Metaphors and Analogies in Sciences and Humanities: Words and Worlds
Abstract
In this highly-interdisciplinary volume, we systematically study the role of metaphors and analogies in (mis)shaping our understanding of the world. Metaphors and Analogies occupy a prominent place in scientific discourses, as they do in literature, humanities and at the very level of our thinking itself. But when misused they can lead us astray, blinding our understanding inexorably. How can metaphors aid us in our understanding of the world? What role do they play in our scientific discourses and in humanities? How do they help us understand and skillfully deal with our complex socio-political scenarios? Where is the dividing line between their use and abuse? Join us as we explore some of these questions in this volume.
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Figures of speech have been suggested to play important pragmatic roles in language. Yet the nature of these pragmatic functions has not been specified in detail, and it is not clear what particular social-communicative purposes metaphors fulfill. I propose that metaphors are utilized in two distinct ways in communication. First, similarly to indirect speech, they enable social bargains: by expressing intentions, beliefs and desires in a veiled manner, they put the burden of interpretation on the hearer, which makes them revocable and thus a great tool for negotiations. Secondly, metaphors can be used to transform the meaning of words so that they describe phenomena and refer to concepts that do not have a lexical entry, by transferring an abstract sense figuratively to a new domain. The latter use is not only a tool of verbal creativity but a means of linguistic change as it adds novel senses to words. Metaphor does not seem to be a mere example of loose language use but a sophisticated communicational tool, either to deliberately create ambiguity in a deniable manner or to extend word meaning beyond the public lexicon, which puts the fundamental mechanisms of abstract thought to figurative use.
This paper proposes a research direction to advance AI which draws inspiration from cognitive theories of human decision making. The premise is that if we gain insights about the causes of some human capabilities that are still lacking in AI (for instance, adaptability, generalizability, common sense, and causal reasoning), we may obtain similar capabilities in an AI system by embedding these causal components. We hope that the high-level description of our vision included in this paper, as well as the several research questions that we propose to consider, can stimulate the AI research community to define, try and evaluate new methodologies, frameworks, and evaluation metrics, in the spirit of achieving a better understanding of both human and machine intelligence.
The emergence and spread of a new pandemic, COVID-19, have raised topics of concern for health professionals, policy makers and publics across the globe. Governments have struggled to find the right policies to stop disease transmission, but all have introduced social distancing. In the United Kingdom this has come to be understood as staying at home and, when outside, maintaining a physical distance of approximately two metres between oneself and others. In this article, the authors examine the emergence of this new social representation as portrayed in one UK broadsheet and one tabloid with the widest circulation: The Times and The Sun, between early March and early April 2020. Using social representations theory and thematic analysis, the authors show that social distancing struggled to emerge from underneath government obfuscation. It was first seen as a threat to normal life, which in modernity is predicated on mobility; it was later portrayed as a threat to social order; and finally perceived as a burden that, like the lockdown (its conceptual twin), needed to be lifted.
Through this contribution I aim to show how the role of language and metaphors is fundamental to our understanding of reality, affecting the way we ordinarily act and live, and particularly important in facing fears and anguish. This is more evident in these times of the COVID-19 pandemic, where our experiences of language and of the world seem to be characterised mainly by war terminology. Politicians declare themselves at war fighting an invisible enemy and health care workers, who are in direct contact with COVID-19 positive patients, are said to be “fighting” on the “frontlines”. Starting from a philosophical account of the relationship between language, fear and anguish, I aim to show how this narrative is unhelpful, both for society at large and especially for patients and health care workers. While war narratives instil fear, it seems to me that new forms of solidarity and new models of coexistence are required. Since language shapes the way in which we think, live and act, it is important to choose words that encourage people to act responsibly, to cooperate and to overcome the hardships of the COVID19 pandemic together.
In our 2017 study ‘Assessing ExxonMobil’s climate change communications (1977–2014)’, we concluded that ExxonMobil has in the past misled the public about climate change. We demonstrated that ExxonMobil ‘advertorials’—paid, editorial-style advertisements—in The New York Times spanning 1989–2004 overwhelmingly expressed doubt about climate change as real and human-caused, serious, and solvable, whereas peer-reviewed papers and internal reports authored by company employees by and large did not. Here, we present an expanded investigation of ExxonMobil’s strategies of denial and delay. Firstly, analyzing additional documents of which we were unaware when our original study was published, we show that our original conclusion is reinforced and statistically significant: between 1989–2004, ExxonMobil advertorials overwhelmingly communicated doubt. We further demonstrate that (i) Mobil, like Exxon, was engaged in mainstream climate science research prior to their 1999 merger, even as Mobil ran advertorials challenging that science; (ii) Exxon, as well as Mobil, communicated direct and indirect doubt about climate change and (iii) doubt-mongering did not end after the merger. We now conclude with even greater confidence that ExxonMobil misled the public, delineating three distinct ways in which they have done so.
Embodied approaches to cognition see abstract thought and language as grounded in interactions between mind, body, and world. A particularly important challenge for embodied approaches to cognition is mathematics, perhaps the most abstract domain of human knowledge. Conceptual metaphor theory, a branch of cognitive linguistics, describes how abstract mathematical concepts are grounded in concrete physical representations. In this paper, we consider the implications of this research for the metaphysics and epistemology of mathematics. In the case of metaphysics, we argue that embodied mathematics is neutral in the sense of being compatible with all existing accounts of what mathematical entities really are. However, embodied mathematics may be able to revive an older position known as psychologism and overcome the difficulties it faces. In the case of epistemology, we argue that the evidence collected in the embodied mathematics literature is inconclusive: It does not show that abstract mathematical thinking is constituted by metaphor; it may simply show that abstract thinking is facilitated by metaphor. Our arguments suggest that closer interaction between the philosophy and cognitive science of mathematics could yield a more precise, empirically informed account of what mathematics is and how we come to have knowledge of it.
The Bloomsbury Companion to Cognitive Linguistics is a comprehensive and accessible reference resource to research in contemporary cognitive linguistics. Written by leading figures in the field, the volume provides readers with an authoritative overview of methods and current research topics and future directions.
The volume covers all the most important issues, concepts, movements and approaches in the field. It devotes space to looking specifically at the major figures and their contributions. It is a complete resource for postgraduate students and researchers working within cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics and those interested more generally in language and cognition.
An examination of metaphor in poetry as a microcosm of the human imagination—a way to understand the mechanisms of creativity.
In The Spider's Thread, Keith Holyoak looks at metaphor as a microcosm of the creative imagination. Holyoak, a psychologist and poet, draws on the perspectives of thinkers from the humanities—poets, philosophers, and critics—and from the sciences—psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists, and computer scientists. He begins each chapter with a poem—by poets including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Theodore Roethke, Du Fu, William Butler Yeats, and Pablo Neruda—and then widens the discussion to broader notions of metaphor and mind.
Holyoak uses Whitman's poem “A Noiseless Patient Spider” to illustrate the process of interpreting a poem, and explains the relevance of two psychological mechanisms, analogy and conceptual combination, to metaphor. He outlines ideas first sketched by Coleridge—who called poetry “the best words in their best order”—and links them to modern research on the interplay between cognition and emotion, controlled and associative thinking, memory and creativity. Building on Emily Dickinson's declaration “the brain is wider than the sky,” Holyoak suggests that the control and default networks in the brain may combine to support creativity. He also considers, among other things, the interplay of sound and meaning in poetry; symbolism in the work of Yeats, Jung, and others; indirect communication in poems; the mixture of active and passive processes in creativity; and whether artificial intelligence could ever achieve poetic authenticity. Guided by Holyoak, we can begin to trace the outlines of creativity through the mechanisms of metaphor.
The groundbreaking analytical techniques of Heinrich Schenker have had a powerful impact on the English-speaking musical world, and their importance, a century after he embarked on his major projects, is greater than ever. A central work in the Schenkerian canon, Der Tonwille, introduced the use of voice-leading graphs that remains a critical tool for many music theorists today. This volume, the first of a two-volume English translation of Schenker’s complete original text, makes these important contributions available to English readers for the first time. In the first five “issues” that make up Der Tonwille, Schenker analyzes piano sonatas by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, as well as shorter works including preludes by Bach and various classical keyboard pieces. The volume also includes the first two installments of a large-scale study of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony which, in common with many of the other essays offered here, is comprised of a detailed analysis of the score, a commentary on the sketches and autograph and related textual problems, remarks on performance, and a critique of the literature on the symphony. Most significantly, the essays in this volume are the first that consistently embrace the concept of “Urlinie” by coordinating an explanatory text with a “graph of the Urlinie” for each work discussed. It also contains the most extensive expression of Schenker’s outspoken philosophical, political, and artistic beliefs, providing an important cultural perspective from which to view his theoretical work. Under the leadership of William Drabkin, a team of well-regarded musicologists has produced this skilled and lucid translation of Schenker’s infiuential writings, an essential resource for English-reading musicologists and music theorists.
Psychiatry has long struggled with the nature of its diagnoses. This resource brings together established experts in the wide range of disciplines that have an interest in psychiatric nosology.
The paper examines the fortunes of Aristotelian metaphysics in science and the philosophy of science. It considers the Enlightenment claim that such a metaphysics is fundamentally unscientific, and that its abandonment was essential to the scientific revolution. The history of the scientific revolution and the metaphysical debates involved in it is examined, and it is argued that the eclipse of Aristotelian views was neither complete, nor merited. The evolution of Humeian and positivist accounts of science is described, and it is shown how the severe problems with these accounts, together with a revival of Aristotelian concepts in philosophy, have led to the rebirth of broadly Aristotelian accounts of the metaphysics underlying science.
This chapter introduces a structural account of representation through partial structures and examines its ontological commitments. It is pointed out that structural approaches to scientific representation emphasize the crucial role played by structures in representing salient features of the world. It is common to present and, in some cases, even to reify such structures as abstract entities, in particular as set-theoretic constructs. Against this view, it is argued that no such reification is called for and that several strategies can be articulated to avoid commitment to set-theoretic structures in the defense of structural representation. In the end, one can favor the latter without being platonist about the former.
Intersubjectivity and usage play central roles in figurative language and are pivotal notions for a cognitively realistic research on figures of thought, speech, and communication. This volume brings together thirteen studies that explore the relationship between figurativity, intersubjectivity and usage from the Cognitive Linguistics perspective. The studies explore the impact of figurativity on areas of lexicon and grammar, on real discourse, and across different semiotic systems. Some studies focus on the psychological processes of the comprehension of figurativity; other studies address the ways in which figures of thought and language are socially shared and the variation of figures through time and space. Moreover, some contributions are established on advanced corpus-based techniques and experimental methods. There are studies about metaphor, metonymy, irony and puns; about related processes, such as humor, empathy and ambiguation; and about the interaction between figures. Overall, this volume offers the advantages and the opportunities of an interactional and usage-based perspective of figurativity, embracing both the psychological and the intersubjective reality of figurative thought and language and empirically emphasizing the multidimensional character of figurativity, its central function in thought, and its impact on everyday communication.
The collection of articles in Discourse Studies in Public Communication illustrates that public communication is a fascinating, evidence-based storehouse for research in discourse analysis. The contributions to this volume — in the spheres of political rhetoric, gender and sexuality, and corporate and academic communication — provide good evidence of contemporary social structure, social phenomena, and social issues. In this way, following the parameters of different analytical frameworks (critical discourse analysis, cognitive metaphor theory, appraisal theory, multimodality, etc.), the contributors address not only the linguistic aspects of texts but also, and more importantly, the cultural and cognitive dimensions of public communication in a range of real life communicative contexts and kinds of discourse. Although the volume is addressed, first and foremost, to readers with diverse interests in English linguistics, it may also prove valuable to scholars in other non-linguistic research fields like communication studies, social theory, political science, or psychology.
Grâce à Maurice Agulhon, la symbolique a son histoire, tout comme l’histoire a sa traduction symbolique. Maurice Agulhon a prouvé en trois livres magistraux sur l’imagerie et la symbolique républicaines de 1789 à nos jours, Marianne au combat (1979), Marianne au pouvoir (1989), et enfin en 2001 Les Métamorphoses de Marianne, que l’image symbole de la figure féminine, avec ou sans bonnet phrygien, avec ou sans le nom de Marianne, fait partie de l’histoire générale de la République en France. Cet ouvrage collectif construit en dialogue avec des spécialistes d’histoire politique, des historiens d’art et des spécialistes des symboles dans d’autres temps et d’autres espaces prolonge et interroge la quête de l’historien sur les relations entre images mentales et images figurées qui migrent d’une nation à une autre et connaissent des mutations de sens au cœur des transferts culturels. L’histoire du « genre » permet de re-visiter l’histoire physique et sexuée des allégories féminines et masculines. Dans notre monde de plus en plus éclaté et divers, où les images sont à la fois plus nombreuses et plus banalisées, quelle place reste-t-il aux symboles politiques et nationaux, entre art, folklore, idéologie, caricature et publicité? Est-on passé du temps de l’idéologique à celui du médiatique? Le contraste entre les symboles optimistes choisis par Le Douanier Rousseau en 1907 et le pessimisme engendré par la « starisation » des dernières années nous éclaire sur l’évolution de notre société politique et de ses cultures.
This book offers a systematized overview of Ian Hacking's work. It presents Hacking’s oeuvre as a network made up of four interconnected key nodes: styles of scientific thinking & doing, probability, making up people, and experimentation and scientific realism.
Its central claim is that Michel Foucault’s influence is the underlying thread that runs across the Canadian philosopher’s oeuvre. Foucault’s imprint on Hacking’s work is usually mentioned in relation to styles of scientific reasoning and the human sciences. This research shows that Foucault’s influence can in fact be extended beyond these fields, insofar the underlying interest to the whole corpus of Hacking’s works, namely the analysis of conditions of possibility, is stimulated by the work of the French philosopher.
Displacing scientific realism as the central focus of Ian Hacking’s oeuvre opens up a very different landscape, showing, behind the apparent dispersion of his works, the far-reaching interest that amalgamates them: to reveal the historical and situated conditions of possibility for the emergence of scientific objects and concepts.
This book shows how Hacking’s deployment concepts such as looping effect, making up people, and interactive kinds, can complement Foucauldian analyses, offering an overarching perspective that can provide a better explanation of the objects of the human sciences and their behaviors.
Despite sharp drops early in the pandemic, global emissions of carbon dioxide picked up in the second half of the year, new data show. Despite sharp drops early in the pandemic, global emissions of carbon dioxide rebounded, new data show.
It is increasingly important in our globalised world for people to successfully manage interpersonal relationships. This is the first book to tackle this vital topic, by taking an interdisciplinary approach to exploring the process of relating across cultures. Drawing together key concepts from politeness theory, intercultural communication, and cross-cultural/intercultural psychology, it provides a robust framework for analysing and understanding intercultural encounters. It explores the ways in which individuals make judgements about others, deal with offence and conflict, maintain smooth relations, and build new relationships. These processes are explained conceptually and illustrated extensively with authentic intercultural examples and empirical data. With accessible explanations and follow-up activities, it will appeal not only to academics working in the areas of intercultural communication, pragmatic theory, conflict research and other related academic disciplines, but also to students of these topics, as well as professionals such as intercultural trainers and those working in the third sector.
Coastal ecosystems, being on the interface between various habitats and also heavily influenced by human impact, face most challenges influencing natural and social systems. This book presents a collection of frontline research on Latin-American coastal marine ecosystem models, written mostly by Latin-American authors. Linking parts to the whole, ecosystem models show large-scale, holistic approaches for better understanding human impact on these complex ecological systems, ranging from the North-East Pacific to the South-East Pacific and Mexican Caribbean coastal areas. In this chapter, we present an overview and synthesis regarding the information presented in each previous chapter, highlighting the relevant aspects and their implications for the conservation, management, and monitoring of coastal marine ecosystems. We also include a general analysis regarding the advances in marine ecological modelling in Latin America within a global context. Finally, we outline and discuss the perspectives of the systems-based view on conservation biology and marine fisheries management.
The metaphor of the body politic is diverse in the history of European political discourse yet it remains unclear why such diachronic variations occurred. Drawing on Zoltán Kövecses’s idea of “the pressure of coherence,” the present paper argues that diachronic reconfigurations of metaphorical discourses occur due to differential contextual experiences; more specifically, metaphorical discourses on the body politic, which consist of mapping between the domain of the POLITICAL COMMUNITY and that of natural BODY, are reconfigured diachronically in accordance with not only the ideological but also the medical context. In order to demonstrate this, the paper examines the texts of three key medieval political thinkers — John of Salisbury, Marsilius of Padua and Nicholas of Cusa — and the medical knowledge that was influential in their respective era. Thus this paper constitutes a contribution to the historical cognitive linguistic study of metaphorical discourse.
We present a study of the online forum Reddit, specifically a sub-forum for (typically heterosexual) men who identify as involuntary celibates or incels . Incels are an online imagined community/community of practice who wish to, but do not, have sexual relations with women. Owing to this identity, they view themselves as non-normative within broader society and see women and societal standards of masculinity as the cause of their problems. In this paper, we take a small corpus of 67,000 words generated from 50 threads created, and commented on, by incels. We analyse keywords, word frequencies, and concordance lines to explore the representation of gendered social actors. Keyword analysis reveals that references to gendered social actors are particularly salient within this community, leading to an analysis of all such social actors in the corpus. The findings suggest that incels position different groups of men in a hierarchy in which conventionally attractive men occupy the top position. Notably, we find that female social actors are not placed in a similar hierarchy. An additional appraisal analysis of the most frequently occurring male and female social actors shows that men are judged as incapacitated while women are seen as immoral, dishonest and capable of hurting men. Members of the online community also seem preoccupied with physical attractiveness. The study opens up a number of avenues for future research, especially into the complexities with which members of non-normative heterosexual groups simultaneously orient to and reject social norms.
This book develops a feminist and queer linguistic account of the construction of sex, sexuality, and desire through a linguistic and discursive analysis of naturally occurring sex talk from an online community. Critical discourse analysis is used to analyse a corpus of data drawn from incidental sex 'talk' observed in the community over the course of an 18-month period. Sub-types of sex talk that are examined include cybersex, self-disclosure, confidences, joking, games, flirting, and automated sexual commands that ‘generate’ sex between participants. The book will be of use to students and researchers interested in the language of gender and sexuality, as well as feminist and queer accounts of technology and sexual communication.
Chrystie Myketiak is Principal Lecturer in Language and Linguistics at the University of Brighton, UK. Her research investigates discourse and narratives in text and media with a focus on language use in relation to issues of power, identity, and inequality.
Decision theory and the theory of rational choice have recently been the subjects of considerable research by philosophers and economists. However, no adequate anthology exists which can be used to introduce students to the field. This volume is designed to meet that need. The essays included are organized into five parts covering the foundations of decision theory, the conceptualization of probability and utility, pholosophical difficulties with the rules of rationality and with the assessment of probability, and causal decision theory. The editors provide an extensive introduction to the field and introductions to each part.
A multiple analogy is a structured comparison in which several sources are likened to a target. In Multiple analogies in science and philosophy , Shelley provides a thorough account of the cognitive representations and processes that participate in multiple analogy formation. Through analysis of real examples taken from the fields of evolutionary biology, archaeology, and Plato's Republic , Shelley argues that multiple analogies are not simply concatenated single analogies but are instead the general form of analogical inference, of which single analogies are a special case. The result is a truly general cognitive model of analogical inference.
Shelley also shows how a cognitive account of multiple analogies addresses important philosophical issues such as the confidence that one may have in an analogical explanation, and the role of analogy in science and philosophy.
This book lucidly demonstrates that important questions regarding analogical inference cannot be answered adequately by consideration of single analogies alone.