No Warfare: Let us render unto metaphor’s paradox we live by

Abstract

This essay discusses metaphor as a cognitive paradox. It is divided into two parts. The first part outlines a schema explaining the paradox that the authors call ‘prodigal-within-prodigy’ in terms of how metaphor conception creates a contextual opposition within mutuality. They argue that such [re]cognition of paradoxical context actually helps mutualize mainstream oppositions we come across in metaphor literature: cognitive linguistic vs.psycholinguistic/cultural, empirical vs. intuitive, inductive vs.deductive, realization of what we call the real-world. In the second part, the authors discuss how the prodigal-prodigy schema could resolve the conflicting positions on metaphor—disengaging from what Gibbs (2017) calls Metaphor Wars. In this regard, to assess the scope of this cognitive paradox vis-à-visa disengagement from warfare, a set of ‘critical methodological concerns’ raised on metaphor conception (Gibbs, 2009) are discussed. This discussion points to contemporary debateson metaphor conception thatunderlie ‘conceptual metaphor theory’, ‘traditional theory of metaphor’, ‘deliberate metaphor theory’, and ‘contemporary...new and improved theory’ of metaphor, among others. The authors claim, with examples from earlier work (Abdullah, 2016), how a cognitive paradox creates ‘metaphorical truth-values’ that sustain the spatiotemporal context. Towards the scope of evolving a unified theory of metaphor, this paper reaffirms Gibbs’ argument that no single explanation in literature alone can comprehend the scopeof metaphor in thought and practice.