Lakoff-Johnson

Works

Two joint books, and separate work that is frequently attributed to the pair.

• Metaphors We Live By (1980) is the founding statement: conceptual metaphor, the systematic entailments that follow from a mapping, and the highlighting and hiding a mapping performs.
• Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) makes the philosophical case that reason is embodied and directs it against objectivist accounts of meaning.
• Johnson's separate work on image schemas — container, path, balance, force — supplies the preconceptual bodily structures the account depends on.
• Lakoff's separate work on political framing, including the strict-father and nurturant-parent models, is more contested than the linguistics and is not part of the joint programme.

Central ideas

Three, and the second is what this work actually uses.

• Conceptual metaphor: expressions like winning an argument, defending a position and shooting down a claim are not separate figures but the surface of one mapping, and the coherence among them is the evidence offered for it.
• Highlighting and hiding: a mapping makes some aspects of its target salient and suppresses others. Treating argument as war makes winning visible and makes cooperation nearly unsayable, which is a claim about what a description permits rather than about what it asserts.
• The embodied mind: conceptual structure arises from recurrent bodily experience, so abstract reasoning is not free-floating. This is the strongest and most contested part of the programme.

Distinctive vocabulary

Three terms with technical senses.

• Conceptual metaphor: a systematic mapping between domains, conventionally written in small capitals. Not a figure of speech and not a comparison.
• Entailment: what follows within a mapping once it is in force. Not logical implication.
• Image schema: a recurring preconceptual structure derived from bodily experience. Not a mental picture.

Debates and disagreements

The central question is whether a pattern in language demonstrates a structure in thought.

• Psycholinguistic evidence for conceptual metaphors being active in online processing is mixed, with supporting findings alongside significant null and conflicting results. Rival accounts — metaphor as categorisation, or as deliberate communicative choice — explain much of the same data.
• The method has a circularity problem: identifying a conceptual metaphor from expressions and then citing those expressions as evidence for it guarantees nothing unless identification is independent. Formal identification procedures were developed specifically to address this.
• Whether the strong embodiment thesis — that abstract thought is generally structured by bodily metaphor — is testable as stated.

Intellectual relationships

One precursor, one break, and one successor framework.

• Reddy's analysis of the conduit metaphor is the immediate precursor and the demonstration that a single mapping can organise a whole vocabulary.
• Lakoff's break with generative grammar is the background: the programme is built against a formal, autonomous syntax and an objectivist semantics.
• Conceptual blending is the successor and rival framework, handling cases where two inputs produce structure neither contained.
• Bakhtin, Eckert and Labov, in this same lens lineage, work on language from literary, ethnographic and distributional directions respectively.

How it changes this reading

The Lakoff-Johnson collaboration is named in the lineage of the Aesthetic-linguistic lens, completing it.

• The load-bearing borrowing is highlighting and hiding. Which metaphor organises a description determines what can be noticed about what is described, so a description is a mapping that suppresses rather than a neutral report.
• That is the same structure as this work's concern with characterological against calibrated language, arrived at from cognitive linguistics rather than from grammar or from ethics — which is why it belongs beside the discourse-analytic references rather than duplicating them.
• This work can use the highlighting-and-hiding structure as an analytic tool while declining the strong embodiment thesis, and the entry says so rather than borrowing the whole programme to get one part of it.
• It is not evidence about anyone's thought, metaphors, or reasoning.

Useful comparisons

The lens is complete with this entry, and its four members answer to four evidences.

• Mikhail Bakhtin: heteroglossia and the many-voicedness of an utterance, argued from literary texts.
• Penelope Eckert: variation as a resource for making social meaning, argued from ethnography.
• William Labov: variation as structured and quantifiable, argued from distributions across a community.
• The Lakoff-Johnson collaboration: conceptual metaphor as the organisation of thought, argued from patterns in expressions.

Where the ideas meet

All four deny that form is a neutral vehicle.

• None treats linguistic form as packaging around a content that could have been delivered otherwise.
• All hold that how something is said carries meaning the words alone do not.
• Each treats ordinary language as the primary evidence rather than as a degraded case.

Where they part

The evidences are not commensurable, and the collaboration is not internally uniform.

• Labov and Eckert argue from what people are observed to say, in communities, measured or ethnographically described. The conceptual-metaphor programme argues from patterns in expressions taken to reveal structures of thought, and whether that inference holds is precisely what is disputed.
• Bakhtin's heteroglossia concerns voices in a text and makes no cognitive claim; the two do not reduce to one another.
• Within this entry: citing Lakoff and Johnson for Lakoff's political-framing claims is a misattribution. The framing work is separate, weaker in evidential support, and not part of what the two argued together — which is why this reference is typed as a collaboration rather than as a person.

Limits

• A claim about how thought is generally organised establishes nothing about how any particular person thinks.
• The psychological status of conceptual metaphors is contested, so the programme supports an analytic vocabulary rather than a finding about anyone.

Criticisms

The objections are methodological and empirical.

• Circularity: without an independent identification procedure, the expressions that generated a conceptual metaphor cannot then be evidence for it.
• The psycholinguistic record is mixed rather than supportive, and rival accounts cover much of the same data.
• The strong embodiment thesis is difficult to falsify at the generality with which it is asserted.
• Cross-linguistic universality of the primary metaphors is contested.
• Lakoff's political-framing work has weak empirical support for its central practical claim, and its popular success has lent the linguistics an authority the framing work does not have.

Common misreadings

Four uses this placement does not license.

• Citing the pair for political-framing claims, which belong to one author's separate and more contested work.
• Treating a conceptual metaphor as demonstrated psychological machinery rather than as an analytic description of a pattern.
• Reading a person's metaphors as evidence of how they think.
• Using conceptual metaphor for any figurative language, which loses the systematicity that is the whole claim.

What remains outside this idea

• It cannot establish anything about any person's thought or reasoning.
• It cannot convert a pattern in expressions into a fact about a mind.