this is the creation of order out of chaos.  It was a cultural metaphor that constituted their cosmology and that was incorporated into all aspects of their daily lives.  Plato argued that a cosmic order always existed in an eternal world of abstract entities.  This world of ideal forms had to be eternal because it symbolized a world order that existed since the beginning of time. Plato went on to explain that human beings live in another world, the material world.  Things that exist in the material world are copies of these ideal forms.  Although the ideal forms may never change, their copies do.  They undergo change and decay. 

Aristotle did not concur with Plato about how order is established in the world. From the numerous examples of the organic world that surrounded them, he created models of change, growth, and decay that have dominated Western philosophy and science. Things came into being by means of a process.  They originated from matter and underwent transformations.  In their poetry, the Greeks frequently drew on the metamorphosis of the seed from a hard, dry, and almost lifeless form that contained the inner forces of genesis and growth.  It is this process of becoming that the Aristotle intended when he spoke of physis.  This word has been rendered in Latin as natura, but this translation is only partly correct because physis means "to give birth to, to come into being" and in the genealogical scheme of Greek cosmology it refers to the regenerative power in the world.  The Romans focused on the end product of growth. For the Greeks they were interested in the "process of becoming" itself and not on its products.  For Aristotle, everything in the universe has a physis of its own.  It has its own way of growing, and he was interested in finding out just what the physis of each thing functioned. He wanted to learn about its original condition and its successive stages of development.  He was interested in external factors that may inhibit growth or enhance its emergence toward its final form (Cornford, 1952). It is not surprising that he was a biologist.

The process of becoming is a Greek concept.  It was part of their cultural framework.  For them, Becoming meant the creation of order out of chaos.  Aristotle saw the process of becoming as stages of growth that began with a material cause and terminated with a final cause, the end product of growth.  When his idea of the stages of growth (physis) was translated into Latin, the word used for growth was natura.   It would appear that “nature” was an adequate translation for “the process of becoming.”  However,   according to Greek cosmology, “becoming” meant the creation of order out of chaos and in the Roman cosmology “nature” mean the end product of growth, the harvest from the fields.  Even the world “culture” in Latin was associated with farming.  It is derived from agricultura (agriculture).   The translation of introducing “order into the world,” the transformation of forms into life was translated into the introduction of “agricultural products,” the end products of growth.

 

The Aristotelian Stages of Growth
The Causes  of Growth	The Stages of Growth
The Material Cause	The raw data from which growth emerges, the seed or the  ovum
The Formal Cause	The range of changing forms or patterns of growth
The Motor Cause	The motivation behind change, the force of nature, the cosmic plan, the DNA program, or the spirit of life which underlies change
The Final Cause	The end product of growth, the final destination, the final product behind the seed  or the ovum

 

Each of these stages of growth provided an explanation of the way things grow.  Through each cycle of growth, there are stages of development that offer a natural explanation for change in the physical and the social worlds of the Greeks.  It was this doctrine of the cycle of growth that Greek historians tried to explicate in their written description of events.  They were not interested in providing a chronicle or narration of historical events, but wanted to address themselves to types of events that tend to be repeated in the natural history of human experience (Nisbet, 1969:33).  What is significant about this metaphor is the concept of "natural change."  In the process of becoming, for example, a plan may be prevented from developing along its necessary stages of growth by such external or endogenous factors as bad weather conditions or environmental pollution. Aristotle calls this deterring factor "the Doctrine of Accidents." Its importance can be found in the Aristotelian quest for natural order or natural growth. He noted that events that prevent this natural process are designated as its History of Accidents.  This is the rationale behind their dichotomy of physis vs. techne.  The opposite of natural growth is artifice, techne.  What is natural is respected; and what is not natural is, by definition, artificial and is held in lower esteem. 

 

The Greek Dichotomy between Natural and Artificial
PHYSIS	TECHNE
Growth is natural	Technology is artificial
Growth is real, it is a product of nature	Technology is modifies the appearances of things that are natural
Authenticity, it is ordained by nature	Conventional, it is man-made
Ideal, it is based on eternal forms	Imitation, it is a copy of the ideal
Eternal, it exists forever as an ideal form	Ephemeral, it belongs to the world of matter and changes through decay
Private, it is change that belongs to substance, internal and private	Public, it is change on behalf of others in the city-state.

 

It is this dichotomy which has been an implicit vocabulary of motive in Western thought with its devaluation of artificiality, the temporality of appearance, the arbitrariness of convention, the superficiality of imitation, and the unnaturalness of behavior in public where the persona (mask) hides the real person.  For Aristotle, convention is a form of accidental growth and that which is not natural is pathological.  It is interesting to note how this framework plays an intrinsic role in his Politics.  In a planned society, the forces that hinder natural growth must be eliminated or subdued so as to permit the causes of natural growth to emerge at the proper stage of development.  This intervention by the people [polis] on behalf of what is natural is the original meaning of "politics."  It is ironic, indeed, that the concept of politics has drastically shifted in contemporary society so that it is naturally aligned with what is artificial and conventional. This shift in meaning came about later and is characteristic of British empiricism. What is important about this discussion of natural change is the fact that it has dominated and continues to dominate scientific modeling and theory building in Western thought. 

It is easy to dismiss metaphor as "unscientific" or "non-rational," a mere substitute for the hard analysis that rigorous thought requires.  Metaphor, we say, belongs to poetry, to religion, and to other more or less "enchanted" areas of thought.  So it does.  But metaphor also belongs to philosophy and even to science.  (Nisbet, 1969:5)

This predominance of metaphorical thought is evident, for example, in the theory of natural selection espoused by Charles Darwin (1859), the natural history of society by Herbert Spencer (1876; cf. Peel, 1972), the natural history of economics by Karl Marx (1973), and other metaphors of growth that incorporate the study of natural history.  But, before these can be investigated in greater detail, it is necessary to first comment on the parameters of the growth model, its predominant characteristics.

There are certain premises that are characteristically associated with the metaphor of growth.  These underlying assumptions can be found across a wide range of social, historical, and cultural models of epistemology, and they can be summarized as follows:

THE PARAMETERS OF GROWTH: Change is natural; change is directional; change is immanent;change is continuous; change is necessary; and change follows from uniform causes.

Many of these premises result directly from the Aristotelian concept of the cycles of growth.  He was interested in studying change, which he found to be inherent in the biological organisms that were the basis of his own metaphor of growth.  Because the metamorphosis of a seed from its material cause to a full-grown tree in its final cause occurs iteratively in nature, Aristotle saw no reason to doubt the inevitability of change.  For him, it was natural.  This concept has persisted in the intellectual history of Western thought.  Hence, it was also obvious to those who advocate evolutionary models of physical and social change. 

,,, social evolutionists nonetheless assumed that change in time is natural, is normal, and that when fixity is encountered it is either to be categorized as abnormal, as a kind of monstrosity, or else it is fixity of appearance only, with reality to be understood in terms of underlying forces of change which required only further time for their manifestation. (Nisbet, 1969: 166)

The directionality of change also follows a pattern.  This was evident in the Greek philosopher’s discussion of the stages of growth from simple to complex and from genesis to decay.  When he wrote about the various stages of growth, Aristotle set the framework for contemporary models of development such as the one espoused by Sears and Feldman (1964) in which human beings progress through seven stages of directional change.  But these models of the seven stages of life are further articulations of a linear model of time and change. 

Change we may define as a succession of differences in time within a persisting identity. All three aspects of this definition are crucial; and crucial only in their relatedness.  A mere array of differences is just that; not necessarily change.  The passing of time is just that; not change.  And obviously, persisting identity apart from anything else is the opposite of change.  Taken together, however, these elements form what we call change.

We see the succession of changes, and I stress the plural.  It requires analysis and deduction, however, or metaphor, or analogy, to bind the plurality of observed changes into a single, ongoing process.  And it requires still further analysis and deduction to reach the conclusion that this single, ongoing process has beginning, middle, and end - that is, direction in time.  (Nisbet, 1969: 268)

The immanence of change is frequently referred to under the rubric of inherent forces within an organism, which unleash the next stage of growth when the environmental conditions themselves are conducive to change.  In any pattern of growth through time, new structures do emerge from old ones, and this change is brought about immanently by forces internal to an organism.  This immanent force has been called Geist by Hegel and élan vital by Bergson.  In contemporary research it is equated with DNA molecules or with subroutines in computer programs.  All of these have the same function, to unfurl the final plan systematically and consistently.

How else could change be directional save in terms of inherent forces within culture, within each of the institutions which in their interaction provided the necessary dynamism?  Admittedly, natural, immanent growth could be arrested or deflected  - could be and frequently was.     It was still important to discover that kind of change which, assuming no interference or mutational accidents, could be seen as inherent, as a function of the system itself, even as the growth of an organism.  (Nisbet, 1969: 170)

The idea of continuity is consistent with the metaphor of growth.  The changes that come about are very gradual and occur without interruption.  When Aristotle arrived at the concept of continuity, he obviously had the human growth cycle as his reference. For what is gradual in the growth of an individual is not gradual when compared to certain flora and fauna. Nevertheless, there is a continuity that marks the beginning, the middle, and the end of the process. 

The idea of continuity is, as Arthur Lovejoy has made profoundly clear in his The Great Chain of Being, one of the fundamental ideas of Western thought, as richly evident in Greek, Roman, and medieval philosophy as in the thought of the modern world.  Often the idea of continuity bespoke linear gradation only, as from the smallest conceivable being on earth to God himself, with no possible space in the series left unfilled.  (Nisbet, 1969: 174)

Darwin rested his entire system upon this concept.  Natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight, successive, favorable variations.  It can produce no great or sudden modifications.  It can act only by short and slow steps.  The trouble that Darwin encountered was that, at times, there was an absence of innumerable transitional or missing links along the path of phylogenetic growth among the species.  This created ontological gaps between the species.  These absences or gaps in the continuity of evolution had to be inferred from his metaphorical and biological model of the growth of the species. 

Aristotle argued that not only is this change gradual, but it is also necessary.  In the transition from a raw material form to the final stages of growth, an organism must undergo several natural and necessary changes.  This transition is impeded only by the doctrine of accidents whereby exogenous factors impede the natural unfolding of a pattern of growth.  Otherwise, such change is necessary and will follow from the inner forces directing the organism's development.

Here again it is necessary to remind ourselves that no one of the social evolutionists was speaking of history in the aggregate when he spoke of necessity; nor was any of them blind to the existence of the casual and fortuitous.  Each of them - Marx with capitalism, Morgan with polity, property, and family, Comte with human knowledge, and so on - was declaring that a given sequence of development was necessary to the nature of the system or systems he was studying...

Necessity means, in short, logical necessity; logical in the sense of the relation of the development to the structure of the thing developing - be it capitalism or Christianity.   (Nisbet, 1969: 178-180)

Finally, there is the principle of uniformity, which states that nature must be consistent and uniform in its evolution.  The possibility of a great catastrophic event is summarily dismissed.  After all, there is logic to the gradual unfolding of nature, and this logic is controlled by the physis (the becoming) of the organism itself.  It was this assumption that led Darwin, for example, to assume that changes in the morphological structures of animals could only result from the uniform causes of natural selection, i.e. change proceeds from uniform causes.

Like everything else that is basic in the nineteenth-century theory of social evolution, the principle of uniformity comes most directly from the theory of natural history.  And specifically, it was James Hutton, himself one of the Scottish philosophers of natural history, who did more than anyone else to give the principle secure place.  Hutton was a geologist  or more accurately a natural historian of the earth, just as Adam Ferguson was the natural historian of civil society - and it was his contention that the only scientific approach to the study of the history of the earth was through the study of present processes.  That is, on the assumption that 'Nature must be consistent and uniform in her working,' it could be further assumed that careful study of the processes of change now occurring in the earth would yield all necessary knowledge of the past, in other words, of the forces which had been involved in giving present shape to the surface of the earth and to its atmosphere.  The possibility of great, unique, catastrophic events ... could be conveniently dismissed in favor of a principle that worked solely in terms of the manifest processes of the present.  (Nisbet, 1969: 183)

These assumptions regarding the parameters of change can be found implicitly in contemporary methods of psycholinguistics and developmental kinesics.  When studying the emergence of grammatical structures, for example, psycholinguists and investigators of nonverbal behavior are concerned with differentiating natural forms of change from those patterns which develop spontaneously and are not set off by forces inherent in the organism.  When these changes unfold, it is assumed that they are produced gradually and by some kind of systemic necessity, i.e., that they express natural patterns of growth.  Similarly, those who investigate the acquisition of nonverbal communication among children are also working with these assumptions.  The selection of children as a population for study, for example, is based on the assumption that change involves a transition from an earlier stage of homogeneity (undifferentiated and consequently simpler structures) to a later adult stage of heterogeneity (highly differentiated and consequently more evolved structures).  This process of differentiation is gradual and necessary (a fundamental Aristotelian assumption).  If the process happens to be interrupted, it is because of the interference in the growth process is caused by certain exogenous environmental factors that impede its progress (a history of accidents).  The stages documented in both psycholinguistics and developmental kinesic research are stated in terms of the natural history paradigm.  It does not matter if there are counter examples to natural growth, because they have resulted from the doctrine of accidents.  What does matter is that the stages of growth have been documented and that these provide evidence for a model of natural growth.

THE METAPHOR OF THE STAGE

The rise of the theater in Europe marked the formal introduction of the stage metaphor into European culture.  With the popularity of the stage in Spain, France, and England, the metaphor of the stage soon established itself as a root metaphor in European thought (Burns, 1973).  One of the strongest advocates of this metaphor is Erving Goffman (1959).  He used it as the basis for his theoretical account of social behavior.  Life is, according to Goffman, a social drama. He argued that people perform for one another in public.  He calls this performance the "presentation of self." He also argues that people participate in a social drama and as actors they express themselves in order to impress on others. They perform for others in public.  The audience is there to applaud their presentations of self.  They accomplish this presentation in several ways. They present themselves in the way they talk to others.  They stage their behaviors in the manner in which they dress for others. They also attempt to guarantee their acceptance by others through their uses of topic control and by use of the various means at their disposal, which are employed in their interaction with others. When they adopt a role, for example, they believe that they are playing a significant part in the theater of life, and they take great effort in making sure that the images of self that they present are consistent with the social expectations of their audience.  The analogy between the stage and public interaction can also be found in the etymology of the concept of a "person" which is derived from the Greek word for mask, persona.  But, the similarities do not end here.  Just as there is a front stage where one performs and a back stage where one is off camera or behind the curtain, there are contexts in social interaction where people are visible to others and must perform their publicly assigned roles. 

A region may be defined as any place that is bounded to some degree by barriers to perception.  ... Given a particular performance as a point of reference, it will sometimes be convenient to use the term "front region" to refer to the place where the performance is given.  The fixed sign-equipment in such a place has already been referred to as that part of front called "setting."  ... The performance of an individual in a front region may be seen as an effort to give the appearance that his activity in this region maintains and embodies certain standards. (Goffman, 1959: 106-197)

These contrasts with the private aspects of life where people are safe from public scrutiny and can therefore relax and become themselves.  This opposition between "public" and "private" selves has changed with the passage of time (Burns, 1973).  In the 18th century, the dichotomy between public and private behavior meant that one performed public roles for an audience of strangers when away from home.  And, they participated in private roles in the intimacy of the family.  This dichotomy of roles has not always been the same as Richard Sennett notes in his informative work on The Fall of Public Man.

As the Augustan Age faded, Romans began to treat their public lives as a matter of formal obligation.  The public ceremonies, the military necessities of imperialism, the ritual contacts with other Romans outside the family circle, all became duties - duties in which the Roman participated more and more in a passive spirit, comforting to the rules of the res publica, but investing less and less passion in his acts of conformity.  As the Roman public life became bloodless, he sought in private a new focus for his emotional energies, a new principle of commitment and belief.  This private commitment was mystic, concerned with escaping the world at large and the formalities of the res publica as part of that world.  ... Today public life has also become a matter of formal obligation.  ... The difference between the Roman past and the modern present lies in the alternative, in what privacy means.  The Roman in private sought another principle to set against the public, a principle based on religious transcendence of the world.  In private we seek out not a principle but a reflection, those of what our psyches are, what are authentic in our feelings.  We have tried to make the fact of being in private, alone with ourselves and with family and intimate friends, an end in itself.  (Sennett, 1978: 3-4)

But, with the advent of the 19th century (Sennett, 1978) this relationship changed and people began to act more intimately in public. Because of the rise of the "nouveaux riches," it became increasingly difficult to differentiate the richness and largess of the old  aristocracy from  and new class of wealthy merchants.  With this transition came a confusion of social roles and the eventual demise of the public self as portrayed by the aristocracy.  As a consequence, the contrast between public and private lives attenuated substantially and this led to the creation of new roles of a more narcissistic nature leading eventually to the creation of an incipient narcissistic society (Lasch, 1978).

The psychological effects of consumerism can be grasped only when consumption is understood as another phase of the industrial work routine.  The repeated experience of uneasy self-scrutiny, of submission to expert judgment, of distrust of their own capacity to make intelligent decisions, either as producers or as consumers, colors people's perceptions both of themselves and of the world around them.  It encourages a new kind of self-consciousness that has little in common with introspection or vanity.  Both as a worker and as a consumer, the individual learns not merely to measure himself against others but to see himself through others' eyes.  He learns that the self-image he projects counts for more than accumulated skills and experience.  Since he will be judged, both by his colleagues and superiors at work and by the strangers he encounters on the street, according to his possessions, his clothes, and his "personality" - not, as in the nineteenth century, by his "character" - he adopts a theatrical view of his own "performance" on and off the job.  (Lasch 1978: 29-30)

If these historical analyses of contemporary culture are true, it means that more than ever life has become a public stage and the viability of the dramaturgical model is theoretically enhanced. One could have argued, for example, that the sociological model of Goffman was inadequate because it did not fully explain social behavior.  However, as societies become more and more narcissistic under the guise of the new psychology of the capitalism, the dramaturgical model became fully sufficient in its theoretical explication of the social drama of everyday life. 

The staging of social reality involves the use of various symbolic indicators.  These are used to display to others certain behaviors so that they can recognize them and draw the correct inferences as to one's social status, occupation, and self-image.  An interesting use of symbolic indicators can be found in the study of proxemics (Hall, 1966).  The kind of furniture that surrounds a person, the decor of the room, and its physical layout have much to do with the image one wishes to convey through the manipulation of objects in space.  A desk, for example, can be employed to create a social distance between interactants and the luxury of the office can readily signal status symbols just as the selection one makes in buying a car or in creating a wardrobe.  The setting of a stage in everyday interaction is concomitant, therefore, with the designing and the implementation of stage scenery for the various acts of a play (Burns, 1973).  What is important about the creation of social distance is that it is a dramaturgical technique used on the stage to create and maintain a form of mystification between the performer and the audience.  This enables the audience to sense the mood of the performer and to idealize the performance (Goffman, 1959: 67).

Life is merely a sequence of mini-plays or episodes.  With the advent of television, we have come to mirror those commercially staged events and have made them a part of our new common culture.  We have taken cinema, television, and commercials as our new social reality.

Lyman and Scott (1970) contend that life is merely a sequence of episodes or mini-plays that are linked to social events by means of linguistic relationships.  They argue, for example, that people journey through life by going from one episode to another and from one encounter to another.  In this journey, they employ various face games in order to secure an advantage over others in their own presentations of life in public.  Others must learn how to read these gestures.  They must engage themselves in reading the intentions of others and they do this by studying the emotions and how they are expressed through the eyes, mouth, and other muscles of the face. Other games exist and may involve the creation and the use of social distance, the acquisition and the maintenance of power, and the control of information.

In face games two objectives, either singly or together, are sought.  One may be described as defensive, in which a player seeks to protect his own identity against damage or spoilage; the other is protective, in which the player seeks to prevent any damage or spoilage to the identity of the other player(s).   (Lyman and Scott, 1970: 37)

Face games involve preventing damage to one's own image or identity.  It begins as a challenge, a move that calls attention to an offensive deed.  The challenge is one to the face, the most valued element of one's identity.  The response to save face may take several forms. They may include retaliation against the opponent, the offending party.  But, they could also include an apology, an explanation or a justification for the deed in question.  Saving face is characteristically associated with Asian culture and is usually assumed to dominate as a mode of devaluation in shame cultures.  But, as Lyman and Scott have noted, saving face is fully operative in European cultures.  A rationale for this could be that contemporary societies are increasingly narcissistic (Lasch, 1984) and consequently are emerging as shame cultures. 

All cultures incorporate shame and guilt into their social fabrics. It is only when one of them predominates and is legitimated by the system that it is given this nomenclature. With the advent of mass media marketing via television and movies, the younger generations of these cultures are moving towards subcultures based on shame.  Shame and blame are the opposites of honor and reputation.  Richard Sennett (1978) has documented that the rise of narcissism developed within the Second Industrial Revolution.  Stuart Ewen (1977) went on to demonstrate how narcissism was good for the creation of a consumer culture.  With this transition, American culture moved from one that advocated reputation and substance to one that has a predilection for imposing blame on others.

An interesting extension of the dramaturgical metaphor in sociology can be found in the concept of "stage fright" (Lyman and Scott, 1970).  This occurs when a person loses his or her stage presence because of the newness of the role being played.  To overcome stage fright in daily interaction, Lyman and Scott suggest that one should find a way of increasing rehearsal time in the new role.  Given the nature of social mobility in an open society, the opportunity for stage fright to occur because of the newness of an experience is rather common.  Evidently, some people are better at staging a performance than others.  They know how to give the appearance of belonging to a role even though it is new to their repertoire of interactional styles.

The dramaturgical metaphor continues to play a major role in sociological theory.  In drama, playwrights are already cognizant of the metaphor of the stage.  Similarly, litterateurs are fully cognizant of the metaphor of the stage when dealing with the works of Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekov, O'Neil and Shaw.  However, few sociologists are even aware of the fact that this metaphor has become a highly sophisticated model through which to organize and comprehend the phenomena of their profession - people who are always on stage, projecting a public or social self.  For symbolic interactionists, understandably, life is social dramas where people define the context of the situation, negotiate role, and signal symbolic exchange.  Also, for the social psychologists, the courtroom has become a special place for the staging of justice. All participants play legal roles. The judge, for example, wears a ceremonial robe. The litigants are each playing different adversarial roles. The scripts that they act out have been based on old court cases, the tradition of jurisprudence. The jury has its balcony seats and act as critics, and the audience is there to witness the drama enfold as events are staged in little episodes with recesses or intermissions between major acts.  Given this tradition of the stage in sociology and given the heritage of the stage in literature, it appears that sociological methodology has many significant implications for the study of literary works, and vice versa. 

THE GAME METAPHOR

The game metaphor is an intrinsic part of Western thought.  It can be seen in the simulation of Greek drama in which mere mortals witnessed the games of the gods; and it is also evidenced in the casting of dice among the populi vulgari.  It is also seen in the reading of the Tarot or in the interpretation of the Nordic runes.   This concern for games was so endemic to European culture that Johan Huizinga (1955) considered it to be a dominant cultural trait. 

If we find that play is based on the manipulation of certain images, on a certain 'imagination' of reality (i.e. its conversion into images), then our main concern will be to grasp the value and significance of these images and their 'imagination.'  We shall observe their action in play itself and thus try to understand play as a cultural factor in life.  (Huizinga 1955: 4)

This claim was later carefully substantiated and further articulated by Roger Caillois who also considers play to be a cultural element in European culture, but who finds Huizinga's focus on the kinds of games which exist to be too narrow.  Consequently, he found it necessary revise and to expand the given set of the physical and the mental forms of play into four major types of games and he has reclassified cultures in accordance with his new framework.  More recently, the game metaphor has become a major part of contemporary philosophy.  Ludwig Wittgenstein (1955), for example, considers logic to be a Sprachspiel, a language game.  In mathematical theory, the tossing of coins led to the development of a special field of mathematics known as probability theory, a formal model of mathematical games.  Hence, the game metaphor continues to be a cardinal metaphor in Western thought. The widespread acceptance of commercial sports leads further credence to the game metaphor as a way of life.  This is most obvious in such sports as football in North America and Soccer in Europe where people have built monstrous domes in which to house the sport and have idolized the players as heroes.

Johan Huizinga (1955) advanced the hypothesis that play is a significant part in culture. It transcends the immediate needs of life and enables one to pretend.  It allows one to impart a special meaning to the daily patterns of life, and transforms the ordinary into the divine.   He sees in the Greek drama the embodiment of this situation whereby the enactment of an event takes place and in the process of presenting the dramatic situation one recapitulates and identifies the act with its mystical origin.  Some acts or dramas are represented as imitative acts of life [mimesis] and others involve actual participation, a methectic event.   

The rite is a dromenon, which means 'something acted,’ an act, action.  That which is enacted, or the stuff of the action, is a drama which again means act, action represented on a stage.  Such action may occur as a performance or a contest.  The rite, or 'ritual act' represents a cosmic happening, an event in the natural process.  The word 'represent' however, does not cover the exact meaning of the act, at least no in its looser, modern connotation; for here, 'representation' is really identification, the mystic repetition or re-presentation of the event.  The rite produces the effect which is then no so much shown figuratively as actually reproduced in the action.  The function of the rite, therefore, is far from being merely imitative; it causes the worshipers to participate in the sacred happening itself.  As the Greeks would say 'it is methectic rather than mimetic.  (Huizinga 1955: 14-15)

Consequently, he adds, play has a cultural significance by its ability to create new images as well to manipulate already established ones. That is, in a drama, one actualizes anew, or recreates the events represented and thus maintains the symbolic order. This view of symbolic maintenance is not limited to Huizinga, the social historian.  It can also be found among phenomenological sociologists (Berger and Luckmann, 1966) who argue that once a social reality is constructed, it remains a fragile construct and must be supported and maintained by means of symbolic action. The re-enactment of the symbolic event reifies the experience and convinces the participants in the drama that they are indeed dealing with the appropriate social reality.

During the emergence of the World Theater in the seventeenth century, he notes, such notable playwrights as Shakespeare, Calderón de la Barca, and Racine made the stage their playground.  It was an age that moved away from the medieval concept of personification in which the cosmic drama of Good and Evil competed for the soul of man.   It was an age when a secular shift towards impersonation in which a person's actions reflected his character.  The medieval qualities of Good and Evil were replaced by the theory of the humors and their characteristic personality types (Burns, 1973).  Hence, the plays of the World Theater of the seventeenth century were no longer morality plays, didactic instruments of the church.  They were now social instruments of the newly emerging secular culture and provided social interludes for their audiences, reprieves from the profanity of their ordinary lives.  They adorned their characters with special sentiments, and amplified their derelictions. They enhanced the order of life and demonstrated its limitations.  The game of mimesis enabled them to cast a spell over their audiences.  The mystical origins of drama still persisted, but it was no longer the mysteries of the church which prevailed, but the enigma of the human condition.

The concept of play, as Huizinga has noted, has many similarities with that of an illusion.  As noted earlier, this should not be surprising since the word "illusion" comes from the Latin word in ludo, which means "in play."  But there are differences.  Play has its rules and regulations and these determine how the outcome will enfold.  In play, Huizinga adds, people wear masks and become another person (cf. Greek, persona "mask").  But the actor does much more than wear a mask, he re-presents a special happening, a symbolic act.  His representation is a mystical event, a cosmic happening. This comportment, however, differs significantly from an ordinary stage performance.  The drama, in this case, is memethic. It is acted out.  Whereas in the case of the stage production it is mimetic, it imitates life.  Hence, for Huizinga, play takes on ritualistic dimensions, they correspond to the re-creation of a cosmic event.  It becomes an enrapturement.  Its raison d'être is mythical.  Obviously, he has a reason for creating this dichotomy between the sacred and the profane.  For him, play is sacred and work is profane.  They belong to separate domains.  There is another explanation within the contexts of structural epistemology for the differentiation between work and play in European cultures which Huizinga has overlooked — play is dialectal and involves the exploration of new mentalities, whereas work is rhetorical and is involved in the predefined constructs of a given system in which options are either severely limited or controlled.  This shift in the rationale for the distinction between work and play also enables one to explain why, for some people at least, their work is a form of play -- they have the freedom to explore and redefine their work place whereas others do not.

Huizinga employed the instrumentality of etymology in his attempt to further divulge the relevance of play in past cultures. He noted that there is no common Indo-European word for play and this means that it was not a culturally salient concept at the time of this Urkultur.  But his investigations did reveal several interesting words for play.  In Greek, there two enlightening words for play: paidia that refers to the play of a child and agon, which pertains to adult contests of skill (cf. Latin ludus). These words are important because they provide the parameters for the classification of games by Huizinga (1955).  But, his critic, Caillois (1979), has argued that Huizinga has overlooked other classical designations for play.  In Latin, there is alea, the game of dice, which is associated with vagaries of fate and destiny; and there is the ilinx, the Greek word for whirlpool, which denotes a kind of game that is based on the pursuit of vertigo.  

The underlying tenet of Huizinga's fascination with play can be found in the third chapter of his book Homo Ludens.  He argues that cultures use play to express its interpretation of life. He is not saying that play turns into culture, but that the play metaphor pervades culture.  It can be found in the childish play of paidia, the competitive skills of agon, the exhibits of the agora (the market place), and the victories or athlon of the Gods in Greek drama. Play involves a world of honor in which challenges are met in the cosmic drama of good over evil.  Hence, play can be found in all aspects of culture from the heroes of mythology who win their contests by trickery (a form of gambling) to the contests of superiority in the battle field.  What emerges from such contests is the aristos, the best or most excellent, those who demonstrate virtue by feats of strength, skill, courage, and wit. 

In one of his essays on cultural play, Huizinga provides an insightful illustration of how competition or agon operates within a court of law.  The litigation itself is agon, a form of a sacred contest in which the pronouncements of justice and honor take place.  The courtroom itself is the tenemos, the sacred spot that is divorced from the ordinary world.  The judges who administer this justice are in costume. They may wear wigs, coifs, robes, and other trappings of majesty.  For it is in their court that the contest takes place, the diversion of legal play.  The concern of the court is not justice, but matters of legality (the rules of the game).  The fate of the litigants is promulgated by the judge, the oracle of their fate.  His pronouncement becomes law. And the litigants must live with this ordeal for it is the final word.  Hence, the image of the scales of justice is a sub-metaphor of the outcome of this game of legality. They represent the finality of a cosmic event.     

In contrast to physical competition, Huizinga discusses the phenomena of mental competition.  This is evident, he notes, in the solving of the riddle.  Doing and daring are forms of physical power in which life is, in essence, the game of culture, but the ability to solve a riddle by mental prowess is a form of knowing which brings in the use of magical power.  It is a form of enchantment in which the sacred knowledge of the universe is unraveled, and the cosmic order is unveiled.  Hence, riddles are sacred. They contain esoteric knowledge.  Only after a knight has demonstrated his ability to command physical competition is he allowed to enter into a new realm of rivalry.  He is introduced into the game of the riddle, the secret language of the adepts, and a series of trials and tribulations.  It is at this level that he learns of an agonistic universe in which everything is dominated by conflict and split asunder by opposites.  At this stage, the ethereal life becomes ritual combat, but the riddle he has to solve is for his soul.  The battles that he encounters are essentially battles for his own soul.  From the point of view of secular society, his battles are on behalf of the king, or the royal order into which he was initiated.

Huizinga's theory of play went unchallenged until the work of Roger Caillois on   Les jeux  hommes appeared in 1938. What followed in this treatise was a brilliant critique in which Caillois demonstrated how Huizinga seemed to ignore some forms of play and even minimize others.  Callois expanded on the range and the diversity of the forms of play.  He noted how Huizing failed to elaborate on the various needs served by the phenomena of play within the larger context of culture theory.  Caillois argued that there are four basic types of play:

 

 

These four types of play are linked in a continuum ranging from LUDUS or skilled games at one end to PAIDIA or games of fantasy on the other.  The reason why these types of games are of interest culturally is that they are not equally dominant in all societies.  For example, some cultures are agonistic and others are not.  They may have a propensity for a fatalistic (aleatoric) view of life. Most of Huizinga's discussion of games, it should be noted, tended to deal only with memetic cultures.  Hence, these groups differ culturally.   

THE MAJOR CATEGORIES OF GAMES: ROGER CALLOIS
ALGON	ALEA	MIMESIS	ILINX
Demonstrated by Competitive Sports	Manifested by Gambling	The Life of the Theater	Evidenced by the Frenzy of the Roller Coaster
The Contest, Confrontation Cultures	Fatalistic Culture	Escapist Culture	Panic Culture
Individuals want to compete, winning is everything.	People take chances with their lives and their possessions	Individuals want to escape into another world, they want to hide in the illusions of others	The ultimate escape through self destruction, flirting with death, and  with various states of mental  frenzy

AGON:  There are many games that are adversarial or antagonistic in nature.  Each side confronts the other.  Each competes with the other.  What they contend about is something of value.  Usually, it is a highly ennobled physical or mental skill.  The side that wins the contest demonstrates its superiority.  Agonistic games require sustained attention, a great deal of patience, and considerable training.  The goal is to win the contest (Greek agon) and the victor is the one who assiduously applies himself, and trains most strenuously to accomplish that ideal and win the prize (Greek athlea).

There are many examples of agonistic games.  Boxing is agonistic.  It requires two competitors who fight with each other in the ring in accordance to certain rules.  The winner is the superior fighter, the one with the greatest physical skills of toughness, stamina, speed, and boxing talent.  Football is another example of an agonistic game.  In this case the battle takes place on a field which is marked off into competing territories.  A quarterback heads the team. He organizes the plays and leads his team to victory.  The team that has reached the goal line the most after a stipulated period of time wins the game.  The skill in this case is a team effort; it involves the physical strength and agility of the players and the mental alertness and perspicacity of the team captain.  Chess is another type of agonistic game.  The players compete on a board with opposing rows of chess pieces.  The object of the game is to attack and conquer the king.  The moves are regulated.  Each piece has certain constraints on how it can move, when it can move, and where it can move.  The winner of the game conquers his opponent through the use of his mental skills, experience at chess, and employment of strategic moves.

ALEA:  The Greek word for dice is alea and games of chance are called by Caillois alea.  What makes games of alea different is that the players, in this case, have no control over the outcome.  Winning, he notes, is a matter of fate.  The player is passive and waits the outcome of his fate.  Once the die (alea) is cast, the gods have decided, and he is made aware of the outcome.  It is all a matter of luck.   All is a blind verdict of chance. 

There are many examples of games of chance.   The lottery is a well-known aleatoric game.  It involves the buying of tickets from some commercially recognized establishment.  The tickets have been officially coded and given a lucky number.  Once a month, the winner of that lucky number is revealed to the public.    Those who favor the lottery, sweepstakes, or similar aleatoric enterprises do so on fate.  They have no guarantees that they will win.  They have no skills that they can employ to enhance their chances.  All that they can do is wait for the die to be cast.  It is all a matter of chance.

The gambling casino is a house of chance.  There are many different kinds of games available in these establishments for the gamer.  He may play the cards (blackjack), the jackpots (slots) or the games (roulette, wheel of fortune).  There is a formality in casinos that contrast radically with local gambling clubs.  The patrons wear formal attire, drinks are served, formal announcements are made periodically, and the establishment is furnished in warm eloquent colors.  The illusions of wealth are built into the scene.  Guard escorts winners to the cashier's office where official governmental declaration forms (IRS forms) are signed, customer information is recorded, and a check is ceremoniously conveyed to the patron. 

Lifestyles can also be allocated to chance.  In Anne Tyler's book, The Accidental Tourist, the protagonist is a man who lives his life by default.  He avoids making decisions.  His wife leaves him and he lets it happens.  She wants to get back together with him, and he lets her execute the decisions in his life.  He meets a woman whom he feels is special for him and she sets his agenda in life.  When he travels, he does so passively.  The choices have all been made for him.  In computer terminology, the default is the primary settings given by the software company.  It dictates how the product is to be used.  Those who want to change the default setting must make the effort to open up a configuration file, study the technical manual for the relevant information, and execute the new selections.  The accidental tourist, in this framework, lives a default life.  He has been handed scripts in life.  His consciousness is a false one.  The life he lives is not his own, but one that others have planned for him.  His sister also lives a default life.  When things go wrong it is because they do not comply to the structures that she has been given.  She is compulsive about organization.  Others see it as her forte, but it is really her weakness.  She is over-organized, over-structured.  She also lives a default existence in which there are no surprises, no changes, no variations.  Her life is a matter of fate, it is decided by others, it is aleatoric. 

MIMICRY:  Mimicry is an illusion.  It is a game of escape.  For the players of agon and alea, there is an attempt to enter an ideal world through competition or by chance.  But, for the mimic, the desire is to enter into a world of illusions (Latin in-ludo "in play") through the imagination.  It is a special form of escape from the profane reality of everyday existence.  It is the world of the mask, the persona.  The scripts are created by the playwright, and the drama enfolds before an audience, real or imaginary.  It is all very dramaturgical.  In its more sinister and controlled form, it is the world of the spy who manipulates others, or the domain of the fugitive whose mask (persona) becomes his outer reality, or the universe of the impostor whose mask hides an empty face, a person with unformed ego boundaries.  Although all of these are involved in acting and all are at home in play  (illusion), it is not the same world that is occupied by the actor.  The impostor, the spy, and the fugitive are all very serious in playing their roles.  They deception is serious.  Their simulation is highly motivated.  It forms the basis of their survival.  Such is not the case with the professional actor who merely imitates life and who shares his role taking openly with his audience.  A similar pattern of escape can be found among spectators who become openly involved in the illusions before them and may, from time to time, vicariously enters the stage with the actors.  They are aware of their escape mechanisms. 

The most obvious example of the game of mimesis is the stage. Theaters are houses of illusion. They are chambers of escape. They are places where the audience escapes from the profane world of everyday interaction to enter into a sacred space where heroes are bigger than life and the villains are more evil than iniquity itself.  The earliest stages were allegorical.  The messages of these passion plays dealt with matters of apocalyptic proportions (Burns, 1972).  Its characters were the traits of the good, the bad, love, hope, and charity.  Later, when the art of memory gave way to the rise of the printing press (Yates, 1987), the theater became a place of mystical enlightenment.  Its construction was a mirror of the universe, and its actors shared stories of spiritual enfoldment.  With the advent of technological developments in the area of cinematography, the mimesis of the stage was reformulated into film (Dickinson, 1971).  The stories were no longer about gods and goddesses, but about actors and actresses with celebrity status (Goode, 1978).  Given the rising narcissism in the United States, it is only natural that Hollywood would find a way to assist their audiences in escaping life through celebrity worship.  Hence, Caillois could readily classify the United States as a mimetic culture, but so would India, and Italy, and many other nations around the world fit this classification.  Hence, it is not surprising that Huizinga saw all cultures as mimetic. 

ILINX:  The Ilinx is the pursuit of vertigo, a voluptuous panic.  This is a state of momentary seizure in which reality is destroyed.  The whirlpool affect can be found among the Mexican voladores who hang by their feet and spin in an every widening circle as they slowly descend to the earth.  In such a state of suspension, the blood rushes to the head, the background images merge into a swirl, and all sense of reality is lost, the mind dissolves.  Another example of the pursuit of vertigo can be found among the Sufi.  They begin their whirling dance by means of a gradual rotation with the arms are raised laterally and the head held up high.  As the pace quickens, they soon witness their horizon blurring into a gyrating vista and once again reality is destroyed by the momentary seizure of vertigo. 

Ilinx destroys reality.  It is an attempt to escape into another reality, a different form of the senses.  Whereas the games of alea and agon are attempts to replace reality with an idealized version either by effort or by change, ilinx is an attempt to escape the status quo completely.  Caillois (1979) argues that ilinx is the desire for disorder, a desire for destruction.  This is the game of the drug culture, the game of destruction.  For those who are involved in the sport, it is a form of escape into another reality; but, for those who witness the event from the outside, it is a game of death.  Such is the game of vertigo. 

Roger Caillois is interested in developing a theory of games.  He notes how when play becomes institutionalized, it results in rules and these rules may become contaminated.  This spoil theory of games is really a by-product of Plato's theory of forms in which the ideal forms (phantasia logike) are expressed by actual substances (tungganon).  However, instead of ideal forms, Caillois has ideal games, which are divorced from the contamination of people who try to influence the outcome of the game.  And, instead of the actual substances, Caillois has the actual games, in which rules are violated, and in which people cheat, and in which the decisions make by referees are often countervailed by political and social pressures.  Hence, in the ideal games, the following conditions hold:

Agon         The desire to win by one's merit in regulated competition.

Alea           The submission of one's will in anticipation of the wheel of fate.

Mimesis     The assumption of a strange personality  through   imagery and  illusion.

Ilinx           The pursuit of vertigo to escape the present reality.

In actual games, however, what was once pleasure soon becomes a passion, then a compulsion and eventually an anxiety.  The game has been spoiled.  Similarly, professionals and those who wish to cheat the system, to violate the rules of the game and to spoil the ideal setting.  For the professional, the game is no longer sport, but work.   Caillois is quick to point out that his model of the game is based on the ideal, the Platonic forms.  These ideal games can be combined into six basic existing patterns.

 

There are certain combinations that are not possible: competition and vertigo, for example, are not possible as the former requires the use of controlled skills while the latter represents the abandonment of controlled skills.  Nevertheless, these six patterns can be readily found in various cultures.  The combination of competition and chance, for example, can be found in such games as football, and chess.  In these games, one has only partial control, and chance determines the outcome.  For Caillois, these games are matters of submission or control:

After discussing the structure of games and how they form ideal patterns, Caillois introduces his theory of cultural types based on the kinds of games that they legitimate.  Cultures, he argues, do different things with competition.   Some focus on the mental, while others concentrate on the physical.  Cultures also do different things with chance.  For some it is a diversion, but for others it comes a way of life, a form of fatalism.  Cultures also differ in the way in which they practice simulation.  Some are aware of the roles that are socially constructed and distinguish the public self from the public self, but for other the roles become real.   People identify with their conversational images.  Finally, cultures also vary in how they deal with the games of vertigo.  For some, it is an escape from the present whereas for others it is an excuse for non-action, a time out.

Caillois argues that primitive cultures are Dionysian.  They are involved in the games of MIMESIS and ILINX.  The mask in primitive society is used to symbolize the universe.  The persona or mask was used to transform officiates into gods, spirits, or animal ancestors at ceremonies. The staging of god-play ended in a sacred convulsion (ilinx). The transition was from simulation to vertigo and trance was the bonding effect between the two.  Hence Dionysian cultures employ both MIMESIS and ILINX as cultural games.

Contemporary societies, on the other hand, are Apollonian.  They are marked by competition (AGON) and aristocracy.  People compete mentally at the executive level or physically at the factory level.  By industrial societies, especially those involved in monopoly capitalism, have a two tiered system.  Many are favored even before the competition begins because they belong to the power elite.  These are the members of industrial oligarchy, those who have achieved wealth and power through heredity.  Their place is the game is one of being born into wealth, a matter of luck, a matter of chance (ALEA).  Hence, the games of chance and competition mark industrial societies.

            What has happened in the course of history, Caillois argues, is that there has been a transition from the Dionysian to the Apollonian.   This change brings with it many concomitant transformations.  It involves the transition from the charismatic to the rational, and the substitution of submission to fate with the dictates of reason. Although primitive societies did compete physically, this pattern of AGON has been replaced.  The new competition is bureaucratic.  It is one of merit examinations.  The new competition is one of meritocracy.  Whereas the old heroes where man of physical strength, the new heroes are now administrators.  Their weapons are the pen, paper, and the computer.  Their rewards are commodities, financial advancements, and executive perks.  The old Greek world of tyche (luck), moira (allotment by destiny), and kairos (the opportune moment) has been replaced by the modern concept of self as the company man.  Business becomes the "real world."  The new battles are administrative, and competition is for market share. 

THE METAPHOR OF FORM

            There have been numerous attempts at labeling this very common metaphor.  In art history it is characterized as the copy theory of art (Gombrich, 1963: 12-29). Later, the copy theory of art was replaced by a structural or semiotic model of art (Foucault, 1966) in which new meanings were created during the process of giving them new forms.  What was present was “re-presented” in a new form.  The meaning of the original was “re-presented” or structured into a new code and this process itself gave it a new meaning. Most art historians appear to use the same metaphor of form for both of these theories of art and is based on the belief that the medium of art is neutral, but forms can have meaning and they do function as symbols.  Under this new view of “re-presentation,” artists do not copy reality; they impose their interpretations of reality unto their viewers.  In cybernetics (Wiener, 1954) and in information theory (Shannon and Weaver, 1949), there is the metaphor of information packaging, the act of putting meaning into a form so as to in-form others to make them con-form to the flow of in-form-ation. And, if they do not conform, they need to be re-form-ed and made to per-form correctly within the system. It is the metaphor that has also appeared under the rubric of structuralism, what Brown (1978: 145-153) calls the language metaphor.  In this context, language (a system of linguistic forms) becomes the metaphor for dealing with social structures as in the semiotic forms of film, the novel, art, the theater, and social history.  And, in theology, it has been known as the "word" metaphor (Borzarth-Campbell, 1980) whereby meaning is given form through words and these meaning then are put into action by performance (i.e., letting the form come through).  But, this theological metaphor is nothing more than the classical process of mimesis (Auerbach, 1968) in which something is composed (put into an ordered form) and then performed (put into action).  Mimesis, then, is just another mode of representation theory in which an original form (that which is already present) is re-presented in another context through other kinds of forms.  In the case of mimesis, however, the representation is also performed. These representations are not oily used to say things, they are used to do things.  The actions themselves play a role in establishing the meaning of these representations.  In this essay, the author argues that these metaphors are all derived from a more basic model, the Platonic metaphor of ideal forms.

In The Republic (Cornford, 1945; 1957), Plato asked his contemporaries to turn away from the overabundance of their sensual experiences, to escape the imperfections of the world of senses and to focus upon the abstracted objects themselves through purification [katharsis] which, he argued, is the only possible object of thought.  He called this abstract knowledge an Ideal Form and contrasted it with Appearances, which are the basis for opinions.  To explain this difference within his cosmology, he introduced concept of the two states of mind.  On the higher level there is intelligence [noesis], knowledge [episteme], and discursive thinking [dianoia] and on the lower level one finds belief [pistia] and imagination [eikasia].  These have been referred to in philosophic literature as the World of Ideal Forms and The World of Appearances.  It is on the level of the intelligible world that one finds these abstract forms and mathematical objects.  These forms, Plato contended are eternal in nature, they never decay or change.  This is where, in the tradition of Pythagoras, one can also find mathematical forms.  Furthermore, these ideal forms are sublime and as a consequence they also represent that which is good.  For Plato, these ideal forms are found to be in stark contrast with the decaying and ephemeral things in the World of Appearance, the lower realm (Cornford, 1945: 222).

 

THE WORLD OF IDEAL FORMS

STATES OF MIND

Intelligence (noesis), Knowledge (episteme), Thinking (dianoia)

OBJECTS

The Good and the Eternal, The Forms (eidos), Mathematical Objects

  

THE WORLD OF APPEARANCES

STATES OF MIND

Belief (pistia), Imagination (eikasia)

OBJECTS

The Visible and Decaying, Images

 

The world of Appearances is full of change, chaos, and illusion.  In contrast to this system of forms, there is the real world — the world that never changes.  The real world, for Plato, is the world of forms; and, the imaginary world is the world of appearances. One understands these appearances only by looking beyond them to the underlying real forms that they represent. The appearances, then, are merely representations or copies of these ideal forms. 

Here is a new frame of discourse and a new kind of vocabulary offered to the European mind.  We take it for granted today as the discourse of educated men.  It does not occur to us that once upon a time it was necessary for it to have been discovered and defined and insisted on, so that we could easily and complacently inherit it.  This discovery is essentially Plato's, even though he is building on a great pioneering effort in this same direction which had preceded him. (Ellis, 1967: 260)

For Plato, these terms were not just linguistic devices.  They were not inventions of the intellect.  But they were intended to be entities existing outside of the mind.   These forms exist prior to their appearances.  These ideal forms are accessible to the knowing subject, the person who has intelligence and who uses discursive thought as an instrument through which he can come to know these ideal forms.  This dichotomy of the two levels of the mind provides, in Plato's scheme, the ultimate separation of objective knowledge from the knowing subject.  For Plato, real knowledge never changes and can only be found in his World of Ideal Forms.  All other claims to knowledge which are not part of the World of Ideal Forms consist of mere opinion or imagination and belong to the World of Appearances. This discussion of the states of mind was important for Plato because he was trying to overcome the oral tradition with its inherited state of the opined mind, a tradition of belief.  He considered these traditions to be no more than dogma, opinion and imagination.  He wanted to break these centuries of contextualized beliefs by appealing to something that is eternal and never changes.  Havelock Ellis (1967: 260) mentioned that Plato was building his efforts in the same direction as those who had gone before him.  What was this tradition?  Who had gone before him?  The answer is informative because it demonstrates that the Metaphor of Form had a precursor.  In other words, it is also a derived metaphor.  It is a version of a much older Pythagorean metaphor of The Involution and Evolution of the Soul (Cornford, 1937; McClain, 1978).  A discussion of this Platonic metaphor can be found in the Timaeus and also in the Critias.  There is a scene in Timaeus in which Socrates is teaching a slave how to reason in geometry.  The slave is not a mathematician and cannot know this special knowledge.  But, he is able to use his reason in order to ascertain this system of knowledge through an intellectual dialogue [the original meaning of dialectics before its transformation by Hegel] with Socrates.  The slave soon discovers that he has come to command and to control this special mathematical knowledge [anamnesis].  Plato argues that the reason for this is because this knowledge already exists in the World of Ideal Forms.  And, what appears to be new knowledge is only a recollection of Ideal Forms.  It is, consequently, eternal knowledge. Ernest McClain (1978) has demonstrated that Plato's dialogues abound in mathematical allegories and reflect the Pythagorean worlds of spirit versus matter. The Timaeus, for example, provides a lengthy discussion of mathematics and universals of thought as soul forms.  In addition, the Statesman, the Critias, and the Laws are permeated with them. McClain (1978) is also interested in the mathematical theory of music, which emerges as a dominant theme in Plato's writings.  This metaphor is also taken from the cosmology of Pythagoras and assumes that music with its intervals for the octave is the manifestation of mathematical proportions that is a fundamental note produces its next higher octave when it is halved. Furthermore, number and figures are the essence of all things. Entities that exist are imitations of mathematical forms.  Physical shapes (lines, circles, squares, triangles, pentagons, and duodecahedrons) are products of number.  Plato was influenced by the Pythagoreans who classified numbers into categories of odd, even, prime, composite, perfect, and amicable.  The used stones or pebbles and studied the number patterns that they formed.  A triangle consisted of the first series of natural numbers.   The ratio of 3:4:5, for example, designates the sides of a right-angled triangle.  The first series of odd numbers formed a square (1+3+5 … + 2 (n-1). Plato also held to the view that there is a harmony among the various fields of mathematics. Arithmetic deals with one-dimensional numbers; geometry has to do with two-dimensional numbers; stereometry has to do with three-dimensional geometry, and sphaerics has to do with stereometry in movement. Music is number. When a string or flute is shortened to half of its original length, the note or tone that it produces is one octave higher.  The Pythagoreans experimented with ratios and found that the ratio of 3:2 gives the fifth note on a scale of seven notes.  The ratio of 4:3 gives a fourth note.  The Greeks built their music on the Pentatonic Scale, a five-note scale.  Pythagoras developed a scale that uses only two intervals: 9:8 (white keys on the Piano) and 256:243 (black keys on the piano).    This is known as the Lydian Mode.  The 9:8 intervals were chosen and then the gaps were filled in with semitones with 256:243 ratios.  It should be noted that much of Chinese and Scottish music is based on this Pentatonic Scale.

All is number.  Nothing escapes this principle of philosophy, this mysticism of number. For this reason, Plato's cosmology speaks of objects in the World of Appearances as representations or replications of a divine order - one that is mathematically structured (Gellrich, 1985: 20-22).  This divine order is one in which the whole of the heavens is harmony.  Number became the basis of this harmony.  Even traditional and Renaissance rhetoric was based on this harmony (Yates, 1987). Yates has demonstrated how the mnemonist from classical times up until the Elizabethan Age (Yates, 1983) envisioned a Platonic World of Ideal Forms and how they placed these Ideal Forms in certain locations [topoi] where they could be readily accessed by the mind through recollection [amanesis] or recall.   An actor learned his lines not by rote, but by this system of visualization.  Furthermore, theaters were constructed, she noted, to reflect this cosmos, this World of Ideal Forms. 

The Pythagorean Tetractys or Decad is a figure based on a system of numbers (1 + 2+ 3 + 4 = 10). The One represents the essence of Divinity.  Later, this divinity is manifested into spirit and matter, the duality or two.  After a period of rest, the divinity and its manifestations produces an animating soul of the cosmos, number three.  Four represents the physical aspect that of the world.  These four numbers (1 + 2 +3 + 4) totals ten.  This Decad symbolizes the whole, a functioning organism.  

The Pythagorean J,Jk"6JLH or Decad is a figure based on a system of numbers (1 + 2+ 3 + 4 = 10). The One represents the essence of Divinity.  Later, this divinity is manifested into spirit and matter, the duality or two.  After a period of rest, the divinity and its manifestations produces an animating soul of the cosmos, number three.  Four represents the physical aspect that of the world.  These four numbers (1 + 2 +3 + 4) totals ten.  This Decad symbolizes the whole, a functioning organism.  

The metaphor of the involution and evolution of the soul derived, most likely not from Plato but from Pythagoras.  When Pythagoras went to Egypt he learned of the Myth of Isis and Osiris, which is a metaphor of the involution of the spirit into the body and its eventual evolution back to the spirit world upon death.  He brought these and other forms of ethereal knowledge back to his homeland of Samos and incorporated it in his school of metaphysics.  It was Pythagoras among the Greek philosophers who first spoke of the involution of the spirit into the concrete human body and of the task of the soul in its evolution towards a return to pure spirit.  It was Pythagoras who first created the dichotomous realms of spirit and appearances.  He lectured on the Forms of Opposites: The One versus the Many, The Rest versus the Moving, The Straight versus the Curved The Limited versus Unlimited, The Odd versus the Even, Male versus Female, The Good versus the Evil, and The Light versus the Darkness.  Many of these concepts still dominate Western mathematical and religious thought.  Plato continued this dichotomization of polar opposites rather than a continuum, which would have allowed for a gradual transition from one value to the other.  He added the distinction between the habitual and unconscious use of rules [empeiria] and their deliberate practical action [techne], opinion [doxa] vs. knowledge [episteme], the realm of things [ta pragmaoa] vs. the ream of rational ideas [logoi].  In addition, he argued that the soul should be purged of these impurities, of the degrading and debasing lower world of myth and opinion.  He wanted people to raise from this world of sense perception [aisthesis] to the world of rational understanding [noesis].  He believed in a benevolent Demiurge who had formed the universe from the entropy of primordial matter [chaos] into an orderly world [kosmos]. This Demiurge made it into a copy of the World of Ideal Forms and also invested the World-body with a World Soul, making the cosmos a living being.  Consequently, mathematics and numbers were of special interest to both Plato and to Pythagoras because they saw life and being as manifestations of this world of spirit, of this world of pure mathematical forms.  And, as noted earlier, music was another special field of interest to him because it also provided evidence in the mathematical division of the octave of the manifestation of this pure spirit. What is significant about The Platonic World of Ideal Forms is that it is concomitant with the teachings of Pythagoras and the Pre-Socratics. 

The One versus the Many

The Rest versus the Moving

The Straight versus the Curved

The Limited versus Unlimited

The Odd versus the Even

Male versus Female

The Good versus the Evil

The Light versus the Darkness

Heidegger (1952, 1969), a philosopher who is very familiar with the Presocratics, was also cognizant of this relationship between the two modes of existence underlying the metaphor of involution and evolution.  He treated this as two separate metaphors and makes them the basis of his reinterpretation of contemporary themes on Being [Das Sein] and Beings [Das Seiende].  Heidegger feels that these concepts have been misconstrued among the philosophers of Modernity.  He wanted to avoid any spiritual connotations to his discussion, he couched them - whenever possible, into the more secular vocabulary of Heraclitus and Parmenides who envisioned life as an energy in flux.  Not all philosophers concur with Heidegger’s secularization of these concepts. Writers of religious historiography have openly welcomed this metaphor in its original context:  

Philosophical discussion of the word doubtless precludes that it is prior to life.  In theology, however, this assumption is not so.  The Eternal Word coexists with God the Creator from the beginning.  It calls life into being.  It precedes existence, all existence save its life with the Spirit in God.  The primacy of the Word is manifest in Christian dogma.  This primacy, because of the Incarnation, takes on existential importance in the human situation.  Interpretation of the word of God in the Scriptures is a receptivity to the Divine Word within them.    (Borzarth-Campbell, 1980: 22)

The embodiment of the spirit is called incarnation (the act of putting spirit into the form of the body).  It is interesting to note some similarities between this metaphor and Plato's World of Ideal Forms.  The original home of the spirit is eternal and occupies the World of God, the Eternal City.  It partakes of the body through the process of involution and eventually leaves the body through evolution.  As Greek society was dislodged by secular thought, the metaphor of incarnation also shifted towards to a derivative metaphor, The World of Ideal Forms.  And, now what is embodied is no longer the spirit, but merely an idea, an ideal form, or even a concept. Hegel was to later revive this Pythagorean concept of spiritual embodiment in his Phenomenology the Spirit (Hegel, 1952) where he mixed the metaphor of the Platonic metaphor of ideal forms with the Aristotelian metaphor of growth [physis].  In the presentation of his system, an entity evolves through time towards its final goal as a perfect form or telos.  The motivating factor is this transition is the spirit [Geist] and is equivalent to what Aristotle called a motor cause.  Although the metaphor of incarnation is the precursor of the metaphor of the World of Ideal Forms, its place in this investigation is limited.  The metaphor of form is what dominates contemporary social, historical, and secular thought.  Consequently, this derivative metaphor is the one that continues to provide the illustrative metaphor for new systems of thought.  And, this is why it is central to this investigation.

THE MACHINE METAPHOR

Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1961) has often been cited as the strongest proponent of the machine metaphor.  His book, L'homme Machine (1748), openly argues that man is a complicated machine.  His belief in the machine metaphor is so strong that he admonishes G. W. Leibniz (1954) for advocating a theory of monadology, which has spiritualized matter rather than materialized the soul.  This, he notes, is an unintelligible hypothesis.  He even attacks Réné Descartes (1903) and all the Cartesians for making the same mistake.  They are in error, he adds, because they have taken for granted two distinct substances in man - the body and the soul.  But, no one has seen the soul, it is a matter of faith.  Consequently, this leaves one to only consider the body, which is a machine.  Man, he argues, is therefore a machine.  What is significant about this book by de la Mettrie is that it was the first clear statement of the belief that man is a machine.  His model of the human being as a machine can be found in the intellectual and mechanical accomplishments of Julien Leroy (1686-1759) who was a celebrated French watchmaker.  Leroy excelled in the construction of pendula and large clocks.  

Many philosophers continue to attribute this mechanistic view of the body to Descartes who strongly denied this concept. This contrast between Descartes and de la Mettrie is further evidenced by their views on the role that the senses play in cognition.  De la Mettrie found solace in the writings of John Locke (1956) who believed that knowledge must come from experience.  Descartes, on the other hand, argued that neither one's imagination nor one's senses can give one any assurance of anything.  The senses, Descartes noted, are fallacious.  The ideal method of philosophy for Descartes (1913) was to be found in mathematics.  De la Mettrie saw no need for locating consciousness within the soul.  The brain, he remarked, has its muscles for thing, as the legs have muscles for walking.  This approach to medicine is known as iatromechanics.  It is systemic pathology that attempts to deduce all bodily functions from the laws of statics and hydraulics.  Iatromechanics existed before de la Mettrie (Tönnies, 1974:20-21), but it was this physician from Saint Malo who legitimated the concept in his famous tome on L'homme la machine. 

Le corps humain est une machine qui monte elle-même ses ressorts; vivante image du mouvement perpétuel.   (de la mettrie, 1961:21)

De la Mettrie began his collegiate career in Paris in the humanities and later studied rhetoric at Caen.  He was a born orator who had a passion for poetry.  Upon his return to Saint Malo in Brittany, he studied natural philosophy and was to later take the advise of his physician who recommended that he study medicine.  De la Mettrie became a celebrated doctor because of his intellectual prowess.  Early in his career he adhered to a mechanistic view of the body.  Thought, he argued, is but a consequence of the organization of the human machine. His writings on this matter were published in several tomes, one of which is L'homme la machine. 

De la Mettrie had many critics.  One of them was his publisher, Elie Luzac, who questioned how matter can be endowed with the faculty of thought. Luzac even wrote his own book on this subject and entitled it L'homme plus que machine [Man more than a machine]. De la Mettrie, a physician, astutely avoided this issue by adhering to an epiphenomenal explanation. In his own vituperous manner, he added that only physicians have a right to speak on this subject. 

The Machine Metaphor and its subsequent aftermath in the mechanization of the world have a long history with its origins deep in Western Culture.  It can be traced back to the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome and even before that to the technological developments in China and the Near East.   It appears as though there has always been some kinds of sophisticated machines and technology in the culture (Ellul, 1969).  So the mere fact machines existed is not what makes the machine metaphor a topic of central concern.  What makes this venture into the historiography of metaphor interesting is that since the Middle Ages there has been an increase in technological consciousness; and, somewhere in the last two or three centuries the machine became the model for human behavior. This change did not all happen at the same time.  Each contributor to this change in consciousness offered a unique mechanical model of technological progress.  Isaac Newton (Manuel, 1979; Westfall, 1983), for example, envisioned the universe of  as a celestial clock, and Julie de la Mettrie (1979) considered the body to be comparable to a hydraulic system,  Sigmund Freud also employed a machine metaphor when spoke of psychological disturbances as fluid blocks within a hydraulic human body which is subject to pressures and which require release from stress.  Currently, there is a whole new field emerging from among the social and natural sciences, which applies the metaphor of the brain as a computer.  These are often placed under the same rubric as the cognitive sciences.  They include information theory (Singh, 1986), human information processing models, a machine model of rhetoric (Flower, 1985), mathematical models of language (Chomsky, 1959; Chomsky and Miller, 1961), mathematical models of the brain (Jeremy, 1982), machine model of systems theory (Dillon, 1983; Emery, 1969; Churchman, 1986), and cybernetics (Parsegian, 1973).  What these authors all demonstrate so clearly is the fact that modernity is imbued with the machine metaphor.  It has become the root metaphor of contemporary western civilization.

Information theory was developed by of Shannon and Weaver (1949) as a mathematical theory of communication.  It is a model which attempts to measure the formal attributes of a system of information and not on the semantic content of these messages.  The natural unit of measurement within this system is the bit or the binary digit.  This unit was selected because of its efficiency for processing the formal properties of messages and because electronic machines were designed on the binary principle.  These units within the message do not share the same probabilities and this lack of parity is accommodated by means of the statistical weighting of bits of information.  One of the more interesting by products of this system of formal properties is concerned with the phenomenon of redundancy.  A highly efficient system, it can be argued, would not be highly redundant, as this would involve the reduplication of unnecessary properties.  However, as Shannon and Weaver (1949) noted, natural language is highly redundant. 

In nearly all forms of communication, more messages are sent than are strictly necessary to convey the information intended by the sender.  Such additional messages diminish the unexpectedness, the surprise effect, of the information itself, making it more predictable.  This extra ration of predictability is called redundancy, and it is one of the most important concepts in information theory.  Redundancy is essentially a constraint.   (Campbell, 1982: 68)

Shannon and Weaver (1949) decided that English is 50 percent redundant when taken in samples of eight letters at a time.  For sequences of 100 letters, the redundancy increases to 75 percent.  The figure is even higher when language is studied in the context of sentences, paragraphs, and chapters of books.  Redundancy is important because it reduces error, engenders probabilities unequal, and makes complexity possible.  It is because of redundancy that a system is kept functioning in the presence of a signal interruption. 

The natural measure of the actual flow of information within a system is important to engineers because these formal properties are transmitted within a limited system.  They have a limit.  A machine can only process as much formal information as it was designed for. Hence, information theory incorporates the machine metaphor.   It assumes that messages are put into codes [encoded], transmitted through a channel, and the code is broken [decoded] at the other end.  When this code is transmitted through a channel, it must be enciphered into a form that is acceptable to that channel.  It must match the channel capacity if it is to be most efficient.  Hence, information theory is about the optimal code which can be sent from one component to another within a system.  This model is based on an ideal system.  But, actual systems do not measure up to the ideal.  Often there is noise in the channel.  Sometimes this is a byproduct of the machinery itself, at other times it comes from outside of the system.  To avoid miscommunication brought about by noise, information theorists have employed various degrees of redundancy in order to guarantee a successful rate of transmission. 

The machine metaphor of Shannon and Weaver (1949) is the outgrowth of several Victorian metaphors of the harnessing of energy and the forces of nature.  The steam engine was the emblem of the Industrial Revolution and it is linked to information theory through the train.  Messages, in this system, are packaged (encoded), sent along a track (the channel) from one station to another, and opened at the other end where the messages are retrieved (decoded).  Information theory is a mathematical expression of this mechanical metaphor.  The other incorporation of Victorian science can be found in the law of entropy - the claim that universe is running down into a state of complete disorder or entropy [chaos].  In Victorian times, Rudolf Clausius and Ludwig Boltzmann discovered the formula for this concept of entropy (Dillon, 1983: 66-67). This information is based on statistical chance or probability theory which Shannon and Weaver readily incorporated into their mathematical model of information theory.

METAPHORS OF SPACE AND TIME

For many years, Gilles Fauconnier (1985, 1997) worked on developing a model of mapping various uses of natural language into mental worlds.  This model has been very successful in accounting for the use of counterfactuals in language.  He argued that metaphors occur in a blended mental space.  In this earlier model, the source of a metaphor was mapped onto a target mental space and this cross mapping resulted in a blended mental space were some of these input structures were used. What is important about the blended space is the fact that emergent structures occur there that cannot be traced back to its inputs. An example of this earlier model can be found in the metaphor of “the surgeon is a butcher.”  The source input of the butcher is mapped onto a target mental space of the surgeon and the result is a new construct, a surgeon who operates like a butcher. Recently, he has expanded this model (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002) with a focus on what happens in the blended cognitive space. There are many configurations involved in creating metaphorical blends. In this essay, the focus is in on creating a blend of linear time from the inputs of linear space and internal time. 

 THE SOURCE-PATH-GOAL SCHEMA:  One of the concepts of into the blended concept of linear time has to be the Source-path-goal-schema.  In this framework, one encounters a logical space of a source, path, and goal.  There are also locations on that space and movements through that space from source to goal. This creation of a segmented line is similar to the mathematical blend that provides the concepts behind mathematical theory. In this case, however, that segmented line will be divided into concepts of time: the past, the present, and the future. The concept of a segmented time line, the arrow of time, will provides this model with powerful tools that can explain punctuality (moments in time as being equivalent to points in space), duration or movements in time from one point to another which are considered to be unique events (stretches of time as being equivalent to duration in time), and movement into unknown spaces beyond the time line (this explains conditionals, subjunctives, and optatives).  In order to envision how this is accomplished, one needs to use this output of linear movement with the input of internal time. 

INTERNAL TIME: The biological aspects of time revolve around various internal experiences such as being conscious, witnessing events that are causal, witnessing events that are simultaneous, memory of the past, cyclical modules of growth, awaiting new outcomes in the future, etc.  This inward awareness of time is blended in Western societies as linear time. This is time that reckons movement from the past, through the present, and into the future. This movement of time is from left to right.  This has become the natural scanning movement of the eyes in processing information. It forms the basis of reading, scanning items on a grocery shelf.  Industrial psychologists have studied these scanning movements and documented how this scanning movement terminates its search towards the right.  If one is searching for an item, this goal terminates when favored products are placed at the right of all other items on a supermarket shelf.  , etc.  This linear movement emerges in the blend of linear time. These movements are new to the blend. They do not occur naturally in time.  They have been created in the blend and constitute a cognitive metaphor in European languages.  Hence, in English, it is natural to assume that one looks forward into the future and turns back to see the past. Furthermore, in English time is based on a Contact Schema. One has to move forward physically from the present and into the future.  Such is not the case in all languages. In Greek, for example, the future is behind an individual and the past is in front. Furthermore, time moves from the future, enfolds in the present, and resides in the past. In Greek, it is time that moves.  In English, on the other hand, it is the individual who moves towards time.  The march of time is a metaphor that is common to English speaking countries.

Many students of language are astounded by the fact that there are languages which lack tense. This confusion results from the fact that they do not realize that time is a semantic construct and tense is a linguistic one. All languages have ways of speaking about time, a semantic construct.  Not all languages have linguistic markers of time, tense. Languages that lack tense can still convey the concept of time.  They use time words to signal events that take place in the past, present, or future. With the passage of time, these time words become attached to verbs and the resulting conflation is known as tense. English has only two tenses: the present and the past.  The future occurs as a time construct, but not as a linguistic one. In order to talk about the future in English, one must use a construction that employs the model will. 

            Past Tense:  John walked home.(-ed)

            Present Tense:  John walks home. (-s)

            Future Periphrastic Construction: John will walk home. (will + infinitive)

Tense is one of the linguistic markers of time and there are several ways of marking tense in English. One is by means of suffixation (-ed suffix marks the past) and the other is through vocalic changes within a verb base form (eat, ate, sing sang, etc.).  The other means of marking time in English is through aspect. Tense designates that an even took place at some period of time. Aspect tells one how that event was enacted. This system of time modifiers is discussed below.

 

HUMBOLDTIAN LINGUISTICS AND CULTURAL SALIENCY

Metaphors are used to construct conceptual categories and many students of language encountered difficulty in describing the relationship between metaphors and the social construction of reality.  This is because they assumed that language is organized around the linear representation of verbal forms.  It is now clear that language is used to organize concepts and many of these concepts are framed metaphorically.  Hence, a recurrent theme of cultural saliency can now be better addressed within the new theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics.  One of the persons who played a major role in the topic of cultural saliency was Benjamin Lee Whorf. He was trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a chemical engineer.  After his graduation, he soon took a position with an insurance firm as a fire investigator.  It was this appointment that led him into the study of the Hopi language and culture. While investigating a conflagration on the Hopi reservation, he noticed that even though a sign was posted stating "Empty Oil Drums," the Hopi Indians who caused the fire did not consider themselves to be culpable.  For, in their minds, they claimed that they learned after the fact that the sign was wrong and that the oil drums were not empty.  Hence, it was not their fault.  Whorf was intrigued by this different view of the situation and he attributed their misunderstanding of the English sign to the Hopi language itself. He reasoned that they had a different linguistic system and a different pattern of thought.  This pronouncement was eventually to become known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (Rossi-Landi, 1973).  What is significant about this segment of anthropological folklore is that the world view [Die Weltanschauung] of the Hopi Indians was substantially different from those of what Whorf called Standard Average European (SAE) or Western thought.  But, there is another difference that has not been openly discussed in the literature of the cultural relativism, namely that Whorf was influenced by Edward Sapir (Mandelbaum, 1962) whose approach to language and culture was more concomitant with the European phenomenology of Humboldt than with the positivistic underpinnings of American structuralism.   

No individual is free to describe nature with absolute impartiality, but is constrained to certain modes of interpretation … All observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated. Benjamin Lee Whorf, 1940; reprinted in Carroll, 1956: 214.

There are two dominant paradigms or metaphors of Western culture (cf. chapter two): the Natural Sciences versus the Human Sciences (i.e., the Humanities).  But, within the context of language theory, this model was reinterpreted to mean the contrast between the positivistic model of Bloomfieldian structuralism and the phenomenological model of Wilhelm von Humboldt (Brown, 1967).  Many critics of the cultural relativism hypothesis have not understood this disparity and consequently have attacked Sapir and Whorf for using the wrong metaphors, wrong similes, and mystical thinking (Miller, 1968).  The history of these ideas began with the writings of Immanuel Kant (1956). 

No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing same social reality.  The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached. Edward Sapir and Morris Swadesh, 1929.  

 The controversy between linguistic relativity and innate ideas engender the origins of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (Penn, 1972).  Kant was interested in the ability of the human mind to bring order into experience Cassirer, 1981).  He reasoned that this was accomplished by the use of innate ideas, which construct entities and constitute experience.  This conclusion was arrived at by Kant after his encounter with the writing of David Hume (Barrett, 1986) who argued that ideas are only possible through sense perceptions or synthetic a posteriori propositions.  Hence, Kant endeavored to demonstrate that ideas can be innate, that they can exist independently of sensory input and may even structure perception.  His argument, that innate ideas encompass the construction and constitution of experience, was his pronouncement for the existence of a priori analytical propositions. 

The next step in the genealogy of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis can be found in the writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt (Haym, 1856).  Humboldt, unlike his contemporaries Herder and Hamann, accepted Kant's theory of epistemology, but he also reckoned that language augments the theory of synthetic judgments by giving it further objectivity. Johann Georg Hamann, it should be noted, was the first German scholar to address the question of the influence of language on thought.  At this time of rationalism, it was naturally assumed that language was merely an appendage of reason and linguists were more concerned with rational grammars rather than with the faculty of perception, the gemeinen Menschenverstand.  Consequently, language was considered to be a product of reason.  And many scholars who practiced this tradition were only interested in the logical forms and structures residing within natural languages. But Hamann did not concur in this assessment, especially after his religious conversion and he was more interested in the divine Logos than in rational grammars.  As a matter of fact, if he was forced to go back in time and diachronically assign one concept over the other, it was language that he considered to be more primitive, i.e. an Urfaktum.  As a consequence, Hamann went on to argue that the Logos of language fertilizes reason and that it is from language that reason obtains its concepts.  The making of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and the Theory of Cultural Relativity has its origins in the writing of Hamann.  But Hamann was not the only critic of Kant's model of pure reason, logic and its derivative, viz., a logical grammar. The other opponent of Kant was Johann Gottfried Herder, a student of Hamann.  For Herder, language and reason were not separate, but identical.  

If words are not merely signs, but also, as it were, the mold in which we see our thoughts, then I would regard a whole language as a great range of thoughts having become manifest.  (Herder, 1877-1913, II: 12)

 

If it is true that we cannot think without thoughts, and that we learn to think through words, then language gives to the whole of knowledge its limits and counts.  (Herder, 1877-1913, II: 17)

Consequently, Herder regarded language to be the tool, the content, and the form of human thought (Miller, 1968:21).   What one finds in the writings of Herder is the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, viz., that language is equal to thought.  Nevertheless, both Kant and Humboldt were interested in innate ideas, but whereas Kant was dealing with the outcome of a medieval philosophical tradition (Heidegger, 1959) that was severely threatened by the empiricism of David Hume (Miller, 1968) and that claimed that all ideas are ultimately derived from the senses, Humboldt brought with him another perspective on innate ideas.  Humboldt, it should be noted, was the first European to combine his knowledge of Non-Indo-European languages with his philosophical approach.  He was attracted to the notion of linguistic and cultural variability or diversity (Penn, 1972) and argued that these extreme differences were due to the internal structure [innere Sprachform] of their respective languages.  These inner speech forms were not merely semantically structured labels of reality [Gegenstände], but they were involved in the structuring of the world through these semantic units [Begriffe].  Hence, from the perspective of Humboldt, language provided an objective source for universal ideas. 

When the soul actually awakens to the feeling that language is not merely a means of exchange for mutual understanding, but a real world, which the spirit must set between itself and objects by an inner exertion of its powers, the soul is on its way to finding more and more in language and putting more and more into it. Wilhelm von Humboldt, cited  by Ernst Cassirer,  1957:55-51.  

As a matter of fact, he argued along with Herder, his contemporary, that language is thought. But again, there are subtle differences.  For Humboldt, language comes into being when thought is embodied into sound.  Thought, he indicates was formless and struggling for clarity and it is language that provides an articulation of its structures.  Language is the formative organ of thought [Gliederung].  This articulation of thought through language enables the mind to grasp objects by eliciting a certain number of features, connecting them, and giving them form and color through the choice of sounds.  The word, in this model, is the minimal unit capable of expressing the content of language.  It segments and shapes the contact of language.  It possesses a unity of content and provides thoughts with shape.  Language is not, as Herder would have claimed, merely a collection of words.  Language, Humboldt argues, is organic.  The parts are intrinsically related to the organic whole.  Each part is connected with the other, it is the part united with the whole, the cause with the effect, the union of possibility with its necessity, the conditional with the unconditional.  What this means is simply that Humboldt did not dwell at the lexical level, but sought to understand language as a systemic whole.  He went on to argue that the creative act of language takes place at the sentential level.  In the sentence, he reasoned, there is a perfect unity.  It is at the level of the sentence where the synthetic act occurs. 

How can we penetrate to this pure inner world of consciousness, this ultimate concentration of all spiritual life, if in exploring and describing it we must avoid all the concepts and criteria which were created for the exposition of objective reality? Where shall we find a means of seizing the intangible – of expression what has itself not yet entered into fixed form, whether of an intuitive spatial and temporal, or of a purely intellectual or ethical or aesthetic order? Ernst Cassirer. 1957: 53

Later, this concept was to be the basis for the writings of Paul Wundt and his inceptive model of atavistic psycholinguistics [Völkerpsychologie] with its holophrastic model of verbal comprehension (Cassirer, 1923b; Urban, 1939: 30-31). There is another difference in Humboldt's model of language that merits comment.  He espoused linguistic and not philosophical relativism.  When he came across the diversity of language types, he noted that words in one language almost never have an equivalent in another. The way in which objects are designated also differs.  From this experience, he concluded that language does not represent objects, but rather they represent concepts that have been formed in the mind.  These concepts in the mind are independent of the objects themselves. 

The significance of perception has changed completely; it is no longer the copy of an existing world, but in a sense the prototype of natural objects.  It already contains this object in a kind of schematic sketch but cannot follow up the determination of the  object except by the application of the functions of pure understanding to that empirical material given in perception.  Ernst Cassirer, 1957: 59-61

This is his stance of linguistic relativism and provides a more sophisticated explication of the writings of Herder.  John Locke (1690), a British empiricist, also argued that there is seldom a complete correspondence between the words of one language and those of another.  But, for Locke, words were merely the means by which one expresses concepts that are already known independently of language.  His position is one of philosophical relativism.  What Humboldt is espousing is not the mapping of thoughts into language, but that language represents the way in which a human being approaches an objective idea.  His claim, to use the Roman metaphor of knowledge, is that different languages constitute different fields of knowledge which are waiting to be tilled by the human mind, but man's use of his cognitive and sensory powers depends ultimately on the language he speaks.  Humboldt went on to argue that different linguistic structures are reflections of the mental characteristics of their speakers.  He saw the true reason for linguistic diversity in the disparate forms of intellectualized energy belonging to each nation.  The formative principle, which organizes this energy into a systematic whole, is its "inner form," and each nation has its own "inner form."   Consequently, for Humboldt, language becomes identical with the Geist or the collective thought of a nation:

The intellectual peculiarity and the linguistic conformation of a people are related by such a depth of blending that, given the one, the other could be entirely derived from it.  For intellectuality and language permit and promote only mutually agreeable formations.  Language is, as it were, the external manifestation of the minds of peoples.  Their language is their mentality, and their mentality is their language.  It is impossible to conceive of them to be ever sufficiently identical.  Von Humboldt, 1841, VI: 38

At this point something very interesting happens to the work of Immanuel Kant.  There were those who looked to all languages for evidence of the same innate ideas and there were those who viewed different languages as belonging to different systems of thought and consequently dissimilar in culture and linguistic form.  (This view is not inconsistent with findings in cognitive psychology. If all humans are the same biological and have the same intellectual tools, they do not all use them in the same way. Some skills are nurtured and others are not. Some cultures, for example, either promote or legitimate certain skills over others. Hence, cultures frame cognition.)  The former is involved with the search for linguistic universals (cf. Chomsky and Cartesian linguistics or the structuralism of Levy-Strauss) and the latter is concerned with the establishment and the verification of cultural relativity (cf. anthropological linguistics and structuralism of Levy-Bruhl).  It is this latter tradition to which the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis adheres and it is the former tradition which motivates the "Expressiblity Hypothesis" of Fodor (1982).  In order for one to better comprehend the controversy regarding the role of metaphor and other figures of speech in language, it is necessary to consider these conflicting models of language in greater detail.

 

METAPHORICAL STRUCTURES AND CONCEPTUAL SPACE

The concept of lexical domains was once situated in anthropology and reflected an outgrowth of Humboldtian linguistics in the phenomenological tradition of Trier (1932) and Weisgerber (1926). Both of these scholars are Neo-Humboldtians.  Leo Weisgerber continued to work on the question of inner speech forms.  He argued that the way in which a person perceives and thinks about phenomena is determined by the categories that his language possesses.  Every person who learns to speak a language, he argues, is given a built in way of looking at the world through these categories.  And, he concludes, each language effects a different conceptual partition [Aufteilung] of the world.  People are, in his terminology, under the spell of the language that they speak.  But Weisgerber went on to assert that cognition results from the interaction between man's inner and outer worlds.  The latter provides his physical environment, his relative position on the earth.  But his inner world is biological and psychological and is related to other living organisms.  It is in the meeting place of these two realms that reflection takes place. It is a spiritual and intellectual mediary world [geistige Zwischenwelt].  Man behaves towards these physical and cultural worlds.  It is in this mediary world where constructs come into being, where one reflects, conceives, and judges things and events.  But language is not the only way in which this mediary world is manifested.  It is just one of the ways in which people categorize reality.  Its function is similar to the Greek concept of stasis in which the flux of energy is temporarily stabilized into a temporary form.  Language represents, therefore, a temporary form of linguistic consciousness which involves cognitive processes such as recognition [erkennen], knowing [anerkennen], attending [beachten], judging [urteilien, beurteilen], and evaluating [werten, bewerten].  This linguistic consciousness provides a world picture consisting of contents as signs [Zeichen] within a perceptual field [Feld]. This is the genesis of the famous triangle of the word, the meaning, and its referent used by I. A. Richards 1936).  When one grasps a meaning, he warned, he must not define it as though it were a property of a word, but rather as a relation [Beziehung] obtaining between a word's sound and content.  Meaning is simply a relational term.  It is a relation [Beziehung] between a meaning [Begriff, Inhalt] and a sound-complex [Lautform.  These fields, Weisgerber notes, can be multilayered or connected through word associations.  Hence, the innermost ring of the experience of death [sterben] by human beings creates a related field of the death of animals [verenden], and of the death of plants [eingehen].  These concentric rings of meaning are part of a multilayered field in modern German language because it has created an analogical system in the field of usage.

 

The Semantic Triangle 

The use of objects found in nature [verwenden] differs from the use of things manufactured by humans [gebrauchen] and from impersonal objects of a public nature [benutzen]. Furthermore, Weisgerber observed that these conceptual fields are modified by environmental and cultural needs.  Hence, as noted earlier in Middle High German, the zoological world was divided into four major categories, according to the mode of locomotion: visch (was used for everything that swims), vogel (was the category for everything that flies), wurm (was the label for everything that crawls), and tier (is the nomenclature for everything that runs). What is interesting about these categories, he asserts, is that there was no generic term for animal because there was no need for cover term of this nature until later in the culture when the conception of the zoological world underwent a transformation, giving rise to new categories in the eighteenth century with the discovery of the insect world.   Once could argue that an abstract category of <animate thing> did exist and that it was lexically incorporated into various verb expressions.  Hence, an <animate thing> that moves under water is a fisc.  An <animate thing> that moves in the air is vogl, and so forth. Abstract verbs and nouns do and are often discovered in a language through the process of “back formation.”  For example, the noun “editor” existed in English almost a century before the verb “edit” made its appearance in the language.  Morphologically, “editor” presupposes “one who edits.”  Hence the abstract verb   < edit > must have existed as an abstract verb form only to surface a century later as a concrete verb form, “to edit.” 

Jost Trier (1932) is another Neo-Humboldtian whose theories led to the development of semantic space.  He defines the semantic field [Bedeutungsfeld] in the following sense:

Every language is a system of selection over and against objective reality.  As a matter of fact every language creates a self-sufficient and complete image of reality... Every language structures reality in its own manner and thereby establishes the components of reality which are peculiar to this given language.  The language-reality components of one language never recur in quite the same form in another, nor are they simply a straightforward copy of reality.  They are instead the linguistic-conceptual realization of a view of reality proceeding from a unique but definite structuring matrix which continuously compares and contrasts, relates and distinguishes the data of reality.  Implicit in the foregoing is, of course, the realization that nothing in language exists independently.  Inasmuch as structuring constitutes the basic essence of language, all linguistic components are the result of structuring.  The ultimate meaning of each is determined precisely and only by its relation to and function in the total linguistic structure.  (Trier, 1952: 100)

In this theory of conceptual space, the content of every word in a language is determined by all the other words of that language.  Every lexical field [Wortfeld] is an outward manifestation of an underlying conceptual field [Begriffsfeld] and both are connected into an architectonic whole.  These closed conceptual fields show how different languages have partitioned the same area of experience, each constituting a separate world picture. 

What is interesting about modern models of semantic space by psycholinguists and cognitive psychologists (Glucksberg and Danks, 1975) is that they also conduct research on lexical space predicated on the conceptual field models of the Neo-Humboldtians.  Nevertheless, the differences between these two traditions are extensive.  Anthropologists, for example, still function within the context of cultural relativism.  They are looking for a posteriori knowledge of conceptual and cultural categories.  Most psychologists, on the other hand, operate within the framework of Neo-Kantian rationalism and they are searching for a priori cognitive categories, i.e., universals of the mind.  An area in which these two paradigms have come into conflict is in the lexical domain of color categories; and consequently this research merits some discussion as it relates to the Neo-Humboldtian concept of conceptual space.

At one time, color terminology provided the best evidence available for the cultural relativity hypothesis (Sapir, 1944; Whorf, 1956.  But research by Brown and Lenneberg (1954) shifted the focus from cultural saliency to one of codability.  Researchers in the field overlooked the fact that this was a different paradigm with a dissimilar epistemological tradition.  They accepted the claims that people are able to recognize colors previously shown to them if the colors are highly codable.  Later, Eleanor Heider Rosch (Heider, 1972) used this model of codability to demonstrate how in Dani, a language of New Guinea in which speakers have only two colors (mili dark and mola light) native speakers, are able to distinguish some eleven colors (black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray) because of their ability, under laboratory conditions, to select these highly codable focal colors.  The fact that native speakers went back into their natural cultural habitat and reverted to seeing only two colors under these non-laboratory conditions outside of the experiment is totally dismissed.  Their color constancy, which is culturally determined, enables them to see only two colors. What is important about this shift is that there were two paradigms of human perception, and when the psychological model was imposed it automatically discounted questions of saliency and other concerns of a phenomenological nature.  The work of Berlin and Kay (1969) merely further legitimated this model of psychological imperialism. 

Although the psychological model ruled out many significant anthropological concerns, the path it followed has been rather informative.  The most interesting recent research is one of the neurophysiology of color vision by DeValois and Jacobs (1968).  They noted that in the pathway between the eyes and the brain are six types of vision cells.  Only four of these cells determine hue and are called opponent response cells, while the remaining two determine brightness.  What is important for this discussion of color vision, however, is the fact that these response cells are grouped into two color pairs: (1) the perception of blue and yellow, and (2) the perception of red and green.  Each of these cells maintains a base response rate or a threshold level.  In the two blue/yellow cells, the color that is perceived depends on whether or not the stimulus is above or below the response rate.

The Neural Thresholds of Vision

Hue Cells

Blue - above threshold; Yellow - below threshold

Green - above threshold; red - below threshold

Combinations of Hue Cells

Purple  = Blue and Red                       

Orange = Red and Yellow

Turquoise  = Blue and Green            

Chartreuse  = Yellow and Green 

Brightness Cells:

White - above threshold

Black - below threshold

Combination of Hue and Brightness Cells

Pink =     Red and White

                                                               

              Maroon = Red and Black

              Light Yellow = Yellow and White

              Dark Yellow = Yellow and Black

              Light Blue = Blue and White

              Dark Blue = Blue and Black

              Light Green = Green and White

              Dark Green = Green and Black

 

When the stimulus is above the threshold, blue is perceived; and when the signal is below the threshold, yellow is perceived.  Similarly, for the two red/green cells, when the stimulus is above the response rate, red is perceived; and, when the stimulus is below the response rate, green is perceived.  Consequently, among the four cells, focal blue is seen when the blue/yellow cells are firing above the neutral response rate and when the red/green cells are firing at the neutral base rate.  But what would happen if the red/green cells were also to fire above the response rate?  The answer, DeValois and Jacobs note, is purple.  These findings are consistent with color theory, viz., purple is made up of blue and red.  Furthermore, turquoise occurs when the blue/yellow cells are firing above the response rate, and the red/green cells are firing below the response rate.  After all, turquoise is made up of blue and green.  It should be noted that the two remaining cells, which determine brightness, are actually light-sensitive or dark-sensitive.  Pure black occurs when the dark-sensitive cells are firing at their maximum rate and when the remaining four cells (blue/yellow and red/green) are firing at their neutral rate.  Similarly, pure white transpires when the light-sensitive cells are firing below the threshold and the remaining four cells are firing at the neutral rate. 

As interesting as the research by DeValois and Jacobs (1968) is, it does not deal adequately with the concept of cultural salience.  In Japanese, for example, there was no word for green.  It was later added to the lexicon as midori.  The terms akai (red), yaoya (green), aoi (blue) and kiiro (yellow) all existed in the lexicon, but not midori (green).  According to DeValois and Jacobs (1986), these colors could be characterized in physiological terms as aoi/kiiro or blue/yellow cells, and as akai/midori or red/green cells.  But, there was no lexical item in Old Japanese for green (Miller, 1967).  It is unsatisfactory for one to merely claim that the red/green cells were firing beneath the threshold.  From an anthropological perspective, however, the phenomenon can be viewed in terms of cultural saliency.  Midori could be perceived in terms of focal colors, it could be explained in terms of the neurophysiology of perception, but it was not culturally relevant at the time, so it did not exist as a lexical category.  Obviously, the answer lies within both paradigms, and herein lies the paradox in Western thought - one deals either with universals or particulars. 

Once psychologists felt that they had conquered the vagaries of cultural relativism and had demolished the Neo-Humboldtian framework underlying the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, they immediately focused their research on the categories of the mind.  Once again, their research was originally situated in the anthropological tradition, viz., componential analysis (Romney and D'Andrade (1964).  Within this framework, lexical terms are stored in paradigmatic space.  The discovery of such lexical field was used as a possible typology of types or universals and their strength came from being grounded in language rather than in vitro laboratory conditions.  Consequently, there was a shift in reasoning that no longer questioned whether or not categories were found by anthropologists to be culturally salient in a language, but rather to what features are surmised by psychologists through experiment and logic to underlay the subjective lexicon (Fillenbaum and Rappoport, 1971; Johnson, 1967). 

The work of the subjective lexicon, automatically leads one to the study of memory.  And, the noted authority on this subject is Tulving (1972:386).  Memory, he noted, is a mental thesaurus.  It is the organized knowledge that an individual possesses about words and other verbal symbols.  It has to do with their meanings and their referents.  And it articulates their relations and other rules needed to retrieve or store them in lexical space.  What makes this model different from the previous tradition of semantic anthropology (Dolgin, et al., 1977) is that it claims that all of the categories employed by cognitive psychologists are, by definition, universals. In other words, they are arguing for the existence of innate a priori categories of the mind (Rumelhart, 1977). 

Gender:  father, mother - son, daughter - grandson, granddaughter

Generation: father, self, son, grandson - mother, self, daughter, granddaughter

Linearity:    father, uncle - mother, aunt - self, sister, first cousin  - daughter, niece

Anyone familiar with Asian languages will immediately notice the absence of several categories from this supposedly universal model.  It does not include any reference to the role the elder son plays in ancestral lineage of the family. nor does it include the use of honorifics, and other related aspects of Asian cultures. 

                JAPANESE

                        Brother  兄 ani - older brother,  弟 otooto - younger brother

                        Sister    姉  ane - older sister, 妹 imooto - younger sister

Just as componential analysis was divorced from the context of cultural relevance and reinterpreted into a logical model of semantic space, research in the use of computer memory (Collins and Quillian, 1972; Quillian, 1967, 1968) has followed the same path, but in this case the focus is on the representation of property relations.  Nouns in this computer model are defined in terms of the predicates to which are intrinsically related. Animals are identified by the predicates (can move around), (eats), and (breathes).  Fish are identified by the predicates (have fins), can swim), and (have gills).  Sharks are defined by the predicates (can bite), and (is dangerous). Birds are connected to the predicates (have wings), (can fly), and (have feathers), etc.  But, these nouns are also hierarchically related: animals are comprised of Birds and Fish.  Fish includes Sharks.  Birds include Canaries and Ostriches. 

These logical models may represent current research in cognitive linguistics, but they overlook the significance of cultural factors in their attempts to describe figurative language.  A more insightful model for dealing with cross-cultural metaphors nevertheless does exit.  It can be found in the study of episodic memory (Tulving, 1972). The episodic semantic model is of special interest to computer programmers in artificial intelligence (Schank, 1973; Norman and Rumelhart, 1970).  When Schank attempted to converted linguistic inputs into underlying semantic representations of meaning, he found it necessary to rely on models of episodic memory for the organization of knowledge and he also found it essential to incorporate cultural information into this model.  It must be remembered that early work on computer translation was only 75% accurate.  As more and more cultural information was built into the memory system, the translations greatly improved.  Hence, once again, the divorce of culture from language has led to severe problems that could only be rectified by returning to a more phenomenological model. 

What is episodic memory and why should it be of significance not only to models of psycholinguistics, and computer translation, but also for the understanding of metaphor and other figures of speech?  In episodic memory, one recapitulates information within a context and within a definite experience, and the things that one remembers are highly specific objects and events. Hence, whereas semantic memory deals with universal or innate categories of the mind, episodic memory has to do with significant events or objects in one's life.  Hence, in semantic memory, the family is nothing more than the organization innate categories mapped unto a semantic space, but in episodic memory, the family connotes rich experiences and a plethora of events.  With the passage of time, this memory is reorganized so that some events are placed in the background and others are foregrounded.  Just how one reorganizes episodic memory so as to restructure it into a different model of semantic memory appears to be one of the problems of cognitive linguistics (Rumelhart, 1977).  

For programmers working in the area of artificial intelligence (Schank, 1973, Schank and Abelson, 1977), episodic memory is translated into protocol statements.  These are behavior formulae that dictate how one performs within the context of a semantic domain.  For example, when dinning in a restaurant, one knows the code of behavior, the procedures for ordering meals, the conventions for tipping, etc.  If during the meal, a discussion of business matters arises, then other series of protocol statements are brought into play.  The more one emulates the ethnomethodology of a culture, the more efficacious is the computer program. 

An interesting break away from the old model of metaphorical analogy came in the work of Lakoff and Johnson (1980).  What makes this approach different is that they are not drawing analogies between topics and vehicles, but between cognitive domains.  Within this new context, metaphor is no longer deemed to be a superficial aspect of language that is subservient to the autonomous syntax model of Chomsky (1965).  Language is not organized by syntax, but by the organization of conceptual schema that structure language. Metaphors, Lakoff and Johnson argue, pervade thought, shape judgments, and structure language. As a matter of fact, metaphor provides evidence that human beings organize their experiences in terms of a small number of image schemas. Consequently, much of reasoning is metaphorical and is based on experiences that individuals have embodied in their own cultures. Metaphors involve the movement from the source domain to the target domain.

 

Metaphorical Mapping: From Source to Target 

Source	Target	Metaphor
Tiger	John	John is a tiger
Animal	John	John is an animaL

Metaphor, they argue, facilitates thought by providing an experiential framework in which abstract thoughts can be accommodated.  Together with other metaphors, it creates a network of metaphors that function as a cognitive map.  By means of this cognitive topology, individuals impose structure onto space.  They use it to draw spatial inferences.  What Lakoff and Johnson are saying, in essence, is that human beings as agents project onto the world by means of this cognitive map and not vice versa. The cognitive agent is an essential player in the organization of thought.  They are using the concept of schema in the original Kantian sense of linking a conceptual representation to its sensory ground.  Hence, they function as categorial imperatives (Kant, 1956).  The metaphoric schema is a mental representation that grounds the conceptual structures of an abstract domain to physical one. Metaphors not only pervade language, they also provide cognitive topologies that dissert social and mental worlds.

An interesting development in cognitive linguistics has led linguists to interpret metaphors in terms of blends between mental spaces. This is because metaphors are referential structures that integrate linguistic information with background and contextual knowledge (Coulson and Fauconnier, 1999). Mental Space Theory (Fauconnier, 1994; Langacker, 1999a) is an attempt to account for the organization of ideas.  It predicates a conceptual level between a situation and the linguistic structures that describe it.  In this framework, words do not refer directly to objects in the world.  As a theory of referential structure, it provides temporary containers, mental spaces, for the articulation of relevant information about a particular domain.  These mental spaces provide partial representations of the entities and relations within a scenario. They also contain frames to represent the relationships that exist between these particular domains. Hence, this theory of referential structure relates complex scenarios by means mental spaces and the connections between them.  In the metaphor, John is a tiger, two domains or mental spaces are integrated to create a new frame or blend.  Frames from established mental spaces (the tiger, John) are recruited and used to create a new frame, a conceptual blend.  This is done by a mapping or mental space connection.  When a mental space connection exists between two domains, the Access Principle allows us to refer to an element from in one mental space with a word in a different space.  The result is a conceptual integration network (Coulson and Fauconnier, 1999).  The representation of this network is provided below and requires four mental space and related frames:

Now that the social, psychological, and cultural contexts of linguistic research on metaphor have been explicated, it is appropriate to consider the structure of metaphor and comment on its how some of these models can be employed in the understanding of figures of speech.  And, it is also imperative to note how these models may need to be reinterpreted or re-evaluated as a consequence of these findings. 

FIGURES OF SPEECH AS EXTRASYSTEMIC COMMUNICATION

As was noted in the beginning of this essay, scholars with a positivistic perspective distinguish between literal and metaphorical language and favor the former while deprecating the latter.  Samuel R. Levin (1977) struggled specifically with these issues within the context of speech act theory, the theory of conversational implicature, and the transformational model of semantic interpretation.  He argued undauntedly for the literal interpretation of metaphor.  However, it was not until his later work (Levin, 1988) that he able to modify his position and provide a coherent rationale for this shift in scientific epistemology.  In his discussion of conceptual space (Levin, 1988: 28-29), for example, he noted that the words of language stake out positions in the field of meaning and this conceptual space is subdivided into subspaces in which each is defined by an intrinsic conceptual coherence.  A sentence, he added, must be construed within the background of this conceptual space.  In other words, all metaphors are to be interpreted as literal within their own metaphorical or socially constructed worlds.  This later approach to language by Levin is definitely phenomenological.  It is reminiscent of the work of Husserl (1962) on the notion of The Horizon or the levels of consciousness involved in interpreting a form, and it is consistent with the work of Heidegger (1962) in his treatment of within the conceptual worlds of the Pre-Socratic philosophers.  What all of these philosophers noted is the fact that the interpretation of language is culturally and historically bound.  Metaphors, Levin adds, influence how one views the world and they determine the roles that one plays in that world. 

Other works on metaphor tend to focus on structure.  This is evident in the model of topic, vehicle, and ground proposed by I. A. Richards (1926).  How he used these terms can be readily explicated by considering the metaphor, "John is a tiger."  "John," the topic, represents the source of the metaphor.  "Tiger" is the vehicle because it is the thing commented upon and is the target of the metaphor.  Metaphors are analogies.  Topic is to the Ground as Vehicle is to the Ground.  It is the common ground that allows the metaphorical analogy to take place.

Finally, the ground is the semantic basis for comparison, and in this case it would have to be an attribute such as "brave" or "strong."  In other words, the metaphor represents a kind of analogy, viz., "John is strong as a tiger is strong."  The common ground is the adjectival form "strong."  Because other adjectives could be used, this common ground is also a symbol.  What this means, in essence, is that the metaphor " John is a tiger" also implies other attributes characteristically associated with this ground adjective.  Consequently, "John is a tiger" implies that Topic is to Ground as Vehicle is to Ground.

The Anatomy of Metaphor

 

                     Topic            is         Vehicle

                        Ground                     Ground 

John is strong (as a tiger is strong),

John is virile (as a tiger is virile),

John is brave (as a tiger is brave),

John is an animal (as a tiger is an animal),

John is male (as a tiger is a male)

 

The symbolic focus of the metaphor at this stage is essentially illustrative.  It functions in many ways to illustrate certain common attributes provided by the metaphor.  But, as the metaphor is further explored, it becomes more and more iconic.  Hence, what originated as an illustrative symbol eventually develops into an iconic symbol.  At some later stage, the limits of the symbolism offered by the metaphor will be tested.  At this time, the symbolic power of the metaphor is compromised and symbolic failure is encountered, i.e., certain analogies no longer hold.  Hence, "John is an animal with four legs," and "John has a mane" no longer fit within the symbolic enclosure as defined by the semantic space of the lexical item "tiger."  It should be noted that the metaphorical claim of human being the possession of animalistic qualities is really a form of analogy.  Personification, according to this model, is also a form of analogy because it makes a metaphorical claim that an animal or a plant may possess humanistic qualities.  When one claims that "The tree weeps," what is intended is the analogy "A person weeps as the tree weeps."  This approach to metaphor is not new.  At one level it recapitulates the structural categories of "topic and comment" in Firthian linguistics or "Theme and Rheme" in the Prague School of linguistics.    

Note that all of these tropes are part of a structural relationship.  They may be classified as separate items, but they all refer to some metaphorical world.  When they are used in that special construction of reality, they are taken literally.  But when they are used out of context, they are interpreted as deviant constructions.  The crucial concept underlying a metaphorical world is the schema or the model upon which a worldview is constructed. 

Consider the model of semantic memory proposed by Fillenbaum and Rappoport (1971) in which the semantic space of the family was interpreted in terms of underlying opposing features.  Although this model is widely accepted by cognitive scientists, it has major problems associated with it. 

First, it does not relate verbal behavior to non-verbal action.  The model cannot, for example, account for analogies between the social distance and the physical distance in a family.  It will be argued that the episodic memory model does not share this shortcoming. 

Second, it does not provide an explanation in terms of developmental psychology.  For instance, it can only explain the stage of formal operation though, but is especially inadequate in dealing with the Piagetian level of sensorimotor intelligence. The episodic memory model does not have this problem. 

Third, does not account for the diachronic shifts within semantic domains as when a term is generalized (e.g. Kleenex) or when processes a term is particularized (deer < Tier [animal]). The episodic model is able to accommodate to shifts in meaning.  

And finally, it does not explain why some metaphors die and others continue to live.

According to the episodic model of memory, some event or context in one's experience becomes the basis for an underlying schema.  It does not specify that this experience has to be verbal or non-verbal.  It can be both. Once a model begins to form sedimentation, it concurrently develops a provisional structure and it is this structure that organizes the semantic space of the experiences involved.  In the case of the experience living in a family, for example, this experience provides an underlying model which finds exemplification in the metaphors one uses, the kinds of metonymy employed, the types of synecdoche tolerated, and the forms of analogy used.  But, it is not solely expressed in verbal terms.  It may be found in the honorific system of Japanese, Korean, or Thai, but it is also found in the non-verbal patterns of behavioral respect, selection of apparel, body language, uses of silence, etc.  Hence, both verbal and non-verbal behaviors are cognitively connected and the source of this synthesis derives from the actual context of a living culture.

The most promising model that explains how metaphors work comes from the work on cognitive linguistics (Langacker, 1999a, 1999b).  Under this framework, Fauconnier (1994) has developed a theory of mental space, which is the level at which concepts are organized within cognitive linguistics. This model adequately deals with the nature of metaphorical blends, recruited frames, and cognitive mapping (Barsalou, 1998).  These are also concomitant with the concept of schemata theory, episodic memory, and other aspects of human information processing models. This cognitive framework provides a better understanding of numerous social constructs such as defining the context of a social situation, the nature of conversational images, and the reality construction.  Hence, these schemata, it can be argued, are the genesis for the social construction of reality (Berger and Luckmann, 1962) which forms an intrinsic part in social dramas, and these schemata also provide the socio-historical contexts from which cultural mores (Ewen, 1986) evolve, and from which social roles (Goode, 1978) are substantiated, and from which situational attributions (Snyder, et al., 1983), and personal scripts (Douglas et al., 1985) are formulated.  They provide the plots of life, the enactment of social drama (Lyman and Scott, 1975), and the framing of life (Goffman, 1988).  They also generate sub-metaphors as when the metaphor of growth developed into the metaphor of progress.  And most importantly for cognitive scientists, schemata provide the basis upon which derivative forms or systems of knowledge are generated.  This claim is an important one because it states that most semantic memory models are not basic, but derived.  They are products or sub-products of other systems.  Now, consider how these components are interrelated:

 

What are called knowledge structures are, in essence, models or events in one's experience that lead to the construction of episodic memory and to the eventual development of semantic memory.  The schemata are generated by the reworking of episodic memory and they lead to the creation of plans (scripts, strategies) and themes (life goals, roles, biographical patterns).  Schemata also create scripts, episodic structures such as plots and formulas which are realized in situational scripts (protocol statements), social scripts (roles), personal scripts (personality traits), and finally, they emerge in language as figures of speech. 

 

Anyone familiar with Asian languages would notice that the schema for the family in Asia is not concomitant with the schema for the family in Europe.  The semantic memory model has no way of adequately dealing with this fact.  The reason for this is manifest in the positivistic claim that the categories upon which the semantics model is constructed are innate categories.  They claim to be a priori categories.  But, their claims for universals apparently fail in this case because it is a European culture-based model.  If one were to employ the episodic memory model as discussed in this essay, the dilemma could be readily resolved by the fact that these cultures have different concepts of the subjective lexicon.  They have different models of semantic memory.  Since, as it has been argued in this essay, the semantic memory model is a derivative of the episodic memory, this discrepancy can be adequately explained both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.  Furthermore, it can be argued that because of these differences in underlying schemata, the figures of speech that are part of the mainstream of Asian culture are different from those in European thought. They have used different events, happenings, and contexts of experience upon which to draw from.  Finally, it is because different cultures employ different schemata upon which to draw their models of symbolic realism, and because these models are expressed figuratively in language, it can be concluded that metaphors, among other master tropes, provide valuable and genuine insight into the underpinnings of other cultures, their structures, their values, and their categorical saliency.  Mark Johnson (1987) essentially encapsulates this framework in his argument that the body provides a significant role in creating meaning, in guiding imagination, and in the development of reason.  In other words, the body becomes the schema for many natural metaphors found in English and other languages.

As a culture changes due to new social forces or new cross-cultural influences, it brings in new events and activities that provide new models upon which schemata are developed.  With the passage of time, some words are lost because the epistemological frameworks upon which they were developed have either attenuated or been replaced by other structures.    And this condition leads to the dead metaphor. An interesting example of how metaphoric change reflects cultural shifts can be found in the research on contrastive analysis across cultures by Yoshikawa, Yamada (1986).  They have compared the Japanese words for house (ie) and home (uchi).  In both Japanese and in English the words for home (uchi) have strong emotional connotations, and reflect an attachment to property and lineage (cf. The house of Tudor). The Japanese word for house (ie), on the other hand, possesses a larger semantic domain than its English counterpart. These differs become more evident when expressed metaphorically (Yamada, 1991).    Some of these differences can be attributed to the ways in which houses are constructed in Japan.  In the timber-framed Japanese house, the pillar (hashira) supports the load of the house.  References to the father as the pillar (hashira) or the central post (daikokubashira) of the family is based on the metaphor of the Japanese house.  So are references to other terms of sustenance such as the nation's diligence is one of the supporting posts for the economic growth of Japan.

Another obvious difference in metaphorical expressions relating to the house or home in Japanese can be found in the word for door (to).  In Japan, a door consists of a sliding wall (kabe) which leads to an outer yard and a gate (mon).  The door in English represents an entrance into the house.  In Japan, the door is a moving wall.  It does not lead to the outside. It is the gate (mon) which is used metaphorically in Japanese to differentiate between the inside (uchi) and the outside (soto) of the house.  Hence, it is the outer fence with its gate that represents the entrance to the house. In English the door is used to enter inside of the house or home and the wall is used metaphorically as a protective barrier against the outside world.  In Japanese, walls (kabe) are not the protective barriers.  Another interesting difference in the cross-cultural uses of terms for house and home can be found in the various functions that the rooms in a house may have.  In English, rooms have different functions.  The kitchen differs from the dinning room and the den.  In the Japanese house, the rooms are demarcated by mats (tatami) and they can be linked to other mats in other rooms by merely opening the walls (kabe).  Rooms (heya) do not share the same functional clarity in Japanese as they do in English (Yamada, 1991:201).  The Japanese room is comparable to a stage in which different activities can take place.  The English room is likened to a museum in which portraits, knickknacks, and sundry items of furniture are frozen in space. 

This long digression into the ways in which house and home differ from one language to another across cultures is important because the masonry house of Western cultures provides a different schema for the home from that of the Japanese timber-framed house.  An even more interesting example of how different schemata lead to metaphorical shifts and changes can be found in the research of Nishikawa (1991).  He has documented through examples from Japanese literature how the concept of the house has changed and how each change provided the schemata for the genesis or the creation of new metaphors for the house and home in the Japanese language.  He documents the changes from the house with a Japanese style fireplace (irori bata no aru ie), to a house with a Japanese style dinning room (chanoma no aru ie) and finally to a house with a Western style living or dining room (ribingu no aru ie).  At the beginning of the Meiji period, farmers made up about 80% of the population.  Their houses were made of wood and earthen walls and were covered by a thatched roof.  The central fireplace (iroribata) was used for cooking and also for warming the house.  The metaphorical expressions for house used during this period referred to the house as a container for an extended collateral family that is bonded by a common meal around a central fire place. The house with the Japanese style dining room was derived from a separate retainer's house during the Edo period.  It was built of wood and had a shingled roof.  Within the house, mats (tatami) lay on the floor.  Instead of the fireplace as a central area for the communal meal, this later development of the Japanese  house had a dinning room.  Other differences in this revision of the Japanese home is that the house is no longer a place of business and the extended collateral family was replaced by up to three generations of same family.  The most recent development in the Japanese house involves the inclusion of a Western style living / dining room.  There are fewer tatami rooms.  Families used to kneel or sit on the floor and now they have chairs to sit in and beds to sleep in.  They include modern kitchens and flush toilets.  People still take off their shoes upon entering the house.  The families are no longer extended.  The houses are built for nuclear families. Now, 80% of the population consists of salaried workers; and farmers make up only 10% of the population.    It is interesting to note that the modern Japanese word for house (ie) has changed in meaning over the period discussed by Nishikawa.  The semantic domain of the word has been narrowed over time.  Each of these separate meanings generated its own schemata of the house and each has created special metaphors to reflect these differences.  These different uses of metaphor are based on different schemata is not limited to the cross-cultural patterns of English and Japanese (Yoshikawa, 1991).  Sato (1991) has done similar research on German and Japanese; and Mizuno (1991) has investigated the differences between French and Japanese. All of these studies provide evidence that metaphors are derived from schemata.  The schema for the Japanese house reflects the cultural differences on family dwellings are constructed in Japan.  As the homes changed in their structures, so did the language that reflected these architectural and cultural changes.  The same conclusion holds for the metaphor of the family in Japan.  It differs from similar metaphors used in Western countries because the schemata upon which families are structured differ substantially from one another.  The concept of the older brother and the older sister has different meanings in Eastern cultures and thus generate different metaphorical patterns.

 

CONCLUDING REMARKS

The focus of this essay is on the role that metaphors play in the understanding of other cultures.  It was argued, for example, that metaphors are derived from events, from episodes, or from the contexts of human experience.  In each of these cases, the social construction of reality was involved.  And, in each of these cases, they led to differences in cultural saliency.  However, the path leading to these conclusions was a long and meandering one. 

First, it was necessary to demonstrate that the denigration of metaphorical expression by positivists was misguided.  They openly claimed, for example, that scientific language is literal while metaphoric language is deviant.  In tracing the genesis of this idea, the author was led back from numerous sources to the Aristotelian origins of metaphor and its use as a weapon against those who opposed his epistemological claims.  He had already arrived at a cosmology and did not tolerate those who attempted to undo his system through dialectal means.  He accused them of using bad metaphors, mystical thinking, and magic.

Second, it was necessary to further demonstrate that the legitimation of the scientific model in Western thought is a long evolving process that culminated in the entrepreneurial spirit of the French positivists.  And, it was important to demonstrate that the model was not fully accepted by all scholars, especially not by Wilhelm Dilthey and those who were to be influenced by him (Husserl, Heidegger, Humboldt, Derrida, Gadamer, etc.). 

Third, the next segment of this journey led to a discussion of these two evolving paths of human knowledge: one was Cartesian methodology and the other was the phenomenology of language.  This led back to a discussion of the work of Immanuel Kant and his attempt to counteract the empiricism of David Hume.  When Kant arrived at his distinction between a priori judgments and a posteriori judgments, he created a whole episteme centering around the quest for innate ideas.  It was important to highlight this fact because it became the basis for another dichotomy that rules European thought: phenomenology versus analytical philosophy. 

Fourth, it was necessary to show that Wilhelm von Humboldt agreed with the Kantian quest for innate ideas and proposed that language is an objectification of these innate categories.  But, then he was later forced to modify his claims by arguing that each language had its own set of innere Sprachformen, or internal categories underlying linguistic expression. It was at this point that the two schools of structural linguistics came into being: one that saw all languages as sharing the same underlying innate categories (Positivism), and the other that was skeptical of the claim and wanted to work with the temporary documentation of each language having its own world views [Weltanschauung] and its own unique categorization [innere Sprachformen]  of living [Erleben]. This second view is phenomenological in nature.

Fifth, once the distinction was made between the competing models of epistemology in Western culture, it important to shift the focus back to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and its predilection for cultural relativism.  This model was not against the Kantian claim of universal categories, but it was suspicious of such claims because it brought a larger cross-cultural framework to bear on the quest for universals. Hence, this tradition is neo-Humboldtian.  But those who make claims of cultural relativism were the adherents of universal linguistic categories.  After the onslaught of empirical research, it was argued by the positivists that their model of innate categories was adequate in accounting for linguistic and cultural diversity.  To demonstrate that this was not the case and that the claims rested on false assumptions, it was necessary to discuss the models of semantic memory and to demonstrate how they were not able to account for such a simple phenomenon as cultural saliency.  It was also imperative to draw on their research on episodic memory which, quite frankly, contradicts the semantic memory model.  And, at this point it was shown that the schemata or schemas are the basis, which forms the genesis of metaphorical worlds: cultural domains, semantic space, mentalities, and historiographical epistemes.   And, again, it was necessary to demonstrate that the semantic memory model can be preserved only if it is perceived as a derivative structure, a by-product of episodic memory.

Sixth, the relationship between schemata and the master tropes or various figures of speech were outlined in order to demonstrate how each schema creates its own metaphorical world with its own vocabulary of motives and its own figures of speech.  It was noted that this approach is even currently employed in Artificial Intelligence research where protocol statements function as equivalents to episodic memory or to cultural events. 

Seventh and final point was on the nature of dead metaphors, and this was added only to show that the question is intrinsically related to language and the social construction of reality.  The phenomenological approach to language is able to adequately deal with this technicality because it admits to multiple realities.

The journey terminates with an interdisciplinary synthesis by showing how research in episodic memory provides numerous insights into the creation of metaphors, and by demonstrating that a deeper understanding of other cultures of realities can be achieved through the study of metaphor and other figures of speech.  The study of semantic space across cultures need not conflict with the various paradigms of the cognitive sciences.  However, there is a grave danger when one field or discipline creates boundary markers that inhibit genuine and sincere inquiry.  The study of metaphor, it appears, has been the victim of reality maintenance among conflicting disciplines.  Each field has its own merits, its own significant contributions, and its own its own claims to epistemology.  But, as Richard Brown (1977) has noted, all knowledge is perspectival, i.e., theories are themselves merely metaphors, ways of looking at things.  They are merely epistemological tools, attempts at understanding reality.  And, so the key to an understanding of another culture should begin with an understanding of their metaphorical worlds.

 

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