Metaphor Center

Center for the Cognitive
Science of Metaphor Online

Papers | Related sites of interest

last updated June 30, 1998

About the Center for the Cognitive Science of Metaphor
Annotated Bibliography of work on Metaphor related to the Lakoff-Johnson theory of conceptual metaphor
The International Cognitive Linguistics Association's next conference (ICLC '98) will be in Stockholm July 10-16, 1998. This is one of the primary venues for new work in metaphor.
Master metaphor list (Zipped Postscript, also available in HTML from UC-Berkeley below)
George Lakoff's E-text on Politics and Metaphor during the Gulf War
Research stemming from Lakoff's paper:
- The Metaphorical Logic of (Political) Rape: George Bush and the New Wor(l)d Order by Tim Rohrer
- Prestige and Reputation in American Foreign Policy and American Realism by Jennifer Milliken (Postscript only)
Metaphors We Ought Not Live By: Rush Limbaugh in the Age of Cognitive Science by Tim Adamson, Greg Johnson and Tim Rohrer
Boundless Paradox: a discussion of Heraclitus, Anaximander and Gorgias by Tim Rohrer
Embodied Perspective vs. Objective Measurement: Rationality in Plato's Protagoras by Tim Rohrer
- From Protagoras to Metaphor: Mark Turner's Design for a Theory of Meaning
Feelings Stuck in a GUI Web: metaphors, image-schemas and designing the human-computer interface by Tim Rohrer
The Cognitive Science of Metaphor from Philosophy to Neuropsychology by Tim Rohrer
Meaning Generation in Music Listening by Halljerd Aksnes
Death is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism The complete text of this book by Mark Turner is now available on the web.
Conceptual Blending: (see also the blending home page)
Conceptual Integration and Formal Expression by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier
Conceptual Projection and Middle Spaces by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner UCSD Department of Cognitive Science Technical Report. Compressed (UNIX) postscript version.
Ed Heil's thesis on Ovid and Space Blending is an example of applying The Turner-Fauconnier conceptual blending hypothesis to classical rhetoric.
Conceptual Blending on the Information Highway: How Metaphorical Inferences Work by Tim Rohrer
Book Review: As Imagination Bodies Forth the Forms of Things Unknown. Mark Turner's review of Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., The Poetics of Mind.
Book Review: Discover magazine on Mark Turner's The Literary Mind..

Papers | Related sites of interest

Links to Related Sites of Interest

Note: These related sites are roughly organized in terms of their relevance to Lakoff-Johnson metaphor theory or Fauconnier-Turner style conceptual blending. Sites farther down in the list may come from differing theoretical perspectives or are less theoretical in nature.

If the metaphor site is too slow or down, you may wish to use the metaphor mirror site now available on darkwing at the University of Oregon. Please bookmark the mirror site if you are frequent user. If you are on the mirror, here is the home machine.
Mark Turner's home page at the University of Maryland details some recent books on metaphor and cognitive science. Check his excellent conceptual blending page for recent work on conceptual blending.
The Conceptual Metaphor Home Page at the University of California at Berkeley Institute of Cognitive Studies has a version of the Master Metaphor List in HTML format. Also see UC-Berkeley's metaphor ftp site.
The Neural Theory of Language Group at Berkeley has begun to do important work on developing computational models of embodied linguistic cognition. Check especially the research publications link, and be sure to hit David Bailey's Research Page and S. Narayanan's ICSI page for some of the real highlights of the NTL group's work.
The philosophy department at Oregon co-sponsored the Body, Mind and Brain: The Collaboration of Philosophy and Cognitive Science Conference, Oct, 3-4, 1997
CMA-squared, a conference on Computation for Metaphors, Analogy and Agents was held 6-10 April 1998 in Aizu-Wakamatsu City, Japan. Check their site for info.
The Metaphor Public Humanities Project's lecture series is a good place to hear recent work in metaphor theory.
Highly recommended is the Journal of Metaphor and Symbolic Activity special issue on metaphor theory guest edited by Mark Johnson. This issue contains articles by Steven Winter, Michele Emanatian, Thomas Leddy, Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier. (Abstracts only are available online...) The index to the journal is also available online, together with abstracts from other issues.
The International Cognitive Linguistics Association 1997 meetings were in Amsterdam. It is one of the primary venues for new work on metaphor. Here is the program. An abstract of Tim Rohrer's talk Recursive Metaphors in Naturalistic Explanation: Directionality and feedback loops between conceptual domains is available.
John Barnden has developed a metaphors of mind databank which contains real-discourse examples of metaphorical descriptions of mental states and processes. It also contains some examples of the use of metonymy in mental state descriptions. The databank points to related research papers on metaphors of mind and on an implemented system for metaphor-based reasoning about beliefs.
Metaphor and Metonymy pages Brigitte Nerlich, David Clarke, Zazie Todd have recently established an excellent site for research on metaphor and metonymy at the University of Nottingham.
Tony Veale's Metaphor Home Page at the Dublin City University is one of the best sites summarizing some of the metaphor literature on the net. See also his call for papers for a conference entitled Computational Models of Creative Cognition
The Hypertext Crito is an interactive analysis of Plato's famous text using the Lakoff-Johnson theory of metaphor.
The Danish Metaphor network now has their own home page.
From UCSD cognitive science community comes COGLING, a discussion list for the cognitive linguistics community. Covers much more than mere metaphor: conceptual blending, cognitive grammar, cognitive phonology, etc.
The thought experiment home page has interesting commentary on a long tradition of philosophical inquiry.
Ray Paton's group at Liverpool has produced some interesting work on biological metaphors for computing. Also has a good list of related links if you dig around.
The MIT Artificial Intelligence laboratory has recently started to take the Lakoff-Johnson claims about metaphor and the embodiment of human reason very seriously. Lynn Andrea Stein and Rodney Brooks head a robot project designed to explore the argument that human-like intelligence requires human-like embodiment. Here is a link to the Human Cognition Project at MIT's AI lab. The nuts and bolts of the Stein and Brooks' proposal is found in Building Brains for Bodies [Postscript, compressed, 16 pages.] You might also want to look at the Knowbotic Interface site.
New work on metaphor, politics and peacmeaking! Anthony Judge of the Union of International Associations has written a paper entitled Enhancing Sustainable Development Strategies through the Avoidance of Military Metaphors. It forms part of other work on governance through metaphor, of which a series of papers is accessible from this table of contents.
Interested in law and metaphor? Bernie Hibbitt's has placed a brief version of his Making Sense of Metaphors: Visuality, Aurality and the Reconfiguration of American Legal Discourse online. I would also recommend that researchers on Law and metaphor also read work by Steven Winter (see annotated bibliography) if they are seeking work which is tightly connected to the Lakoff-Johnson theory.
Mock Spanish: A site for the indexical reproduction of racism in American English is a fascinating paper on contemporary language use.
Michael Buchholtz has an ftp site with various German papers on metaphorand psychotherapy. Click here for a brief English language summary of his latest book.
A well-designed and graphically impressive page on metaphors of the self from outside academia is available from the MetaSelf page. Focused on the humanistic psychological and spiritual aspects of metaphor theory.
Stephen Pepper, who wrote an interesting philosophical treatise called World Hypotheses, now has an email discussion list devoted to Pepper scholarship.
The Digital Anatomist Project has a useful collection of pictures of the brain. Excellent illustrations.
Metaphor: From Plato to the Postmoderns is an impressive and intriguing example of an argumentative hypertext site on metaphor.
Dr. Ana Marjanovic-Shane has placed her paper Metaphor - a propositional comment and an invitation to intimacy online.
Bill Benzon has placed a copy of a dated but interesting article on metaphor and neural processes from 1987. This article is an excellent illustration of the then current debate between the interaction view and the cognitivist (Lakoff and Johnson) view of metaphor. The neural processing revolves around Pribram's suggestion that the mind stores representations holographically.
Interested in the relationship between the metaphor and the Internet? Here's the abstract of a presentation I gave on metaphor and the Internet in the summer of '95. Full text now available as well.
One of the more polished episodes of the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation dealt with the issue of metaphor as fundamental to communication. Highly recommended is the synopsis of the script, from which I have excerpted the following quote:
"Since I'm sure someone will ask "why didn't the translator work!", I'll answer it. This wasn't a translation problem--it was a conceptual, comprehension problem. All the translators in the world won't help you if you aren't thinking in even marginally similar ways."

E-mail comments to rohrer@darkwing.uoregon.edu

This web page is maintained by Tim Rohrer, University of Oregon Philosophy Department.

Seen on a bumper sticker: metaphors be with you

Center for the Cognitive Science of Metaphor Online

Links to Related Sites of Interest

Center for the Cognitive
Science of Metaphor Online