From: Eva-Lise Carlstrom (evalise@yahoo.com)
Date: Sat May 18 2002 - 12:10:11 MDT
bricoleur wrote a good post about metaphor as the
foundation for language and thought. Here are some
book references for people who were intrigued by this
idea and wanted to know more:
Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson
More Than Cool Reason, by George Lakoff & Mark Turner
How Does a Poem Mean? by John Ciardi
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, by George Lakoff
All of these are wonderful and illuminating books.
The first two are fairly short and get to the heart of
the nature of metaphor the fastest. The other two are
excellent if you want more.
Several years ago on this list I also posted my notes
from a lecture of Stephen Pinker's on how thought is
rooted in bodily experience, and these posts should be
findable in the archives.
--Eva
<blacksun@btinternet.com> wrote:
> With regards to generation of language - from a
> private email:
>
> "Words are particularly limiting when used
> literally. They are less limiting
> when used metaphorically. I really believe that this
> is a major insight
> conveniently kept away from the masses. One of the
> greatest lies
> communicated to children is 'Metaphor is a figure of
> speech.' All language
> and symbolic representation is metaphorical! When
> any words are mistaken as
> something other than metaphor they become ways of
> fixing labels and
> categories and they lead us into the illusion of a
> world of isolated objects
> and differentiated thinking. Words as metaphors, on
> the other hand, open up
> the doors of probability and lead us into rich
> associative networks. I would
> agree with Leary that metaphor is the primary figure
> of speech, and thought,
> and that all thinking and all symbolic
> representation is essentially
> metaphorical or analogical. Ralph Waldo Emerson
> said, "Science is nothing
> but the finding of analogy." G. Stanley Hall, one of
> the founders of
> scientific psychology in America claimed that
> metaphors are among the mind's
> "first spontaneous creations" and provide the basis
> for language
> development, which is essentially "fossil poetry."
> The notion that
> metaphorical or analogical thinking forms the basis
> of all knowledge is
> widely held.
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