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Professor George Lakoff: Reason is 98% Subconscious Metaphor in Frames & Cultural Narratives
Notes: Metaphor and Embodiment
In Metaphors We Live By George Lakoff, a linguist, and Mark Johnson, a philosopher, suggest that metaphors not only make our thoughts more vivid and interesting but that they actually structure our perceptions and understanding.
“We are neural beings, (…) our brains take their input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything - only what our embodied brains permit. (…) The Mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.”
— Philosophy In The Flesh” - A talk with George Lakoff, EDGE 3rd Culture, 3.9.1999
“We think with our brains. There is no other choice. Thought is physical. Ideas and the concepts that make them up are physically “computed” by brain structures. Reasoning is the activation of certain neuronal groups in the brain given prior activation of other neuronal groups. Everything we know, we know by virtue of our brains. Our physical brains make possible our concepts and ideas; everything we can possibly think is made possible and greatly limited by the nature of our brains. (…)
Each neuron has connections to between 1,000 and 10,000 other neurons. (…) The flow of neural activity is a flow of ions that occurs across synapses – tiny gaps between neurons. Those synapses where there is a lot of activity are “strengthened” – both the transmitting and receiving side of active synapses become more efficient. Flow across the synapses is relatively slow compared to the speed of computers: about five one-thousandths of a second (5 milliseconds) per synapse. A word recognition task – Is the following word a word of English? – takes about half a second (500 milliseconds). This means that word recognition must be done in about 100 sequential steps. Since so much goes into word recognition, it is clear that much of the brain’s processing must be in parallel, not in sequence. This timing result also shows that well-learned tasks are carried out by direct connections. There is no intervening mentalese.”
— George Lakoff in Raymond W. Gibbs, Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, Chapter I: The Neural Theory of Metaphor, Cambridge University Press 2008, p. 18.
“Primary metaphorical thought arises when a neural circuit is formed linking two brain areas activated when experiences occur together repeatedly. Typically, one of the experiences is physical. In each experiment, each subject has the physical experience activating one of the brain regions and another experience (e.g., emotional or temporal) activating the other brain region for the given metaphor. The activation of both regions activates the metaphorical link. Thus, if the metaphor is Future Is Ahead and Past Is Behind, thinking about the future will activate the brain region for moving forward. If the metaphor is Affection is Warmth, holding warm coffee will activate the brain region for experiencing affection.”
— George Lakoff, Why “Rational Reason” Doesn’t Work in Contemporary Politics, BuzzFlash.org, Feb 21, 2010
Metaphor as “imaginative rationality”
“Many of our activities (arguing, solving problems, budgeting time, etc.) are metaphorical in nature. The metaphorical concepts that characterize those activities structure our present reality. New metaphors have the power to create a new reality. This can begin to happen when we start to comprehend our experience in terms of a metaphor, and it becomes a deeper reality when we begin to act in terms of it. If a new metaphor enters the conceptual system that we base our actions on, it will alter that conceptual system and the perceptions and actions that the system gives rise to. Much of cultural change arises from the introduction of new metaphorical concepts and the loss of old ones. For example, the Westernization of cultures throughout the world is partly a matter of introducing the TIME IS MONEY metaphor into those cultures. (…)
It is reasonable enough to assume that words alone don’t change reality. But changes in our conceptual system do change what is real for us and affect how we perceive the world and act upon those perceptions.
The idea that metaphor is just a matter of language and can at best only describe reality stems from the view that what is real is wholly external to, and independent of, how human beings conceptualize the world—as if the study of reality were just the study of the physical world. Such a view of reality—so-called objective reality— leaves out human aspects of reality, in particular the real perceptions, conceptualizations, motivations, and actions that constitute most of what we experience. But the human aspects of reality are most of what matters to us, and these vary from culture to culture, since different cultures have different conceptual systems.
The reason we have focused so much on metaphor is that it unites reason and imagination. Reason, at the very least, involves categorization, entailment, and inference. Imagination, in one of its many aspects, involves seeing one kind of thing in terms of another kind of thing—what we have called metaphorical thought. Metaphor is thus imaginative rationality. Since the categories of our everyday thought are largely metaphorical and our everyday reasoning involves metaphorical entailments and inferences, ordinary rationality is therefore imaginative by its very nature. Given our understanding of poetic metaphor in terms of metaphorical entailments and inferences, we can see that the products of the poetic imagination are, for the same reason, partially rational in nature.
Metaphor is one of our most important tools for trying to comprehend partially what cannot be comprehended totally: our feelings, aesthetic experiences, moral practices, and spiritual awareness. These endeavors of the imagination are not devoid of rationality; since they use metaphor, they employ an imaginative rationality.
An experientialist approach also allows us to bridge the gap between the objectivist and subjectivist myths about impartiality and the possibility of being fair and objective. (…) Truth is relative to understanding, which means that there is no absolute standpoint from which to obtain absolute objective truths about the world. This does not mean that there are no truths; it means only that truth is relative to our conceptual system, which is grounded in, and constantly tested by, our experiences and those of other members of our culture in our daily interactions with other people and with our physical and cultural environments.”
— George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
See also:
☞ George Lakoff on metaphors, explanatory journalism and the ‘Real Rationality’
☞ James Geary, metaphorically speaking, TED.com, Dec 2009
☞ Paul H. Thibodeau, Lera Boroditsky, Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning, Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA
☞ Bruce Hood, The Self Illusion: How the Brain Creates Identity, May, 2012
