Analogy and Metaphor

One of my pet peeves is people saying "metaphor" when they mean "analogy". A metaphor is a verbal construction, which can express an analogy. But an analogy can be expressed non-metaphorically, and metaphors can be so confused as to not express any coherent analogy (though perhaps then they express a bundle of conflicting analogies). To infer the analogy underlying somebody's thinking from the metaphors used in their speech is chancy; sometimes one set of metaphors is conventionalized for a given topic, but people can, on command, rapidly switch to a different set of metaphors to express the same ideas about the same topic. Yet it is generally the ideas we care about.

(Aside: in Flexible Bodies, a book about contemporary American ideas about immunity, the anthropologist Emily Martin recounts asking one of her immunologist informants to rephrase something without using an military metaphors. He was immediately able to do so, which suggests at the very least that, however his thoughts about the immune system were represented, the conventional metaphors of defense, infilitration, etc. were not essential. Martin, being a cultural anthropologist, completely ignored this point.)

Things get even more complicated when people build abstract models as, initially, representations of some real thing, and then proceed to analogize other objects to the model, using a metaphorical vocabulary drawn from the original object. Thus, to give an example close to home, certain parallel problem solving systems were first built as models of insect colonies, and so there is an entirely metaphorical vocabulary of "ants," "pheromones," "trails" and "foraging" associated with them. And there are now physical robotic systems which implement these computational models. But the analogy is really to the model, not to the nests, e.g., the models have nothing analogous to eggs or a queen, and so neither do the robots. If it turns out that we're stupendously wrong about how insect colonies work, the vocabulary will not go away or become inappropriate for the robots, since it's based on the analogy to the model, and the metaphors have become, to that extent, dead.

Understanding how analogy and metaphor work, and how they work together, is a fascinating topic that I am never going to contribute anything to.

Aristotle, Rhetoric
Jack Balkin, Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology [Full text free online]
Margaret Boden, The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms [Precis]
"Chris"
- Idioms, Metaphors, and Lakoff, Oh My!
- Explaining the War of the Metaphors
- Review of Lakoff's The Political Mind, parts I, II, III, IV
Holland, Holyoak, Nisbett and Thagard, Induction: Processes of Learning, Inference and Discovery [Review]
Julian Jaynes, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind [Part I has an excellent discussion of mental analogies and their role in consciousness; the crazy stuff comes afterwards]
Philip Johnson-Laird, The Computer and the Mind
John Lawler, Metaphors We Compute By
Melanie Mitchell, Analogy-Making as Perception
Gregory L. Murphy, "On Metaphoric Representation", Cognition 60 (1996): 173--204 [PDF. To quote from the abstract: "The article discusses claims that conceptual structure is in some part metaphorical, as identified by verbal metaphors like LOVE IS A JOURNEY. Two main interpretations... In the first, a target domain is not explicitly represented but is instead understood through reference to a different domain. For example, rather than a detailed concept of love per se, one could make reference to the concept of a journey. In the second interpretation, there is a separate representation of love, but the content of that representation is influenced by the metaphor.... [T]he first interpretation is not fully coherent [and] the second interpretation is a possible theory of mental representation [with many problems]. ... [M]any of the data cited as evidence for metaphoric representations can be accounted for by structural similarity between domains."]
Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial
Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Cognition and Communication
I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism
Peter D. Turney [Latent semantic indexing from large corpora meets analogies]
- "Measuring Semantic Similarity by Latent Relational Analysis", arxiv:cs.LG/0508053
- "Similarity of Semantic Relations", arxiv:cs.CL/0608100
- "The Latent Relation Mapping Engine: Algorithm and Experiments", Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 33 (2008): 615--655 = arxiv:0812.4446 ["We evaluate LRME on a set of twenty analogical mapping problems, ten based on scientific analogies and ten based on common metaphors. LRME achieves human-level performance on the twenty problems."]

Yoonsuck Choe, "Analogical Cascade: A Theory on the Role of the Thalamo-Cortical Loop in Brain Function", Neurocomputing 52--54 (2003): 713--719 [PDF; related papers under "thalamocortical basis of analogy" on Prof. Choe's webpage]
D. Edwards, "Categories are for talking: on the cognitive and discursive bases of categorization", Theory and Psychology 1 (1991): 515--542
Robert M. French, The Subtlety of Sameness: A Theory and Computer Model of Analogy-Making
Peter Gärdenfors, Conceptual Spaces: The Geometry of Thought
Merideth Gattis
- "Mapping relational structure in spatial reasoning", Cognitive Science 28 (2004): 589--610
- (ed.) Spatial Schemas and Abstract Thought
D. Gentner et al. (eds.), The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science
Sam Glucksberg, Understanding Figurative Language: From Metaphor to Idioms [Blurb]
Hofstadter et al., Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies
Norman N. Holland, The Brain of Robert Frost: A Cognitive Approach to Literature
Holyoak and Thagard, Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought [blurb]
Albert N. Katz, Cristina Cacciari, Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. and Mark Turner, Figurative Language and Thought [Blurb]
Philip Johnson-Laird, Mental Models
Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation [blurb]
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson [I dislike Lakoff's theory of metaphor, especially when compared to Sperber and Wilson's. His work is deeply, purely speculative, which is fine, but he seems not to care at all about experimental controls, or even admit they're an issue, which is not. And his manner of writing is most unpleasant, principally because it's so grandiose (he's overthrowing the whole tradition of western thought) and so dogmatic (e.g., he often writes "cognitive science has shown that" when what he means is "as I have often claimed, and many others vehemently denied"). I half suspect, given the subjects Lakoff is writing on, that he's deliberately positioning himself to be the 21st-century version of Freud, the man who provides a educated non-specialists with a scientific-sounding vocabulary for mental life. But I hasten to add that (a) I really have no evidence for that, and (b) Lakoff is in person polite, affable and well-spoken. Still, it's very hard for me to force myself all the way through one of his books. — See the paper by Murphy, above, for critique from within the field, and the posts by "Chris".]
- Metaphors We Live By
- Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought
R. Langacker, Foundations of Cognitive Grammar
Earl Mac Cormac, A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor
Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought
G. Polya, Induction and Analogy in Mathematics, vol. 1 of Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning
M. Ramscar and D. Yarlett, "Semantic Grounding in Models of Analogy: An Environmental Approach," Cognitive Science 27 (2003): 41--71
Barbara Maria Stafford, Visual Analogy
Josef Stern, Metaphor in Context
Mark Turner
- Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science
- The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language

Notebooks

Analogy and Metaphor