If 'Journeys' and 'Things' Frame Our Thinking, Can We Adequately Reason About the Nature of Conflict?

Abstract

Like virtually all discourse, the professional literature on conflict resolution depends heavily on metaphor to explain its central concern: What is conflict and how may it be resolved? Readers are conscious of explicit distinctions, evaluations, and logic, but unconscious metaphors frame thinking, structure assumptions and inferences, and guide reasoning. Are these metaphors adequate, robust, and creative enough to describe and explain our highly specialized knowledge of the complexities of conflict and how to resolve it? This study uses cognitive linguistics methodology to identify metaphors and unpack their mappings in a sizable corpus of mainstream expert literature on mediation and in a small corpus of dynamical systems literature on conflict. In both, two highly conventional conceptual metaphors are found to dominate: conflict metaphorically understood as a journey, including paths, movement, and force dynamics, and conflict metaphorically understood as a material substance or physical object. Building construction, war/struggle and personificationanimation metaphors are frequently used and several others are occasionally used; novel or unusual metaphors are rare. Overwhelmingly the same conceptual metaphors are used in the literature studied here as are commonly found elsewhere in a wide variety of discourse types. Yet certain innovative elaborations and extensions that explicate the complexities that conflict scholars have labored over for decades were found in the dynamical systems corpus. Their value in helping us comprehend and teach the nature of conflict and suggestions for their conscious elaboration are discussed.