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Metaphor and knowledge attained

via the body
a a
John M. Kennedy & John Vervaeke
a
University of Toronto , Canada
Published online: 10 Jun 2008.

To cite this article: John M. Kennedy & John Vervaeke (1993) Metaphor and
knowledge attained via the body, Philosophical Psychology, 6:4, 407-412, DOI:
10.1080/09515089308573100

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 PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY, VOL. 6, NO. 4, 1993 407

Metaphor and knowledge attained via the

body

JOHN M. KENNEDY and JOHN VERVAEKE

University of Toronto, Canada
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ABSTRACT Mark Johnson (1991) argues in favour of embodied experience as the basis for
knowledge. An important implication of his analysis is that these experiences instigate pervasive
metaphorical systems. Johnson's argument involves reductionist problems, chicken-and-egg problems
and, at times, unclear criteria for what counts as a basic experience and a metaphor.

Johnson (1991), in an attack on Rorty (1989) and irrationalist relativism, develops

an argument about metaphor and "embodied knowledge"—the idea that we know
via activities of our body. His thesis on metaphor is the focus of the present analysis.
Johnson's argument arises from a body of work on "pervasive metaphorical
systems". Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Johnson (1987), Lakoff (1987) and Lakoff
and Turner (1989) have proposed that metaphors are not isolated, occasional
grace-notes on language. Rather, metaphors come in sizeable groups, each group
centred on a basic metaphor. They come not single spies, but in battalions, and each
battalion has a commander, one might say. For example, one battalion is directed
by a basic metaphor "Life is a journey". A particular footsoldier of this company is
"I'll cross that bridge when I come to it". Some of the very general metaphors
include "mental states are locations in a space" (which permits the use of higher or
loftier visions) and "All events involve an actor" (so the earthquake is caused by
"mother nature"). In this school of thought about metaphors, the basic or very
general metaphors are held to influence a great deal of everyday mental life. Indeed,
it is argued "our concepts in certain domains are often primarily metaphorical, as
when we understand death as departure, loss, sleep, and so on" (Lakoff & Turner,
p. 125). One might allow this claim to pass as reasonable, justifiable hyperbole, but
the school takes on an especially questionable character when it goes further.
"Reason is mostly if not entirely metaphoric in nature", write Lakoff and Turner (p.
125). This departure from mere hyperbole is a strong claim. What exactly is the
connection being drawn between reasoning and metaphor? Johnson (1991) offers a
particularly focused discussion of the ideas at issue. We will take that discussion as
the most recent statement of the school and examine it in detail.
The themes we will address are as follows. Metaphors are said to be derived
from "basic experiences". They are "projections" from these experiences and their
 408 JOHN M. KENNEDY & JOHN VERVAEKE

"schemas" or structure, it is suggested. One such schema, crucial for understanding

intention, is one containing a "goal", Johnson believes. This schema is especially
significant for logical argument, he indicates. Human understanding is presented as
full of schemas in the form of images. Indeed, the schemas are not only common,
they are indispensable. (Schemas include such things as "figure-ground" and
"container" structures.) We find serious problems in Johnson's account, such as
chicken-and-egg and reductionist glitches. We round out our discussion by pointing
out that some of Johnson's goals escape our criticisms, and we specifically note that
a less-reductionistic theory of perception might be helpful to part of his case.
Johnson (1991) argues for "pervasive metaphorical systems" which arise from
the "structures of our embodied experience". He takes as an example "Purposes are
destinations", and discusses its origin and its relation to our understanding of
intentional action itself. His argument is as follows. A pervasive experience is that an
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item (a form or object) becomes an object of attention, is tracked through the

perceptual field and then stops or passes us. The experience, schematically, is a
source, a path and then a goal: this is labelled the "source-path-goal" schema. There
is an initial location A, a final location B and a movement between A and B. "There
arises", Johnson says, "a connection in our experience between structure in the
domain of intentions and structure in the domain of physical actions" (p. 11). The
intended situation is connected to location B and the intended action sequence
corresponds to the movement from A to B. This system of connections can be
named the "Purposes are destinations" metaphor, Johnson notes. It is "an imagina-
tive projection".
Johnson goes on to make two further interesting claims. We use the pattern of
the physical events (the "source") to organise our understanding of the "target"
domain. "Our projection of the 'source-path-goal' schema in our understanding of
intentional activity is thus the basis for the perceived isomorphism that seems to
obtain between the physical and intentional domains" (p. 11). This is a curious
twist. What was described as a connection, has become a projection, and therefore, by
implication, a motion or transfer in a particular direction, from source to target,
rather than just a link, a junction that ties two equal domains together. It is not clear
how this extra property of direction distinguishing connections from projections is
brought into being. Johnson simply makes this verbal substitution. Furthermore,
what made the connections possible in the first place is, apparently, that intended
actions and tracking an object from A to B have the same schema. It is not clear,
then, how intended action could derive its schema in the first place from a projection
that rests on connections that can only be made if the schema is already present!
This is a chicken-and-egg problem that Johnson skirts around and does not recog-
nise. Indeed, once Johnson asserts that the schema allows the connections, and the
connections allow projection, he then claims the projection is a metaphor that
constitutes "our very understanding of intentional action itself. Not only has
Johnson moved without clear justification from a schema to connections to projec-
tions to metaphor, and at times reversed the order, so the "understanding of
intentional action" that would have been the basis for making the connections has
now become the product, but also, the understanding is now said to be metaphoric
 KNOWING BODY 409

(so deeply constitutive of our interactions that we are virtually unconscious of its
metaphoric character, he stresses). At this point in the argument, a clear criterion for
asserting that a kind of understanding is metaphoric would be desirable. If the
understanding is our very cognition of the item in question, how can it be
metaphoric? There may be some answer, but it is not given by Johnson.
A failure to distinguish an orderly sequence of events from the way it should be
construed clearly is evident still further when Johnson goes on to assert the "sources-
path-goal" schema underlies reasoning itself, as in "when I say that assumptions A
and B lead to conclusion C, I might just as easily mean the logical form of the
argument as the temporal process of reasoning from A to B to C" (p. 12, Johnson's
italics). This is not so. One cannot reduce reasoning to temporal order. The whole
point of reasoning is that it involves intention and necessity. A and B lead to C by
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reasoning only if they necessarily do so. Notice that there are many occasions in
which A and B lead to D, E and F, when neophytes in a class on logic try their skills.
Also, the fact that A and B lead to D, E and F is not "the following out" of an
argument (Johnson's phrase) if they occur in succession merely by accident, coinci-
dence, guesswork, association, etc., etc. (as they often do among the neophytes).
The fact that A and B lead to the correct answer C is also not to be called reasoning
if they occur in that order purely by accident. Even if they arise in rapid succession
in one mind this does not ensure reasoning is present, as they could arise as a result
of simply reading them in succession. The reader may even imagine A, B and C are
individual sentences, not connected by logical force, an intention to create a
sequence of propositions that lead to a conclusion.
Johnson's argument puts sequences on the same footing as intentions, projec-
tions and reasoning. As a result, once a metaphor is shown to be a version of a
schema Johnson deems the work of understanding the nature of the metaphor to be
complete. The trick, for Johnson, is to find the schema, and once that "image" is
found then Johnson takes it that "human understanding is image-schematic through
and through, from the most primitive and mundane unreflective acts of perception
and motor activity all the way up to abstract reasoning and argument" (p. 12) and
"such elementary logical forms as predicate-argument structure are basic image-
schematic patterns of our bodily interactions" (p. 13). In response, one must note
that notions bearing on comparable phenomena can have important features in
common, but their differences may be crucial too. There are important features in
common between the gravitational force exerted on nearby bodies by a mass, the
territoriality of an animal, and the ownership of property by a human being. They
all have to do with influence. But there are important differences too, and it would
be wrong-headed to assert action-at-a-distance, territoriality and legal ownership
were "the same" and leave it at that. Of course, one could serve as a metaphor for
the others. We could say the sun protects its little solar system, or owns its planets.
Understanding the metaphor and the target concept does not consist in just realising
that all three do indeed deal with regions of influence. We have to recognise that the
kinds of influence are different, and statements about the sun's gravity are quite
different than statements about its stewardship or legal rights. The sun does not
 410 JOHN M. KENNEDY & JOHN VERVAEKE

intend to protect, and it has no legal rights at all. These are metaphors about the
sun.
Johnson offers lists of concepts he takes to be indispensable schema. The
criteria for membership on the list are not stated. One is figure-ground, for example,
a concept invented by Rubin (1915). This is the experience, Rubin said, when a
contour or line is seen as dividing two regions, but "a shaping effect" emerges from
the boundary and operates only on one field or operates more strongly on one field
than the other. An example is when the line or contour depicts the edge of an object
(such as a hill or land) seen against a distant background (other hills or the sky).
Lines and contours can also be seen as shaping both regions, on either side of the
line, as when they show the crack between two fenceposts abutting, or the frontal
dihedral edge of a cube where both surfaces meeting at the edge face the viewer (a
convex corner) or the change of slant when two surfaces of a room meet (a concave
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corner). When a line depicts a wire, the "background" is on both sides of the line.
Evidently, figure-ground is one of a set of possible percepts dealing with the possible
arrangements of flat or curved surfaces and how they abut. It is not evident why
figure-ground is an especially privileged image schema "indispensable to any ac-
count of understanding and knowledge" (p. 12). Perhaps Johnson is using the terms
metaphorically, to mean an intention in some field of opportunities. Our point,
however, is that membership on Johnson's list is awarded on unclear criteria.
At times 'Johnson hedges: experiential groundings and imaginative projections
are said to prefigure logical relations, not to be them. But the hedges slip away at
times. He argues the "container" schema structures or "provides experiential moti-
vation for" the logical law of the "excluded middle", and for category membership.
One wonders: which comes first? Does the container schema structure the law, and
categories? Or vice versa? Or, do the law and category-membership have an abstract
structure which can be described metaphorically by spatial terms, because the spatial
terms have some aspects of the same abstract structure? Surely if one explains the
shape of a modern designer's chair by reference to a well-known flower it is because
they have the same shape in part. The chair does not have all the shape of the flower,
and category membership does not have all the properties of a container. A
container can be upright. Categories cannot, except in some odd metaphorical
sense. We can indeed argue from analogies (e.g. the flower has separate petals, so
the chair may have separate cushions) as well as just notice them, but the argument
from analogy only provides useful suggestions, which have to be checked via a
different procedure than just repeating the analogy. Johnson's argument relies on
noticing important commonalities between objects, actions and logic. But the
differences between these matters is crucial to understanding them, just as much as
the commonalities.
In short, it is not enough to point to some affinities between metaphor,
reasoning, categories and experiences of patterns of physical action and claim that
the experiences provide an account of embodied knowing. There is, as Johnson
points out, an important problem set by the task he envisages, namely offering an
account of what it means to be a creature who knows things, and does so precisely
because the creature has a body and perceives. Many of Johnson's proposals for
 KNOWING BODY 411

actions and experiences that are related to the ability to know might indeed provide
good metaphors for states of knowledge. But he has been just a bit too reductionis-
tic, important distinctions escape his analysis, and the distinction between
metaphoric and non-metaphoric representation is, ultimately, unstated.
None of these comments on the unfortunate reductionism of Johnson's account
gainsays his more general claim that there are metaphors underlying and organising
extensive networks of concepts and their corresponding expressions in various
languages. This claim is one that Johnson expounds in concert with Lakoff and
Turner (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lakoff & Turner, 1989). This claim, it should be
noted, is not under attack here. Indeed, the analysis of this claim is one of the most
interesting and promising approaches to metaphor today.
As a coda, we would like to add that nothing here contradicts Johnson's goal in
attacking Rorty: to lead to an examination of category structure and its relation to
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imaginative structures and projections, and perhaps to be able to preserve a work-

able if very circumscribed notion of truth as the correspondence between the world
as it is perceived and simple, descriptive, and surely non-metaphoric claims about
the world (p. 17). This goal has a good deal of merit. It is possible that a meld of
recent ecological theory of perception (Gibson, 1979) and Johnsonian analysis of
basic metaphors we live by could make a brave attempt to reach this goal. The
ecological analysis of perception is much less reductionistic than Johnson's about
what is available to perception. The key idea in ecological theory of perception is
that complex perceptible patterns in events can be specific to quite sophisticated
states, including a biological organism acting with intention. That is, not all action
path schemas visibly involve intentions, only ones that possess the complex patterns
that are specific to organisms possessing purposes. For example, a chasing pattern
where A chases after B, and corners B, involves intention. Falling does not. Hence,
there is a basis for distinguishing paths that do and do not literally provide
perceptual hallmarks of intention. A metaphor occurs if the perceiver attributes
intentions to a path of actions when the perceptual hallmarks of purpose are absent.
Johnson could replace his oversimplified analysis of perceptible events with a
Gibsonian one. Then he could complement the ecological theory of what is literally
present with his study of the fundamental, basic metaphors that undergird many
common metaphors. Ecological theory of the perceptible world and Johnson's theses
about basic metaphors may fit each other quite well. Together, they might offer
some key parts of a theory of truth, embodied knowledge and metaphor. But that is
another story. Here, we have simply tried to show the limits of Johnson's approach
to metaphor and perception in its 1991 guise.

References
GIBSON, J.J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston, MA, Houghton-Mifflin).
JOHNSON, M. (1987) The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason
(Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press).
JOHNSON, M. (1991) Knowing through the body Philosophical Psychology, 4, pp. 3-18.
LAKOFF, G. (1987) Women, Fire and other Dangerous Things (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press).
LAKOFF, G. & JOHNSON, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press).
 412 JOHN M. KENNEDY & JOHN VERVAEKE

LAKOFF, G. & TURNER, M. (1989) More than Cool Reason (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press).
RORTY, R. (1989) Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).
RUBIN, E. (1915) Synsoplevede Figurer (Copenhagen, Gyldendals).
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