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metaphor project
``` [This is already under way, but it's very interesting, and just the sort of thing I think bookstores should be doing more of.]
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 1995 12:30:45 -0400 From: RznDemo@aol.com Subject: Subject: Metaphor Series In LA Area
PLEASE REPOST WHEREVER APPROPRIATE
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Metaphor In Mind And Body
A Lecture / Discussion Series From the Metaphors We Live By Project
Saturday Mornings 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM September 9 - October 28
Midnight Special Bookstore & Cultural Center 1318 Third Street Promenade Santa Monica, California
(310) 393-2923 email: msbooks@msbooks.com website: http://msbooks.com/msbooks
INTRODUCTION:
Traditionally, metaphor has been treated as an exotic, fanciful, decorative device limited to the realm of poetry, and antithetical to accurate communication. In contrast, this series explores the new understanding of metaphor as central to human understanding, rooted in everyday life, and underlying the specialized branches of knowledge that grow out of our common experience.
For instance, the everyday metaphor ideas are plants underlies expressions like a fruitful imagination, branches of mathematics, a theory rooted in solid ground, a barren concept, and planting the seeds of an idea that would take years to flower.
In 1980, George Lakoff & Mark Johnson planted the seeds of an idea -- that metaphor is central to human thought -- in their book, Metaphors We Live By. This series offers the general public a chance to see for themselves just how this idea has flowered, and to plant some seeds of their own.
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Session 1, September 9 Mark Johnson: Metaphoric Morality
Research in the cognitive sciences over the last two decades has revealed remarkable ways in which human thought is both grounded in our bodily experience and also thoroughly imaginative. This research has profound implications for understanding moral reasoning: all our major moral concepts are metaphorical in nature, as is the reasoning based upon them. Taking these results seriously forces us to rethink our received notions about morality, especially the idea that there are strict moral laws and that there is a single morally correct action for any given situation. Johnson describes the metaphor system that underlies our Western moral tradition (with such metaphors as moral strength, moral authority, the split self, and moral accounting) and shows how it influences our moral reasoning. Instead of seeing morality as the application of moral rules, Johnson stresses the need to emphasize the cultivation of moral imagination, and to explore the MORALITY AS ART metaphor as a guide to moral wisdom.
Mark Johnson heads the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. He works in the areas of philosophy of language, aesthetics, recent moral theory, and Kant studies. He is co-author (with George Lakoff) of Metaphors We Live By (University of Chicago, 1980) and the author of The Body in the Mind (University of Chicago, 1988) and Moral Imagination (University of Chicago, 1993). He is currently working on the role of the body and imagination in human conceptualization and reasoning.
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Session 2, September 16 George Lakoff: Metaphor in Everyday Life
We conceptualize the world using metaphor, so commonly, automatically, and unconsciously that we re not aware of it. As a result, we think metaphorically a large part of the time, and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world. Over the past fifteen years, it s been discovered that we share a fixed, conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of "metaphorical mappings," each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another, typically more concrete, domain. Our brains are built for metaphorical thought. Since we ve evolved with "high-level" cortical areas taking input from "lower level" perceptual and motor areas, it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason. Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms. Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking. The talk will range over a large part of our system of metaphorical concepts -- our metaphorical systems for time, events, causation, emotions, marriage, the self, and morality.
George Lakoff is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. He previously taught at Harvard and the University of Michigan. He has been a member of the Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society and is past President of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association. He is presently on the Science Board of the Santa Fe Institute and a Senior Fellow of the Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley. He is the co-author of Metaphors We Live By (University of Chicago, 1980) with Mark Johnson, and More than Cool Reason (University of Chicago, 1989) with Mark Turner and author of Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (University of Chicago, 1987).
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Session 3, September 23 Ray Gibbs: Intentions, Minds & The Meanings of Metaphors
What role do speakers'/authors'/artists/ intentions play in the interpretation of metaphor? A great deal of the psychological and linguistic research has shown that recovery of speakers' intentions is fundamental to interpersonal communication--speaking and listening, reading and writing--as well as in creating and comprehending works of art. But there are a variety of different ways that intentions might play a role. What s more, there is deep resistance to this concern with the role of intention among scholars in the humanities and some social sciences. Debates over intentionalism have raged for many years in the humanities (e.g., claims about the "death of the author" by poststructuralist philosophers, literary critics, and legal theorists). How do the issues raised in these debates fit with what we know from empirical studies in the cognitive sciences? This talk will put some of these issues into a greater interdisciplinary perspective. Gibbs will discuss many examples of the use of metaphor in speech, writing, and the arts and pay close attention to how our recognition of a person's intentions may or may not play a role in our interpretation of metaphor. Examples will include works from Shakespeare, the Beatles, Pablo Neruda, Joe Bob Briggs, Marcel Duchamp, and conversations between husbands and wives, aircraft pilots before crashes, as well as various sports-team logos, and museum exhibitions. Some discussion will also be directed to metaphor interpretation in cross-linguistic communication.
Ray Gibbs is Professor of Psychology at the University of California Santa Cruz. He is the author of Poetics of Mind (Cambridge, 1994).
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Session 4, September 30 Eve Sweetser: Collaboration Between Metaphors: In and Out, Up and Down in English
Why is it down and out, not up and out or down and in ? Both vertical metaphors and container and center-periphery metaphors are central ways we view society and the human psyche. Hierarchy and power are among the most frequent senses of the up-down metaphors in English: UP is power and status. Higher-ups in the company may look down on their subordinates, and a roadblock to promotion is a glass ceiling (not a glass floor or a glass wall). But those with high status in the high school class are the in crowd, and the highest government authority is vested in central government, and outlaws are the same folks as the criminal underworld. Although metaphors of containment and exteriority focus on social acceptance rather than hierarchy, they cover much the same territory, partly due to folk models which assert that authority or status and group-membership go together. Sweetser examines ways in which these two potentially independent classes of metaphors are correlated, or coaligned, in English. The result is a remarkable systematic relationship between the two, a symbiosis or mutual support relation. She will give other examples of the phenomenon in English literature and everyday language: it may well be the case that aspects of our linguistic and cognitive systems which initially appear unrelated are actually part of a tightly interconnected conceptual structure. She will further suggest that in this particular case, the correlation is based in human experience, and in the structure of the human body, which is basic to our metaphorical modeling of the psyche and society.
Eve Sweetser is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where she also teaches in the Cognitive Science Program and in the Celtic Studies Program. She is the author of From Etymology to Pragmatics: Cultural and metaphorical aspects of semantic structure (Cambridge University Press, 1990), and is currently writing a textbook on metaphor.
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Session 5, October 7 Ron Langacker: Cultural Knowledge and Conventional Imagery: Reflections in Grammar
Langacker is a founder of the field of cognitive linguistics. He has been developing the theory now called "cognitive grammar" for over 19 years. Using examples from languages like Spanish, Samoan, and Uto-Aztecan, he will discuss and exemplify 3 points: (1) Languages provide conventional means of conceiving and portraying situations ("conventional imagery"). They can use expressions with substantially different meanings to convey comparable information or describe the same situation. (2) Lexicon and grammar form a continuum of symbolic expressions. The conventional imagery they embody is a critical facet of their characterization. (3) Culture is reflected not just in lexicon, but also in grammar, in numerous ways both direct and indirect.
Ron Langacker is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Concept, Image and Symbol (Mouton de Gruyter, 1991).
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Sessin 6, October 14 Keith J. Holyoak: Analogical Thinking
This talk is based on Holyoak s recently published book Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought (1995, MIT Press), co-authored with Paul Thagard. The book presents a general theory of analogical thinking that includes an analysis of how the capacity to use analogy evolved in primates, how it develops in children, and how it s used to reason in fields such as law, politics, philosophy and science.
Keith J. Holyoak is a Professor of Psychology at UCLA. He received his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Stanford University, and taught at the University of Michigan for 10 years before coming to UCLA. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and is the Editor of the Journal of Cognitive Psychology. His research interests lie in the general area of reasoning and problem solving, including the role of analogy in thinking and how it serves as a psychological mechanism for learning and transfer of knowledge.
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Session 7, October 21 Gilles Fauconnier: Cognitive Mappings and Blended Spaces in Language and Thought
Other speakers in the series explore metaphor and metonymy as they reflect deep conceptual connections in our system of thought. Fauconnier will talk about another cognitive process at work in everyday thought, language, literature, action and emotion, and the development of science, among other domains of human experience. This process is conceptual blending. And it has systematic properties: It sets up a generic space, establishes correspondences between inputs, and creates a blended mental space. This space has emergent structure that can be used creatively. This talk will illustrate this operation of the mind using examples from everyday life, science, literature, cartoons, and such children's classics as The Runaway Bunny.
Gilles Fauconnier is Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego, where he teaches in the Cognitive Science Department. He is the author of Mental Spaces (Cambridge University Press, 1994), and a forthcoming book, Cognitive Mappings in Language and Thought (Cambridge University Press).
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Session 8, October 28. Donald C. Freeman: Metaphoric Systems & Literary Interpretation
This talk will explore the analytical and interpretive power of cognitive metaphor. The theory of cognitive metaphor argues that we understand such abstractions as knowledge, careers, and justice by mapping onto them the entities and structure of schematized bodily or enculturated experience: for justice, the schema of balance; for careers, the schema of the path; for knowledge, the schema of vision. In a case study of Shakespeare s Othello, Freeman will demonstrate how the potent metaphorical projection SEEING IS KNOWING characterizes patterns of the play s language, structural aspects of its character relationships, and the sequence of events that constitutes its plots. It is not accidental that the same Othello who demands of Iago, Give me the ocular proof, says as he prepares to murder a Desdemona traduced by Iago s false ocular proofs, Put out the light, and then put out the light. The theory of cognitive metaphor offers a coherent, systematic accounting for these seemingly disparate elements of plot, language, and character.
Donald C. Freeman is Professor of English and Law at the University of Southern California. He has also taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Temple University; and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he founded the department of linguistics. He has also held visiting professorships at universities in Canada, Great Britain, Germany, and Austria. Freeman has published more than fifty scholarly articles and reviews on various aspects of literary and legal language, and edited Linguistics and Literary Style (Holt, Reinhart & Winston, 1970) and Essays in Modern Stylistics (Methuen, 1981). At present he is completing Shakespeare Metaphor: Cognitive Linguistics and Literary Interpretation.
YOU'RE INVITED!
We especially invite participation by the many people in LA who speak languages other than English. Your questions and examples from your language and cultural background are especially desired.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This series is made possible by a grant from the California Council for the Humanities under the sponsorship of Beyond Baroque Foundation and by the continued support of Midnight Special Bookstore, which carries books by series presenters.
* Recommended Introduction for this series: Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson (University of Chicago, 1980). ```
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