Misrepresenting Metaphor

Ok, this relates both to the comments on metaphor, below, and to the previous post on meaning and representation. Lakoff understands metaphor as cross domain mapping, which is to say as a cognitive operation. Time is understood in terms of space – “let’s face the future” “let’s put that behind us” etc. Metaphor helps us know one ‘domain’ by reading it in terms of another. And conversely, we might argue, for example, that thinking of time in terms of space blocks our true understanding of time – it is miscognition, or misrepresentation. This is all fine. But the additional point is that such metaphors are selected not only for their cognitive adequacy, but for the forms of life which they enable, facilitate and produce. The Greeks practised the art of memory. As part of this, it was useful to conceive of memory as a house, with different categories of mnemonic object ‘located’ in different rooms. The point of this was not at all to better conceptualise what memory was really like (ie correct cognition), it was to improve one’s memory. And it apparently worked – the metaphor, we might say, changed its object (rather than forming a ‘correct representation’ of it). Or again, thinking of the past as ‘behind’ us helps organise our relation to the world - thinking of the past as infront of us and future as that dark place behind us, into which we reverse, might be part of a radically different organisation of life. So, in many cases metaphor needs to be understood not in terms of ‘how well does it conceptualise its object’, but in terms of ‘what does it make available’, how does it help us get around, organise our lives etc.