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In 1945, Kenneth Burke began his famous appendix, "Four Master Tropes,"
I refer to metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. And my primary concern with them here will be not with their purely figurative usage, but with their rôle in the discovery and description of "the truth" (Burke 1969: 503). To Burke, these tropes (or figures) have fundamental conceptual status. "Metaphor," he writes, "is a device for seeing something in terms of something else" (ibid.). Figural thought leaves its mark on language. The assertion that figure is conceptual is ancient. It is common in the history of rhetoric, despite I. A. Richards's (1936) implicit and unaccountable claim to have discovered the conceptual status of figure. In classical antiquity, a writer like Demetrius--essentially a reporter rather than an innovator--felt comfortable explaining in On Style that metaphoric conceptions can be as "true" as any others, that the conceptual metaphoric mappings we see manifested in language are asymmetric, that everyday language is widely and ineradicably metaphoric, and that we understand linguistic constructions (to an extent) in terms of what we might now call figural projections of image-schemas. In Longinus's On the Sublime, we find the claim that figural understanding is all the more powerful when it is so automatic that we do not recognize its figural nature. Aristotle's detailed investigation of figurative language obscured, for some, his recognition of its conceptual role, but it was Aristotle who gave Burke the all-important verb: "to do metaphor well is to see (consider) likenesses" [1]. When Aristotle defines metaphor as the transfer of a noun from one thing to another, he means transfer motivated by conceptual relations--either of category (genus to species, species to genus, species to species) or of analogy. Conceptual connection drives linguistic figuration: "To scatter seed is to sow, but there is no word for the action of the sun in scattering its fire. Yet this has to the sunshine the same relation as sowing has to the seed, and so you have the phrase 'sowing the god-created fire'" (Poetics XXI, 14). Burke differs with Aristotle not in seeing figure as conceptual, but rather in seeing it as basic to everyday thought, and irreducible in its mechanisms to special combinations of literal thought. This view places Burke in a tradition of rhetoricians whose famous exemplars include Giambattista Vico.
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| Several literary critics have proposed that the everyday
mind is irreducibly imaginative. In 1936, the same year in which I. A. Richards
wrote that, "Fundamentally [metaphor] is a borrowing between and intercourse
of thoughts. . . . Thought is metaphoric . . . and the metaphors
of language derive therefrom,"[2]. C. S. Lewis wrote that understanding
one story figurally in terms of another story belongs not principally to
expression and not exclusively to literature, but rather, to mind in
general, as a basic cognitive instrument (Lewis 1936: 44). In these traditions, we find sketchy, scattered, and limited analysis of the mechanisms of figure. Aristotle discussed ways in which specific figurative usages can be appropriate or inappropriate, and he claimed that metaphors based on analogical conceptual relations must have two reciprocal forms, reversing source and target (Rhetoric III, iv, 4). In 1942, Stephen Pepper, in World Hypotheses, analyzed conventional "root metaphors" we use to understand components of reality--in terms of objects an artisan makes on the same plan or for the same reason (shoes, beds); or natural objects that arise according to the same plan (crystals, oak trees, sheep) (Pepper 1970:162); or machines (watch, dynamo) (p. 186); and so on. In 1960, Roman Jakobson gave a hint--as assured and visionary in its presentation as it was brief and uncompelling in its substance--of the way in which grammatical structure might be based upon metaphoric and metonymic conceptual relations (Jakobson 1960).In 1982, Calvert Watkins argued that poetic thought is inseparable from everyday language and that to analyze everyday language we must analyze poetic forms of thought. Indo-European etymologies, for example, often rest upon metonymy and metaphor. The scholar can "prove the etymology only by making explicit the poetic nature of the semantic relation between the cognates . . ." "And the moral is simply that linguistics needs poetics, just as it needs pragmatics" (Watkins 1982: 108). But essentially, we have had to wait until the last twenty years for systematic empirical research on the cognitive mechanisms of figural thought, the constraints on figural thought, the system of conventional figural conceptions, the relation of figural thought to language, and the ontogenetic development of figural thought. A loose association of cognitive scientists, linguists, rhetoricians, philosophers, and psychologists has come to test the proposition that conceptual projection is basic to thought and language. This research does not dispense with the distinction between the poetic and the everyday, or claim that we must use poetic fancy just to tie our shoes, or chide scientists of mind for neglecting the study of Keats, but it does claim that there exist cognitive operations once thought to be poetic--their most fabulous products being most easily seen in poetry--that are instead, at least in their central forms, constitutive of everyday thought and language. These researchers have set about collectively to analyze these cognitive operations and to discover the systematicity of their products. This enterprise has--here and there, more or less--struck up oppositions to positivist, formalist, and literalist academic theories, to views (like Aristotle's) of figure as reducible to special assemblies of literal thought, to views (like Grice's) of figure as a secondary and parasitic repair mechanism for failed literal interpretation, and to views (like Chomsky's) of grammar as autonomous of figural thought. This body of research has had no synoptic presentation of its history or of its current state, and no systematic and routine psychological testing of its hypotheses. The Poetics of Mind offers both. In easy and familiar prose, with an organization that makes the landscape of research distinct and coherent, Gibbs surveys traditions of work on the poetic mind and gives a detailed and intelligible synoptic presentation of current research. We learn from this book what is at stake and who argues what, on what evidence, in linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, philosophy, and rhetoric. We observe disparate lines of research converge. Gibbs has preferences, but his summaries are even-handed. Researchers he portrays will recognize themselves in his mirror. Knowing this field begins with reading this book. The paperback is already available and ought to be widely used. Gibbs's scholarship and bibliography are immense and current. His topics include the literal versus the figurative, how figurative language is understood , metaphor in thought and language (including society, politics, science, law, art, myth, and culture), how metaphorical expressions are understood (including surveys of all major previous theories), idiomaticity, metonymy, irony, the poetic minds of children, and directions for future research. Against this background, Gibbs presents his own program of systematic psychological testing of the hypothesis that thought is fundamentally figural. Like Burke, he focuses on the four master tropes, sees metonymy and synecdoche as overlapping, and views each of the four master conceptual tropes as related systematically to the others. He offers a concise and memorable general conclusion:
The psychological experiments that lead Gibbs to this view are the central and abiding subject of his large book. He reviews an extensive body of research, much of it his own, interpreted as discrediting what he calls the standard pragmatic model, according to which understanding figurative language requires greater cognitive effort than comprehending literal language and proceeds in steps: the understander (1) computes the literal meaning of the utterance; (2) decides whether the literal meaning is the intended meaning of the utterance and whether the literal meaning is inappropriate for the specific context; and (3) computes an additional figurative meaning through special pragmatic processes. Gibbs concludes on the evidence that comprehension of figurative language does not take place in these three distinct stages; that figurative interpretation need not be preceded by a prior literal interpretation; and that identical mental processes drive the comprehension of both literal and figurative utterances.
But Gibbs then shows why the total time hypothesis, if true, would not settle the question of whether understanding figurative language requires special processes. Several of Gibbs's experiments are display pieces that can be contemplated (and enjoyed) for themselves, as indications of the range of problems he addresses in the book. Gibbs and colleagues asked participants to write down their mental images of proverbial phrases like "The early bird catches the worm" and then to respond to a series of questions regarding the causation, intentionality, reversibility, and manner of the actions depicted in their mental images. Responses showed a high degree of regularity across areas where variety should have arisen. Variety did arise when subjects were presented with only the abstract version of the proverb: "The person who begins a task first is most likely to succeed." How, Gibbs asks, might we account for this regularity? Gibbs's topics are often subtle. How does our judgment of the degree of irony of an utterance depend upon our recognition that the expression echoes a familiar expression? His theorizing is often bold, as when he concludes that, on the evidence, pragmatic maxims of truthfulness must be weakened: "Speakers want to attribute belief in the proposition they express not necessarily to themselves but to someone or some cultural norm . . . [S]peakers' statements need not be identical to their own beliefs but need only resemble their beliefs" (pp. 393-394). Gibbs's most controversial claims arise in "The Poetic Minds of Children," where he argues not only that human cognition is fundamentally shaped by various poetic and figurative processes, but also that these processes develop very early in children and are not preceded by a "literal stage." In this chapter, his analysis of experimental results often disagrees with alternative analyses provided by other researchers whose work he presents. He is particularly careful to show the difficulties encountered in the design of experiments on children and in the interpretation of results. Children, we are reminded, are in the process of developing the main lines of their conceptual systems; they have great lacunae in the kinds of background knowledge that adults (and experimenters!) take for granted; and so on. For example, Piaget asked children to explain the meanings of metaphorical sentences (often in the absence of linguistic or situational context), but the typical result tells us little, because understanding metaphor may be a much more basic capacity than cobbling together a culturally suitable paraphrase. Consider a different kind of test, says Gibbs: Previous research indicates that correct imitation of sentences implies understanding of the material presented; even three-year-olds who are required to repeat a sentence just read to them do as well on metaphorical sentences ("The stars are the moon's children") as they do on literal sentences ("The fog comes in after the rainstorm"), but they do worse on anomalous sentences ("Newspapers are stars wearing the bath"). Many of Gibbs's claims about the poetic minds of children will be challenged. A fundamentally different view that nevertheless concurs that figurative thought inevitably emerges in the first few years of life can be found in Ellen Winner's The Point of Words (Harvard, 1988), which might be read alongside Marcelo Dascal's "Defending Literal Meaning" (1987). Dascal and Winner challenge Gibbs; Gibbs challenges them. Dispute in contemporary linguistics is notorious for having achieved the sound and feel of weasels fighting in a hole, but this conversation is by contrast clear, pleasant, and concerned principally to serve the reader. Research into mind and language often comes with large claims of fundamental achievement, but there is an alternative view available in cognitive science, according to which research into mind and language is instead in an embryonic state, something like algebra when algebraists participated in "factoring contests" to see who could factor which polynomials, with no inclusive system for the data, the profession, or the body of knowledge, and with individual algebraists naturally preferring the very limited problems suited to the tricks they knew. Algebra advanced through this useful stage to a great coordination. In similar circumstances, cognitive scientists need theoretical scaffolding that lets us see more data, problems, tricks, possible explanations, and possible coordinations. The Poetics of Mind is an admirable attempt to supply it. Footnotes
References Burke, K. 1969 [1945]. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: Universiity of California Press. Dascal, M. 1987. "Defending literal meaning." Cognitive Science 11: 259-281. Jakobson, R. 1960. "Concluding statement: Linguistics and poetics." In T. A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language. Cambrdige, MA: MIT Press. Lewis, C. S. 1936. The Allegory of Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pepper, S. 1970 [1942]. World Hypotheses. Berkeley: University of California Press. Richards, I. A. 1936. "Metaphor," chapter five of The Philosophy of Rhetoric. New York: Oxford University Press, 1936. [Delivered as a lecture in 1936. The quotation is from page 94.] Watkins, C. 1982. "Aspects of Indo-European poetics." In E. C. Polomé (ed.), The Indo-Europeans in the Fourth and Third Millennia. Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers, 104-120. Winner, E. 1988. The Point of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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