Especially relevant to scientists is the mistaken idea that metaphors are just “a matter of words,” namely, a way of speaking that can be shielded from rational thinking, and ultimately innocuous to it. Two decades ago, in the afterword of the updated edition of their classic book, the authors insisted on some persistent fallacies that contribute to a false view of what metaphors are and do.
Despite the popular acclaim of the book and its impact across academic disciplines, their claims met resistance as they challenged objectivist views of meaning and language. In Metaphors We Live By they argued that abstract thought is mostly metaphorical (having a literal core extended by mutually inconsistent metaphors and therefore incomplete without them), that metaphors are fundamentally conceptual (while metaphorical language is secondary), and that metaphorical thought is ubiquitous, unavoidable, largely unconscious, and grounded in everyday life. Four decades ago, linguists and philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson published an influential book on the nature of metaphors.
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