Abstract
The analysis of this article aims at reflecting on the nature of metaphoricity within the context of thought and language – inspired by the contributions of Elaine Botha in this regard commencing about three decades ago. This paved the way for those who were working within the tradition of reformational philosophy to take a new look at the nature of metaphor. Since thinking and talking are concrete activities in principle functioning in all aspects of reality, they cannot as such provide criteria to decide on the order relationship between the logicalanalytical and lingual aspects of reality. It turns out that, without a proper view of the differences between concept and word, an account of the nature of metaphor remains inconsistent. Universal traits, logical objectification, and the conceptual unknowability of what is individual, surfaces in the article. The foundational role of spatial relationships appears to be linked to imaging and imagining, informing the proposal to differentiate between modally and entitary directed knowing. The linguistic turn in particular inspired a renewed interest in language and the central place of metaphorical language use. After considering the connections between analogy and metaphor a new approach to the distinction between modal analogies and metaphors is proposed – one that is geared towards the interconnections between the different dimensions of our experiential world. The last part is dedicated to Lakoff and Johnson (1999) who have developed a peculiar view of the “embodied mind”, “conceptual metaphor”, and “cross-domain mappings”, while the article concludes with an argument about the limits of substitution and take into account expanded conditions.
Highlights
Within the circles of reformational philosophy, Elaine Botha certainly deserves credit for being the first one who thoroughly entered the field of philosophical reflection on the nature of metaphor – culminat
Lakoff and Johnson (1999) started to explore a scheme analogous to what is found in the mathematical function concept, manifested in their idea of source domains and target domains
Metaphors may explore analogies between different entities (E-E: “the nose of the car”), between entities and functional aspects (E-A: such as the “web of belief”) and between aspects and entities (A-E: for example when evolutionary biology speaks of the origin of “life” instead of the genesis of living entities)
Summary
Within the circles of reformational philosophy, Elaine Botha certainly deserves credit for being the first one who thoroughly entered the field of philosophical reflection on the nature of metaphor – culminat-. Greek philosophy soon explored an alternative option, paticularly in the claim of Parmenides that “thought and being are the same” This excellent work by Botha (2007) explores a theme indirectly related to our current discussion on metaphor in the context of thought and language – what is later introduced in our discussion, regarding the conditioning role of interdimensional connections for different kinds of metaphor, may prompt. It appears that apart from relations between named things, no metaphorical use of words or language is possible Such an understanding of these relations is embedded in human awareness of space, because spatial relationships enable the discerning and distinguishing of spatial figures. Within the domain of logical analysis, distinction represents the ever-present counterpart of identification, because in order to identify, one has to distinguish and vice versa This mutual relationship crucially depends upon the nature of concepts, for the latter is fitted within the logical subject-object relation. Does this mean that language is foundational to logical analysis, or is it rather the other way around?
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