Cognitive Theories of Metaphor
Within literary study, the most prominent cognitive approach to metaphor is that of
George Lakoff and Mark Turner. In the Lafoff/Turner account, metaphor is pervasive in cognition. It organizes and orients how we think. It even creates entities that we think about. Metaphor, in this view, is not merely a local phenomenon of the sort found in explicit comparisons, such as "Billboards are warts on the landscape." Metaphor is, rather, a complex hierarchy of structures in which local, and often implicit, comparisons serve as instances of much more abstract
metaphorical schemas, instances that are interpretable only in light of those larger schemas. Thus "We lost him," spoken by a doctor and referring to a patient who died in surgery, is a metaphor that operates unconsciously by reference to an encompassing metaphorical structure, DEATH IS DEPARTURE (Lakoff and Turner 2).
In
cognitive science more generally, there are, of course, other accounts of metaphor as well. The Lakeoff/Turner view is certainly significant, but it is not the only contender. Another prominent account derives from the work of Tversky, Ortony, and others. In this account, metaphor is fairly localized. It may organize and orient how we think, but it does so primarily in explicit and self-conscious cases. In Ortony''s view, the implicit metaphors isolated by Lakoff and others are lexicalized ("Emotion"). In our mental lexicons, lose simply includes a meaning along the lines of "try to keep someone alive and fail." It is not a metaphor.