The basic argument of metaphors we live by

Jesse Bevan

Standing as a Metaphor

The Basic Argument of Metaphors We Live By

​The basic argument of this reading revolves around the concept of our interaction in language, and the conceptual system that we have composed, revolving around the basis of metaphorical structuring. The argument that Lakoff and Johnson make is the following: the way we convey our thoughts, ideas, and the very way we make sense of our world to ourselves andothers is based on our personal experiences. These experiences are regarded as shared, species-wide, and within cultures individually.

As a species we are all subject to the same basic structural experiences of our bodies and minds. Hardwired within us are our commonalities of wants and needs such as our need for nourishment; we all need to eat, drink, have shelter, and love. We all want for social interaction and to share our thoughts and ideas. We have shared constructs in a physical sense with regard toour physical orientation; such as our corporeal shape and posture, along with the ways we take in our world through the senses. We share our experiences of the relationships between ourselves and our surroundings, and our subjection and or control of said surroundings; we have all fallen down, we have all climbed high, built something, and we have all traveled. Everyone hasexperienced conflict, whether with each other, ourselves, or our surroundings; we’ve all argued, fought, and struggled. We also have a concept of how things outside of ourselves interact with each other such as objects, landscapes, and animals. This gives us a need to conceptualize our experiences and create dichotomies of good versus bad, empty versus full, up versus down, big verses small. With this basis it is the belief of the authors that this shared human experience iswhat gives rise to the way we express ourselves and our more abstract and complex ideas. By citing metaphorical usage of words that represent these experiences, we create parallels to things we all know and well understand such as: food, people, objects, containers, plants, products, commodities, money, resources, instruments, fashions, human attributes, magic and war, thus facilitating successful transference of more complex ideas.