Metaphor, metaphor! Wherefore art thou, Metaphor?

Historically, metaphors and figurative language have been ignored as a serious topic of study in psychology and philosophy, exiled to the land of rhetoricians or literary analysts. In fact, even in those realms (normally housed in a different part of a college campus than where the ‘scientists' are) so-called ‘proper' language use and its study was for quite some time only about the literal communication of facts about the world: Don't embellish. Just the facts. Call it like you see it, not like you imagine it to be. To do otherwise was to corrupt the minds and distort reality. This corruptive opinion of metaphors and figurative language is vividly seen in Locke's An essay concerning human understanding:

But yet, if we would speak of Things as they are, we must allow, that all the Art of Rhetorick, besides Order and Clearness, all the artificial and figurative application of Words Eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and thereby mislead the Judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheat: And therefore however laudable or allowable Oratory may render them in Harangues and popular Addresses, they are certainly, in all Discourses that pretend to inform or instruct, wholly to be avoided; and where Truth and Knowledge are concerned, cannot but be thought a great fault, either of the Language or Person that makes use of them.

Those would be called fighting words. This restrictive view of language and its effect has been profound for our understanding about ourselves and the mind in the West.

I have always been concerned about my discipline's bias: that sentences like "Juliet is the sun" are studied far less often than "John and Mary went for a picnic". I have nothing against John or Mary—though I've heard things—but there is something more revealing about humanity in identifying one Juliet with the sun than simply communicating straightforward information.

Future entries on this blog will explore various modern and historical metaphors (within psychology and without), as well other examples of figurative language and their implications. For now, I would like to provide a specific example of how my field has largely looked the other way when it comes to more figurative uses of language.

Consider linguist Noam Chomsky's famous example sentence: "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." What was it supposed to demonstrate? If you read the sentence aloud, you'll notice the flow of it. It sounds like English—in a way. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." It's much different than "Ideas colorless sleep green furiously." You probably noticed how you slowed down for that one. CGISF reveals how semantics (what words mean) and syntax (the grammatical relationships among and between words, or how nouns do verby things in adverbial ways) can dissociate. CGISF is grammatical and syntactically correct, whereas ICSGF is not. Both, however, are literally nonsensical and, thus, their semantics are off. For Chomsky and others, syntax (the way stuff goes together, regardless of the stuff) becomes key to understanding the mind.

If you're like me, however, when you say, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," there is something meaningful about it, and that's important. It sounds like poetry, whereas "Ideas colorless sleep green furiously" sounds like gibberish. It seems wrong to ignore the poetic when we find it.

Since the mid twentieth century, when modern cognitive scientists in psychology, philosophy, linguistics, computer science, and robotics started to think about the mind as syntax and grammar (think of your PC computer crashing as the result of an ungrammatical sentence creating a meltdown in your most persnickety English instructor), it left out the poetic, the imaginative, the emotive, the sexual, etc. It seemed to leave out a good bit of what is great.

Through this blog and your comments, I hope to examine language in all its glory and I hope that my analyses and comments on language don't feel like an elementary school grammar lesson.

If you spot a good recent metaphor or have a favorite, please send it my way!