The Theory of Cognitive Models
(last updated April 26, 1997)
Lakoff’s _Women, Fire, and
Dangerous Things
_is a treasure trove of linguistic examples and
a carefully developed model of cognition argued on the basis of semantics.
His
experientialism places the human act of cognition in the center;
his brilliantly presented result is that cognition is vitally dependent
on metaphor, which he defines as a mapping of conceptual structures from
one domain onto another—a result of particular relevance to literature.
On the Relativity of Knowledge and
Truth
”Knowledge, like truth, is relative to understanding.
Our folk view of knowledge as being absolute comes from the same source
as our folk view that truth is absolute, which is the folk theory that
there is only one way to understand a situation. When that folk theory
fails, and we have multiple ways of understanding, or ‘framing,’ a situation,
then knowledge, like truth, becomes relative to that understanding. Likewise,
when our knowledge is stable and secure, knowledge based on that understanding
is stable and secure.
Is such knowledge ‘real knowledge’? Well,
it’s as real as our knowledge ever gets—real enough for all but the most
seasoned skeptics.” (300)
On the different kinds of cognitive
frames
Lakoff argues that experience is made possible and structured by _preconceptual
structures
_- “directly meaningful concepts” roughly the same for all
human beings that thus provide “certain fixed points in the objective evaluation
of situations”. He divides them into basic-level structures and image-schema
structures, and acknowledges there may be other kinds. Basic-level structures
arise “as a result of our capacities for gestalt perception, mental imagery,
and motor movement” and manifest as basic-level categories such as hunger
and pain, water, wood, and stone, people and cats, and (perhaps more surprisingly)
tables and houses (302). Image schemas are spatial mappings such as source-path-goal,
center-periphery, and container. It is out of these basic cognitive tools
that more complex cognitive models of reality are constructed:
On literal and metaphorical meaning
The literal provides the building blocks of thought. “Cognitive models
derive their fundamental meaningfulness directly from their ability to
match up with preconceptual structure. Such direct matchings provide a
basis for an account of truth and knowledge” (303). Since the matching
is internal—from one concept or cognitive process to another—we do not
run into the later Wittgenstein’s problem of matching word to thing.
The literal, however, cannot capture the order
of all domains. “In domains where there is no clearly discernible preconceptual
structure to our experience, we import such structure via metaphor. Metaphor
provides us with a means of comprehending domains of experience that do
not have a preconceptual structure of their own”. Preconceptual structures
are thus mapped from source domains onto target domains. This is a particularly
elegant result, and fits loosely with faculty theory—although it is not
clear that Lakoff himself would wish to make such an extension.
Some examples of metaphors
-
Life is a journey (the person is a traveler, purposes are destinations,
means are routes, difficulties are obstacles, counselors are guides, achievements
are landmarks, choices are crossroads -
A lifetime is a day, death is sleep; a lifetime is a year, death is winter
-
Lif is a struggle, dying is losing a contest against an adversary
-
Life is a precious possession, time is a thief, death is a loss
-
Time is a thief
What is striking when one examines Lakoff’s painstaking lists of metaphors
is how completely immersed we are in them, and how our thinking is enabled
by them. It is perhaps impossible to say many things literally: there are
simply no appropriate conceptual primitives. How, for instance, do you
speak of the high points in your life literally? The very narrative assumes
the metaphorical mapping.
A critique and appreciation
Lakoff’s approach of developing a general model
of cognition on the basis of semantics has certain inherent weaknesses,
in spite of its spectacular results. It cannot be taken for granted that
semantic categories accurately represent cognitive domains—language may
have access only to the output of other cognitive modules, and their domain-specificity
may be partly elided by linguistic categories. For this reason, evidence
for cognitive domains must be sought and demonstrated independently of
language. However, semantics can be utilized as a way of generating hypotheses
about domain-specificity, which can then be independently verified.
The presence of cognitive domains also raises the
question of how these came about. Lakoff assumes they flow out of our physical
constitution and the nature of the world; a more precise way of speaking
about this is evolutionary psychology. A consideration of the environment
in which humans evolved would permit us to map the source domain onto a
proper domain, and thus generate a more detailed list of properties and
entailments. Such historical considerations would also allow us to provide
principled answers to which domains do not have their own preconceptual
structure: namely, domains that either did not exist in the ancestral environment
(agriculture, most forms of technology, civilization) or domains that were
not available or significant to survival (microbiology, quantum physics,
chemistry).
Moreover, Lakoff’s notion of metaphor as a
mapping from one cognitive domain to another as “one of the great imaginative
triumphs of the human mind” has been echoed by the British paleo- anthropologist
Steven Mithen (1996), who
has suggested that the transition from Neanderthal man to Cro Magnon is
marked precisely by the ability to “switch cognitive frames”: the paleolithic
blossoming in art may be correlated with the ability to think metaphorically.
Lakoff’s proposal on metaphor is a particularly
pregnant one for literary studies— not because ordinary speech is mainly
literal (it clearly is not), but because literature is a deliberate forefronting
of linguistic devices, a cultivation of special effects. Clarifying what
is the source and proper domains of a metaphor promises to throw light
on the way meaning is constructed in reading. As for cultural studies,
Lakoff’s work opens up for the possibility of tracing political and social
patterns back to an underlying set of metaphors (see
Lakoff
and Johnson (1980)
, Brown
(1988)
, and Boyer (1988)).
It should also be noted that Leonard Talmy, whose early work clearly belonged to the Lakovian paradigm (see the next link), more recently has developed this approach explicitly in the direction of evolved cognitive structures (see Talmy (1995)).