I’m curious how well their theory fits into more recent cognitive science research. Later in the book, the authors develop a whole theory using metaphors as a base, suggesting that we generally understand the world through metaphor, the reason being that they are the way to understand more abstract things in terms of more concrete things. I’ve found the idea of conceptual metaphors to be very enlightening and it made me realize how much of the way we think about our everyday life is full of metaphors.

He book then goes on to establish the notion of conceptual metaphor and give several more examples (such as TIME IS MONEY, MORE IS UP and IDEAS ARE FOOD). You can imagine a culture where arguments are not understood in terms of a struggle that could be won or lost, where perhaps the goal of the argument is to reach mutual understanding, but then someone from our culture would probably not perceive it as an argument at all. These are not just stylistic choices they’re how we understand the concept of an argument. Consider the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor: we talk of winning or losing an argument, as well as attacking positions and devising argument strategies. According to conceptual theories of metaphor, these systems of mappings, and their applications to reasoning and cognition, are the primary function of metaphor.' (Karen Sullivan, Frames and Constructions in Metaphoric Language.The main thesis of Metaphors We Live By is that metaphor, rather than being a matter of language to be used to provide style and aid rhetoric, is a key element in thought and understanding. These correspondences, called mappings, allow us to make sense of our lives, understand our stage of life, and appreciate that stage (working while the sun is high, savoring the sunset, and so on). Conceptualizing LIFE as a DAY allows us to map the various structures comprising a DAY onto aspects of a LIFE, understanding our BIRTH as the DAWN, OLD AGE as the EVENING, and so forth. The metaphor allows us to export conceptual structure about the more concrete domain to the more abstract target domain. The target domain is usually an abstract concept such as LIFE, whereas the source domain is typically a more concrete concept, such as a DAY. 'According to the conceptual view of metaphor as outlined in Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff & Johnson 1980), a metaphor is a cognitive process that allows one domain of experience, the target domain, to be reasoned about in terms of another, the source domain.

Metaphors we live by 1980