Abstract

According to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's cognitive linguistic theory, conceptual metaphors are among our most basic cognitive tools and they unconsciously structure our thoughts, our reasoning and our experience. By studying our conventional and systematic use of figurative language in our everyday language and in our scientific theories, they claim that we can uproot important but otherwise hidden facts about how, often automatically and instinctively, we organize our experience and conceptualize the world. It is claimed that what we are learning from emerging fields like cognitive linguistics makes untenable some fundamental philosophical assumptions. ;This dissertation is my attempt to get a handle on the conceptual theory of metaphor and its ramifications for philosophy. In doing so I address three questions: How are we to make sense of the idea that conceptual models "guide" our understanding? It is far from clear what this means, and on its face the use of such a robust mental ontology seems question begging, and perhaps misguided. What is the impact of conceptual metaphors and models for our notions of truth and objectivity? I try to place these allegedly revolutionary ideas in the context of a larger philosophical movement that I think might appropriately be called cognitive empiricism. What is the relationship between the philosophy of cognitive linguistics and the ordinary language philosophy that came before it? Very broadly, they are both concerned with the importance of systematic grammatical patterns in the use of various concepts, and in dissolving misleading models of concept meaning, yet apparently for very different reasons