Do Metaphors Mean or Point? Davidson’s Hypothesis Revisited

Abstract

Lakoff and Johnson’s cognitive approach has offered a cogent paradigm for the analysis of metaphors, and since its emergence, it has almost reigned in metaphor research. However, it is interesting to note that as late as 2008, Johnson still targets Davidson’s seminal paper published in 1978. I argue that this indicates how Davidson’s theory has touched upon something significant that has still not been resolved in the field. I hold that for all its insight, Lakoff and Johnson’s theory, in reducing metaphors to conceptual cross-domain mappings, has bypassed the complexities of perceptual experiences, and although they reject disembodied approach to cognition, their construal of embodied experience is essentially proprioceptive. When perceptual experiences are translated into primary conceptual metaphors and multi-dimensional metaphorical experiences are pared down to one-dimensional conceptual cross-domain mappings, metaphorical experience is considerably impoverished. Davidson seeks answers in the realm of use, by treating metaphors as prompters that direct our attention to the relations metaphors set up between entities and by denying conceptual content to metaphors. In this way, Davidson suggests that metaphors do not establish correspondences between domains at the conceptual level, as stipulated by the cognitive approach. Instead, they invite readers to return to the primary experiential domains so as to re-conceptualize the message. In other words, metaphors de-conceptualize the existing assumptions with new perspectives gleaned from perceptual experiences. The key role of metaphor is not mapping, but prompting a return to the primary experiential domains for a cognitive reconstruction. I use examples from Johnson and others’ discussion of poetry to illustrate how the hypothesis of conceptual metaphors impoverishes rather than enriches metaphorical experience.