When Homer calls old age “stubble,” he creates understanding
One of the most imaginative acts performed by human beings is the creation of metaphors. It requires an inquisitive imagination to see something as something else and it can be extremely helpful in explaining new, unfamiliar ideas and concepts.( https://youtu.be/iA5zBZB2dng ).
Metaphors can also influence our behavior and we likely want to think clearly about the implications of a metaphor that suggests we “shave-off years” as we age.
Most often when we think of metaphors we think of literal ones. They are figures of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. Literal metaphors provide clarity or identify hidden similarities between two ideas. One of the most commonly cited examples of a literal metaphor is the “All the world’s a stage” monologue from Shakespeare’s As You Like It:
“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances …”
In The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1937) I. A. Richards describes a metaphor as having two parts:
- the tenor — the subject to which attributes are ascribed.
- the vehicle — the object whose attributes are borrowed.
In the previous example, “the world” is compared to a stage, describing it with the attributes of “the stage”; “the world” is the tenor, and “a stage” is the vehicle; “men and women” is the secondary tenor, and “players” the secondary vehicle.
Metaphors can also be visual. A visual metaphor is the representation of a person, place, thing, or idea by means of an image that suggests a particular association or point of similarity. It’s also known as pictorial metaphor and analogical juxtaposition. A classic example is Christian Schloevery’s “The Balance” of heart and mind.
Scientific metaphors capture the practical mechanics of a scientific phenomenon poetically. Without metaphors it might take a time exceeding normal human lifespans to describe many scientific events. Metaphors are the heavy linguistic implements that get the job done while there’s still time to apply the science.
A conceptual metaphor, or cognitive metaphor, refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another. An example of this is
- the understanding of quantity in terms of directionality (e.g. “the price of peace is rising”) or
- the understanding of time in terms of money (e.g. “I spent time at work today”).
Conceptual metaphors are frame-to-frame mappings, where frames are basic structures of everyday thought. Conceptual metaphors consist of “source domain” frames that are mapped onto “target domain” frames, with most of the inference structure found in the source domain carried over to the corresponding target-domain structure. Conceptual metaphors enable metaphorical reasoning and very often lead us to behavior one way or another. As a consequence they include great risk.
We reason about complex social issues in the same way we talk about them: through metaphors. For example, policies related to “the war on drugs”, began in the 1980’s, and mandated longer, harsher sentences for drug-related crime. Since then, the incarceration rate for drug related crimes has more than quadrupled in the US. Others have taken the “crime is a virus” metaphor seriously and implemented programs to treat crime as a contagious disease.
These schematic representations for solving literal war or virus problems often transfer to people’s reasoning about crime. If crime is talked about as a virus, people often suggest diagnosing the root cause of the problem and enacting social reform to treat and inoculate the community. If crime is a war, people may suggest deploying armaments in order to overpower the crime attack?
Increasing the risks of metaphorical reasoning, Stanford researchers Paul H. Thibodeau, Lera Boroditsky have found that the effects of metaphor are covert. Unbeknownst to us, metaphors shape how we reason about issues and influence our reasoning. So while the use of metaphors may indeed be imaginative, it is also influences our actions which should be thought of within the context of the images that give rise to them.
