[3] The conceptual metaphor theory proposed by George Lakoff and his colleagues arose from linguistics, but became of interest to cognitive scientists due to its claims about the mind, the brain and their connections to the body.
[citation needed] Therefore, the role of the conceptual metaphor in processing human thinking is more limited than what was claimed by some linguistic theories.
Since then, the field of metaphor studies within the larger discipline of cognitive linguistics has increasingly developed, with several annual academic conferences, scholarly societies, and research labs contributing to the subject area.
Conceptual metaphors are useful for understanding complex ideas in simple terms and therefore are frequently used to give insight to abstract theories and models.
In the Western philosophical tradition, Aristotle is often situated as the first commentator on the nature of metaphor, writing in the Poetics, "A 'metaphorical term' involves the transferred use of a term that properly belongs to something else,"[8] and elsewhere in the Rhetoric he says that metaphors make learning pleasant; "To learn easily is naturally pleasant to all people, and words signify something, so whatever words create knowledge in us are the pleasantest.
In his work Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian states," In totum autem metaphora brevior est similitudo" or "on the whole, metaphor is a shorter form of simile".
Janet Soskice, Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of Cambridge, writes in summary that "it is certain that we shall taste the freshness of their insights only if we free them from the obligation to answer questions that were never theirs to ask".
[15] In his 2007 book The Stuff of Thought, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker lays out several useful classifications for the study of conceptual metaphor.
Mappings describe the mental organization of information in domains, the underlying phenomenon that drives metaphorical usage in language.
This conceptualization relates closely to image schemas, mental representations used in reasoning, through the extension of spatial and physical laws to more complex situations.
The term "concrete," in this theory, has been further specified by Lakoff and Johnson as more closely related to the developmental, physical neural, and interactive body (see embodied philosophy).
[20] In their 1980 work, Lakoff and Johnson closely examined a collection of basic conceptual metaphors, including: The latter half of each of these phrases invokes certain assumptions about concrete experience and requires the reader or listener to apply them to the preceding abstract concepts of love or organizing in order to understand the sentence in which the conceptual metaphor is used.
There are numerous ways in which conceptual metaphors shape human perception and communication, especially in mass media and in public policy.
In the experiments, conceptual metaphors that compared crime to either a beast or a disease had drastic effects on public policy opinions.
James W. Underhill, a modern Humboldtian scholar, attempts to reestablish Wilhelm von Humboldt's concern for the different ways languages frame reality, and the strategies individuals adopt in creatively resisting and modifying existing patterns of thought.
He also reminds us that, as Klemperer demonstrates, resisting patterns of thought means engaging in conceptual metaphors and refusing the logic that ideologies impose upon them.
In multilingual studies (based on Czech, German, French & English), Underhill considers how different cultures reformulate key concepts such as truth, love, hate and war.
Such critics tend to see Lakoff and Jacobs as 'left-wing figures,' and would not accept their politics as any kind of crusade against an ontology embedded in language and culture, but rather, as an idiosyncratic pastime, not part of the science of linguistics nor of much use.
Lakoff's 1987 work, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, answered some of these criticisms before they were even made: he explores the effects of cognitive metaphors (both culturally specific and human-universal) on the grammar per se of several languages, and the evidence of the limitations of the classical logical-positivist or Anglo-American School philosophical concept of the category usually used to explain or describe the scientific method.
Lakoff's reliance on empirical scientific evidence, i.e. specifically falsifiable predictions, in the 1987 work and in Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) suggests that the cognitive-metaphor position has no objections to the scientific method, but instead considers the scientific method a finely developed reasoning system used to discover phenomena which are subsequently understood in terms of new conceptual metaphors (such as the metaphor of fluid motion for conducted electricity, which is described in terms of "current" "flowing" against "impedance," or the gravitational metaphor for static-electric phenomena, or the "planetary orbit" model of the atomic nucleus and electrons, as used by Niels Bohr).
We understand Emily Dickinson's 'Because I could not stop for Death' as a poem about the end of the human life span, not a trip in a carriage.
The idea of encouraging use of conceptual metaphors can also be seen in other educational programs touting the cultivation of "critical thinking skills".
The work of political scientist Rūta Kazlauskaitė examines metaphorical models in school-history knowledge of the controversial Polish-Lithuanian past.
[32] There is some evidence that an understanding of underlying conceptual metaphors can aid the retention of vocabulary for people learning a foreign language.
[37] Language teaching experts are beginning to explore the relevance of conceptual metaphor to how learners learn and what teachers do in the classroom.
[38] A current study showed a natural tendency to systematically map an abstract dimension, such as social status, in our closest and non-linguistic relatives, the chimpanzees.