George Lakoff and Mark Johnson take on the daunting task of rebuilding Western philosophy in alignment with three fundamental lessons from cognitive science: The mind is inherently embodied, thought is mostly unconscious, and abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. Why so daunting? "Cognitive science--the empirical study of the mind--calls upon us to create a new, empirically responsible philosophy, a philosophy consistent with empirical discoveries about the nature of mind," they write. "A serious appreciation of cognitive science requires us to rethink philosophy from the beginning, in a way that would put it more in touch with the reality of how we think." In other words, no Platonic forms, no Cartesian mind-body duality, no Kantian pure logic. Even Noam Chomsky's generative linguistics is revealed under scrutiny to have substantial problems.
In recent years, many philosophers and cognitive scientists have come to agree, seeing metaphor making as a basic activity of the human mind. In 1980, in ''Metaphors We Live By,'' George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and Mark Johnson, head of the philosophy department at the University of Oregon, helped show how subtly metaphors permeate our lives, determining how we think and affecting our understanding. We speak of time, for example, as money, capable of being wasted, invested and spent. It may even be impossible to think about time without using metaphor. The metaphors we use are also related to our cultural preconceptions. If we think of the state as a ship being safely steered through a storm, it means we imagine an authoritative leader at the helm, not a democratically activist crew. Metaphors construct our realities. This also means, the authors suggested, that there is no ''objective truth.'' Truth, they wrote (echoing the multicultural clamor of contemporary America), ''is necessarily relative to our cultural conceptual systems.''
The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects.
