In the two last decades among the cognitive devices to understand categorization, metaphor has helped to explain the utilization of a concept domain, a source, into a new cognitive map, a conceptual target.(1) Thus conceptual change appears as the result of transposing certain unities of meaning into a new semantic field and therefore acquiring a new denotation that ultimately ought to become central. One of the insights of our analysis is the use of metaphors to back arguments, images and even whole scientific systems.(2)
A metaphor is not a mere linguistig trope but a cognitive ubiquous scheme in human cognition. Metaphors like ‘knowledge is seeing’, ’causes are forces’, are able to explain a domain in terms of a diverse domain and thus constitute platforms that integrate diverse elements, showing an underlying plain of consistence. In this sense, it has been observed how thought occurs mostly unconsciously, dominated by concepts, yet at the same time abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.(3) Blended spaces also suggest the motion of two domains mapped onto each other, a decontextualized central concept and a superimposed space, obtaining multiple shades and aspects through the blended experience.(4) Concepts are always nested in theories, knowledge structures, these are both external, cultural, social, plains of consistence, and internal, partial, imperfect, mental models, schemas, whose interlocking conforms the noetic space. The cognitive stabilization of models that corresponds to the basic nodes accords the conditions of possibility of knowledge and remains at a meta-level to our current perceptual-cognitive experience.(5)
(1)Especially relevant is the work by G. Lakoff. Cf. G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Metaphors we live by, Chicago, 1980. G. Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, Chicago, 1987. G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh. The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, New York, 1999. M. Black, Models and Metaphors, Cornell, 1962.
(2)“Some people will no doubt think that we are interpreting these authors too literally and that the passages we quote should be read as metaphors rather than as precise logical arguments. Indeed, in certain cases the ‘science’ is undoubtedly intended metaphorically; but what is the purpose of these metaphors? After all, a metaphor is usually employed to clarify an unfamiliar concept by relating it to a more familiar one, not the reverse.”A. Sokal and J. Bricmont Fashionable Nonsense, London, 1998, p. 9. “But scientific theories are not like novels; in a scientific context these words have specific meanings, which differ in subtle but crucial ways from their everyday meanings, and which can only be understood within a complex web of theory and experiment. If one uses them as metaphors, one is easily led to nonsensical conclusions.” Ibid., p.177. Especially interesting is the emphasis of Sokal and Bricmont on postmodern non-sense regarding the use of scientific theories and their metaphoric extensions. One of the results of this work is precisely that Hobbes, Rousseau and Schmitt also did use vaguely, inaccurately, or superficially, scientific ideas. Thus it does not seem a peculiar postmodern fashion but a rather common stance of social thinkers because of the precise features of a noetic space that nowadays seems to become dispersed into different disciplines, eroding the sense of meaning, the facility to roam on a flta surface. The use of metaphors rather as illuminating than as exact descriptions allow a new arrangement of elements, a metaphor is never an equation but transposing a source domain to a target domain necessarily produces inconsistencies.
(3) G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, op. cit.
(4) G. Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Language, New York, 1997.
(5) “Cultural forms stabilize because they are attention-grabbing, memorable, and sustainable with respect to relevant domain-specific devices. Of course, representations are also selected for in virtue of being present in any particular cultural environment. Domain-specific devices cannot attend to, act on, or elaborate representations that the organism does not come into contact with. For the development of culture, a cultural environment, a product of human history, is as necessary as a cognitive equipment, a product of biological evolution.” D. Sperber and L. Hirschfield, “Culture, Cognition and Evolution”, R.A. Wilson and F.C. Keil (eds.), MIT Encyclopedia, of Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts, 1999, p. cxxii. An example given to religious representations stems from P. Boyer, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: Outline of a Cognitive Theory of Religion, Los Angeles, 1994.
