Constitutive Metaphor Research Articles

Constitutive metaphors and legislator reasoning: the case of domestic violence

ABSTRACT Metaphors are crucial in politics, conveying complex information in simple terms. Research in political science often focuses on how elites strategically use metaphors to frame issues and how citizens rely on them to reason about unfamiliar topics. However, what happens when legislators face novel problems they must attend promptly yet lack profound knowledge about? How do they reason about such issues? Building on research concerning how scientists employ metaphors (constitutive metaphors) to develop scientific theories, this paper contends that legislators can turn to metaphors when grappling with unfamiliar legislative issues. Constitutive metaphors give legislators the terminology needed to adapt their understanding of such issues. By creating a ‘theory’ of the problem, constitutive metaphors influence where legislators believe intervention is needed, ultimately shaping their policy decisions. However, metaphors inherently oversimplify, emphasizing certain aspects while ignoring others. The paper illustrates this argument using the first congressional debates in the U.S. on domestic violence legislation (1977–1978). It demonstrates how the epidemic metaphor emerged and guided policymakers, transforming their approach from victim-focused initiatives to a criminal justice perspective. Revealing the impact of constitutive metaphors on legislative reasoning offers valuable insights into unexpected dynamics within the policymaking process, including unexpected transformations in issue framing.

THE METAPHOR OF THE NETWORK AND ITS CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES

The network has become a dominant form of contemporary thinking, the constitutive metaphor being reinvented during the explosion of reticular techniques - the Internet and planetary telecommunications networks. It seems to draw the invisible infrastructure of contemporary society. The figure of the network tends to define the ways of thinking, being ubiquitous in all disciplines, from biology to sociology, from law to computer science, etc., because the hidden structure of the complexity of today's society is the network that dominates and shapes it.

Metaphorical models and the translator’ s approach to scientific texts

Indeed, the utility of theory-constitutive metaphor seems to lie largely in the fact that they provide a way to introduce terminology for features of the world whose existence seems probable, but many of whose fundamental properties have yet to be discovered. Theory constitutive metaphors, in other words, represent one strategy for the accommodation of language to as yet undiscovered causal features of the world. (Boyd 1979:364)In this article we investigate the mechanisms behind the urge for better and new understanding. Our hypothesis is that these are generally related to and inspired by metaphorical reasoning. The existing cognitive model of a source domain of understanding is used to structure and categorise a target domain. The metaphorical model is an underlying schema which is not fully expressed propositionally and lexically. The traces and results of metapho¬rical thinking are in metaphorical lexicalisations. We challenge the princi¬ple of traditional Vienna school terminology theory which claims that because unambiguous communication is the ideal in scientific communica¬tion, it is preferable to replace a metaphorical term by its literal equivalent. We show how in the life sciences the gestalt-like metaphorical model which was at the basis of better understanding and new discovery continues to have an important role in didactic as well as in scientific texts which treat the same or related subjects. The discipline of terminology theory could work out guidelines for the description of metaphorical models starting from the metaphorical lexicalisations which are the traces which metaphorical think¬ing leaves in a language. Translators who are aware of the impact of metaphorical reasoning on lexicalisation in scientific language will develop the ability to distinguish between metaphorical models which are language and culture independent and those which are not.

Constitutive metaphor and mental mappings: meaning construction in the language of science and technology

The study of scientific and technical language, where metaphor is central, is enriched by the cognitive linguistics approach. This paper is based on the research project that culminated in the Bilingual Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Metaphors and Metonymies, developed to depict metaphorical terms and mental mappings, thus unfolding cognitive metaphors in science and technology. Although terminological metaphors as a whole exceed widely in number those that constitute part of conceptual metaphors, the importance of the latter radicates in its relevance as a constitutive element of scientific thought and language. Focusing on the analysis of metaphorical terms from earth sciences, agronomy, and mechanical engineering, the study reveals the presence of several conceptual metaphors, typified as ‘humanizing’, ‘organicist’, and ‘objectual’, according to their source domain’s nature. The work presents some very productive conceptual metaphorical patterns found in knowledge representation in engineering, in English and in Spanish, and shows evidence that metaphorical reasoning is a mechanism present at the core of creative scientific development albeit certain socio-cultural variations. This contribution opens a door for further research on the role of metaphor in constructing meaning within all branches of science and technology, as well as on the study of knowledge representation variations in different languages and cultures.

Philosophy, Violence, Metaphor

If we did not stop to think, it would be easy (and veridical) to describe Ann Murphy’s 2012 study Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary as an ‘intervention’ or an ‘event’ in philosophical studies in the continental tradition. But Murphy’s book does what all good works of philosophy do. It makes us stop to think. It asks us to stand back from where we find ourselves. It prompts us, or at least those of us trained in a certain lineage of modern thought, to step out from behind the lenses through which we have come to see, and which have become almost invisible to us (Murphy 2012, 14). As its title suggests, Murphy’s work takes seriously the role of metaphor in philosophical work, and the shaping of the Bimaginary^ of specific philosophical traditions: their ways of talking, writing, speaking, even declaiming. ‘So far, so good,’ someone trained in the continental tradition might say—and indeed, Murphy’s book is informed by a deep familiarity with the works of Derrida, Nancy, Lyotard, Le Doeuff and others within this tradition who have questioned the old philosophy-literaturerhetoric distinction. But Murphy’s book, here drawing more specifically on Le Doeuff, is also a work that is animated by a desire to ‘take stock’ of the preeminence of violent metaphors to describe ostensibly non-violent phenomena, processes or objects in contemporary thought (117). Rather than ignoring these phenomena, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary sets out to ‘think through what is at stake in the proliferation of these images’ of violence (1). Far from being incidental to the main philosophical game, Murphy’s claim is that images of violence have a literally transcendental, foundational role in many postwar continental thinkers’ works. They become what Hans Blumenberg has called ‘constitutive metaphors’ for a subfield of inquiry, vital to conceptions of subjectivity, identity, representation and knowledge. These are each often conceived of as operating, SOPHIA (2016) 55:1–4 DOI 10.1007/s11841-016-0522-4

On the Shore: Thinking Water at a Prospective Mining Site in Northern Norway

ABSTRACTDrawing on material from a projected copper mine development in northern Norway, the text explores and contrasts several ways in which water functions as a local “theory machine” to model, reflect, organize, intervene into, and think through relations. Working back from specific examples, it identifies three locally important modes for thinking (with) water: water as a constitutive metaphor, structuring particular ontologies of the social; water as a normative diagram, organizing potential future formations; and water as a kind of boundary, antagonistic (potentially) to the spatial logics of the capitalist resource extraction project. Situating these three “theory machines” of water within the current resource boom in northern Scandinavia, the text examines their potential valence—as figures for thinking through politics, sociality, and relations (human and otherwise) in an age defined, increasingly, by ecological upheavals.

Home and state: reflections on metaphor and practice

‘Home’ is frequently invoked to refer to the nation and a unified national identity, often with a spoken or unspoken division between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The concept of home is also a constitutive metaphor in much political debate, and has been instrumental in the shaping of the public–private distinction. This essay considers the idea of ‘home’ in a narrower focus, as a metaphor for, and a structural feature of, the formal construction of the state and government. My purpose is not to argue for or against adoption of the complex normative values of home in the constitution of the state, but rather to point out that these values and associated rhetoric surface in unexpected and disparate ways in state-related discourse. In Australia, because of the colonial dispossession of Aboriginal homelands and the construction of the state as a home for white people, there is a case that the dissonant references of ‘home’ need to be acknowledged as powerful elements of modern constitutional and governmental forms.

Fare metafore e fare scienza

The analysis of the status of the constitutive metaphor in science is considered along with the examination of some principal models of metaphors among biology, medicine and neurosciences. This allows to highlight the two ages of the scientific metaphor, the crossover between metaphors and models, and some open questions about the hidden ideologies concealed in the scientific theoretical terms that come from the use of metaphors.

Proposal for a Semantic Hierarchy of Terminological Metaphors in Science and Technology

Cognitive linguistics is considered as one of the most appropriate approaches to the study of scientific and technical language formation and development, where metaphor is accepted to play an essential role. This paper, based on the Cognitive Theory of Metaphor, takes as the starting point the terminological metaphors established in the research project METACITEC (Note 1), which was developed with the purpose of unfolding constitutive metaphors and their function in the language of science and technology. After the analysis of metaphorical terms and using a mixed corpus from the fields of Agriculture, Geology, Mining, Metallurgy, and other related technical fields, this study presents a proposal for a hierarchy of the selected metaphors underlying the scientific conceptual system, based on the semantic distance found in the projection from the source domain to the target domain. We argue that this semantic distance can be considered as an important parameter to take into account in order to establish the metaphoricity of science and technology metaphorical terms. The findings contribute to expand on the CTM stance that metaphor is a matter of cognition by reviewing the abstract-concrete conceptual relationship between the target and source domains, and to determine the role of human creativity and imagination in the language of science and technology configuration.

Why We Will Not Be Posthuman: Gadgets as a Technocultural Form

This essay examines the use of consumer electronics as an epistemology of human memory and experienced mental states in the 2003 film Paycheck , an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1952 short story of the same name, as well as other popular media. Informed by my research in the history of the constitutive metaphors of cognitive science in the twentieth century, I conclude from cinematographic analysis that consumer electronics provide the metaphorical framework through which we often understand and represent human memory and cognition. Although brains are seen as similar to computers, the logic of the film insulates liberal human subjectivity from posthuman implications. By invoking electronic gadgets, the film not only produces Cartesian and consumerist separation between brain/hardware and mind/user, but it also begins a broader conversation about gadgets and American popular culture; gadgets are an enduring metaphorical configuration of humans and technology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Consumption as an Emotional Social Control Device

This article discusses signs that, at least in the West, the consumption metaphor is turning into the constitutive metaphor of our relations with objects, with ourselves, and with others. This would probably be anecdotal were it not that consumption has also taken on the character commonly attributed to emotions: natural, inevitable, inexpressible, irrational, and spontaneous. This apparent lack of social features lends consumption enormous strength and puts it in the position of a human need that requires no justification. At the same time, the lack of social factors defining consumption justifies deploying multiple mechanisms to control and manage subjectivity.

The WTO Single Undertaking as Negotiating Technique and Constitutive Metaphor

Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. Negotiations in the World Trade Organization (WTO) proceed simultaneously, not sequentially, and all Members must accept all the results. I show that the so-called Single Undertaking is both a negotiation technique and a constitutive metaphor. It does not cause an outcome to negotiations, whether in a round or the daily life of the WTO, but it shapes the possibility of an outcome. The methodological innovation of the article is the use of counterfactual analysis to assess whether the Single Undertaking can be relaxed using concepts suggested by the various critiques. I consider rounds of negotiations, the consensus principle, diffuse reciprocity, critical mass decision making, the WTO acquis and special and differential treatment for developing countries. One aspect of integrative bargaining strategies, issue linkage, is also considered. The Single Undertaking emerged in the interaction structured by the regime, and the same process could lead to it being eliminated, but that is unlikely.

La metafora di individuo in biologia

- The same common name can designate different scientific objects, whose trajectories in history we can trace. Individual is an interesting case study, and a typical example of a constitutive metaphor in science. The old meaning, moving from philosophy to science, has changed along two centuries. The new meaning in population genetics is based on the difference among individuals. Thus, individual as a constitutive metaphor becomes the real epistemological engine of modern evolutionary theories. Keywords: Biological metaphors, Evolution, Population Genetics, Individual, Metaphor, Semantic change.

Spazi di parole: metafore e rappresentazioni semantiche

- The aim of this paper is to analyse the analogy of the lexicon with a space defined by words, which is common to a number of computational models of meaning in cognitive science. This can be regarded as a case of constitutive scientific metaphor in the sense of Boyd (1979) and is grounded in the so-called Distributional Hypothesis, stating that the semantic similarity between two words is a function of the similarity of the linguistic contexts in which they typically co-occur. The meaning of words is represented in terms of their topological relations in a high-dimensional space, defined by their combinatorial behaviour in texts. A key consequence of adopting the metaphor of word spaces is that semantic representations are modelled as highly context-sensitive entities. Moreover, word space models promise to open interesting perspectives for the study of metaphorical uses in language, as well as of lexical dynamics in general. Keywords: Cognitive sciences, Computational linguistics, Distributional models of the lexicon, Metaphor, Semantics, Word spaces.

Intriguing pendula: founding metaphors in the analysis of economic fluctuations

The paper is an inquiry into the definition of the early econometric programme, namely into the discussions which Frisch and Schumpeter held in the early 1930s about the most suitable model for representing innovations, change and equilibrium in economics. The argument and its framework are briefly presented in the first section. The 1931 correspondence between the two founders of the Econometric Society is discussed in the second section. It provides a magnificent example of the importance of rhetorics in economics, of the heuristic role of constitutive metaphors in a research programme and of the difficulties in defining the most suitable mathematical formalism for dealing with cycles and structural change. The third section presents the conclusion of the story: the bifurcation between the resulting contributions made by Frisch (Propagation problems and impulse problems in dynamic economics, pp. 171-205 in Koch, K. (ed.), Economic Essays in Honour of Gustav Cassel, London, Frank Cass, 1933) and Schumpeter (Business Cycles, New York, McGraw, 1939; and the posthumous volume, History of Economic Analysis, London, Routledge, 1954). Finally, the fourth section presents an alternative epilogue, highlighting some of the hidden implications of these verbal accounts of pendula as the founding metaphor for business cycles. The paper is based upon as yet unpublished papers that were found in Frisch's Collections (Oslo University Library and Frisch's Rommet at the Institute of Economics) and Schumpeter's Collection (Harvard University).

Chess RHIZOME and Phase Space: Mapping Metaphor Theory onto Hypertext Theory

Intcrtcxa, Vol. 3, No. 2, 1999 Chess RHIZOME and Phase Space: Mapping Metaphor Theory onto Hypertext Theory Martin E. Rosenberg K e t t e r i n g U n i v e r s i t y I n t r o d u c t i o n Chess RHIZOME is ahypertext Ihave constructed to explore across disciplinary boundaries the range of references to chess, the chessboard, its pieces,itsrules,andthepeculiarrolethattimeplaysintheprocessof unfolding the game itself (Figure 1). The method informing RHIZOME’sdesigndrawsontheworkofGillesDcleuzeintheforgingof contingentalliancesamongthedisciplinesofscience,philosophy,andthe arts,forthepurposeofconductingepistemologicalinvestigations.The motiveforthisprojectistoexploremetaphor(ortropesmoregener^y)as asite for interdisciphnary study. Particularly, Chess RHIZOME exploits the unstable nature of Richard Boyd’s Theory Constitutive Metaphor (TCA^ as aground for epistemological criticism, by mapping the logics of Ae drift of the chess trope across disciplinary boundaries, in order to make visible its culturalwork.Thethreeparticularlogicsthatthishypertextprojectat¬ temptstomodelare:1)genealogical:thecausaldriftofatropefromone to another; 2) naive: the opaque, unselfconscious use of apamcm^ trope, with an uncritical acceptance of its epistemological baggage; and 3) ironic:thetransparentandself-conscioususeofaparticulartrope,witha skepticalperspectiveonitsepistemologicalbaggage.LaterintWsessay will discuss these three tropic logics as amethodology for interdisciphnary science studies. Fundamentalquestionsneedtobeaskedabouttheroleofmetapor andothertropesintheformationofepistemologyattheheartofscieimc practices.Atthesametime,questionsalsoneedtobeaskedaboutow tropicborrowingsfromthesciencesbythoseoutsideofthesciencesproper becomeimplicatedinandseducedbythoseepistemologies.Inother words:howdothoseoutsideofsciencegoaboutcarryingtheepistemologi¬ cal and ideological baggage that becomes transferred to other domains by meansofthesetropes.^Howself-consciousaretheyofthatbaggage? Gilles Deleuze speaks specifically of the need, in order to understand whatispossibletoknowataparticularmomentinhistory,tocreatelinks amongphilosophicalconcepts,artisticconstructs,andscientificfunctions. Healsoarguesthattheforgingoftheselinksrequiresacertainflexibility,so thatthemobilityoftheimpliedrelationshipsreflectsthecontingenciesof the historical moment in which these relationships are forged. Icall the u s e r 1 4 7 1 4 8 I N T E R T E X T S Game Theory Linguistics Computational Science Thermodynamics C o m m u n i c a t i o n s Military Science P o l i t i c a l S c i e n c e Mao Tze Tung John von N e u m a t m John H o U a n d C l a u d e S h a n n o n H e n r i Bergson M a r k M c P h a U Physics Philosophy Mathemadcs Ludwig Wittgenstein Chess History and Theory F e r d i n a n d d e S a u s s u r c H i s t o r y Henri Poincari I r o n i c N a i v e C l e r k M a x w e l l Ilya Ptigogine Chess RHIZOME i n t r o d u e d o n Richard Feynman Allegory M o d e l Oswald Spcngler Hayden White Jacques Derrida Richard Boyd Metaphor Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari S a e v a n B e r c o v i t c h Walter Benjamin Marcel Italo Calvino Lionnais Duchamp Samuel B e c k e n E z r a P o u n d Georges T . S . E U o t L e Perec V l a d i m i r N a b o k o v Raymond Queneau JorgesLuisBorges Edgar Allan Poe Joseph Beuys John T h o m a s Pynchon Cage John T. Irwin H u b e r t D a m i s c h U m b e r t o E c o A r t H i s t o r y Literary Cridcism M u s i c V i s u a l A r t s Poetry D r a m a F i e d o n Figure 1. “Chess RHIZOME” navigational map. The academic disciplines are arrayed on the outside, while individual authors from all disciplines using the metaphor, and the range of linkages among them, are grouped on the inside, as if to visually represent how the investiga¬ tion of their use of metaphor lies in arealm beneath or between individual disciplines. conceptual space where such links may be forged as “the field of interpre¬ tive immanence,” and this space must be defined in terms of these links themselves and in terms of the specific historical moments where different domains of knowledge intersect. That field may be conceived in terms of the structures of varying stability (often described...