Metaphors We Live By Chaps. 7 & 8

Philosophy writing and other things are zapping my life today, so I didn't have the time to give to resume reviewing Dunn today. I am hoping for a late post tomorrow with some of Hurtado.

But since Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors has really short chapters (and since my wife Angie is on my laptop looking for used cars), I thought I'd put a quick post up on a couple of their chapters.

Chapter 7, "Personification" is only 2 pages long (Ya-hoo!). Their point in this chapter is that we often understand things by comparing them to people (thus, by using metaphors).

Here are some examples. "Cancer caught up with him." "Inflation has attacked us." The latter example is not only an example of the general metaphor, inflation is a person. It is an example of inflation is an adversary.

By the way, since I've been reading Locke, Hume, and Kant this week, the connections of this book with empiricist philosophy are pretty clear to me. I'm sure someone (perhaps Lakoff and Johnson themselves) have pointed out the connection. In their own way, they are with much more specificity doing exactly what Locke and Hume did in the 1600 and 1700s. They are showing the empirical basis for our ideas.

Chapter 8, "Metonymy" is a painful six pages :-) L and J distinguish metonymy from metaphor because a metonymy is when something stands for something associated with it. They give as one example, "The ham sandwich is waiting for his check."

As far as meaning, L and J see metonymy as more focused than metaphors because a metonymy focuses on a particular association with the thing it stands for. I had some questions about this paragraph.

L and J subsume synecdoche under the heading of metonymy. A synecdoche is when you substitute the part for the whole, such as "There are a lot of good heads at the university." A fun paragraph was this one:

"If you ask me to show you a picture of my son and I show you a picture of his face, you will be satisfied... But if I show you a picture of his body without his face, you will consider it strange and will not be satisfied" (37).

The point is that the parts we choose for the whole (in this case--a face is a person) are not arbitrary. In this case it reflects a feature of one way our culture conceptualizes identity.