Metaphor

Introduced by Kieran Egan

I'll begin with some quotes from Aristotle's The Poetics:

"Metaphor is the application of an alien name by transference either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or by analogy, that is, proportion. Thus from genus to species, as: 'There lies my ship'; for lying at anchor is a species of lying. From species to genus, as: 'Verily ten thousand noble deeds hath Odysseus wrought'; for ten thousand is a species of large number, and is here used for a large number generally. From species to species, as: 'With blade of bronze drew away the life,' and 'Cleft the water with the vessel of unyielding bronze.' Here arusai, 'to draw away' is used for tamein, 'to cleave,' and tame in, again for arusai- each being a species of taking away. Analogy or proportion is when the second term is to the first as the fourth to the third. We may then use the fourth for the second, or the second for the fourth. Sometimes too we qualify the metaphor by adding the term to which the proper word is relative. Thus the cup is to Dionysus as the shield to Ares. The cup may, therefore, be called 'the shield of Dionysus,' and the shield 'the cup of Ares.' Or, again, as old age is to life, so is evening to day. Evening may therefore be called, 'the old age of the day,' and old age, 'the evening of life,' or, in the phrase of Empedocles, 'life's setting sun.' For some of the terms of the proportion there is at times no word in existence; still the metaphor may be used. For instance, to scatter seed is called sowing: but the action of the sun in scattering his rays is nameless. Still this process bears to the sun the same relation as sowing to the seed. Hence the expression of the poet 'sowing the god-created light.' There is another way in which this kind of metaphor may be employed. We may apply an alien term, and then deny of that term one of its proper attributes; as if we were to call the shield, not 'the cup of Ares,' but 'the wineless cup'." Aristotle, The Poetics. XXI.

"But the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances." Aristotle, The Poetics. XXII.

Aristotle--one of the great research assistants of all time (though one feels Plato must have sighed a lot "the boy just doesn't have a sense of humor, can't tell a story, but what an encyclopedia maker!")--also observed that humans are a social animal. But that says nothing much about the distinctiveness of our sociability. There are, after all, lots of social animals. Our sociability is crucially of a symbolic kind, as well as other kinds, of course. But unlike any other animal we become symbiotic through our symbols--we are a symbolic/social species. In Geoffrey Deacon's sense, we are a symbolic species. We are, as he says, idiots savants of symbols. (Savants because we are so good at it; idiots because we can't recapture our sense of the world beyond our symbols--we can't go home again.) A huge commitment of our species' early development is given to learning symbolic forms, especially language. Symbols are arbitrarily connected to what they refer to. In laboratory conditions, some psychologists have spent immense efforts on teaching some of our close relations--apes, chimps. etc.--to recognize and use symbols. And there are reasons to think they have had some success. But the success for the effort is derisory when compared with that of a typical two-year-old human. Indeed, no effort at all is required in the human acquisition of language; indeed, in a language-using environment, humans cannot NOT learn a language. (Chimp and human are both born with brains of about 350 cc. To adulthood, the chimp will typically add about 100 cc. The human child by age five adds well over 1,000 c.c. That brain stuff is almost certainly tied in with our preternatural facility with symbols.)

A symbol is something that represents something else. The connection between symbol and thing is usually arbitrary, except in the case of pictures and icons, etc. We learn with great ease to see one thing in terms of another. And we do it with strange flexibility. Learning "chair" and its referent is peculiar. Immediately, it seems, we recognize that such a symbol applies not just to that chair but to an indeterminately varied set of chairs, and we can call a cloud a 'chair of the gods' if we want. Learning "cat" seems never to be assumed to refer to the fur or the color or the tail, but to the whole animal. And while metaphor in its simplest sense is seeing one thing in terms of another, we don't only recognize similarities--as Aristotle suggests--in making good metaphors, but we create connections that did not previously exist. That is, metaphor is the central engine of our language for generating increasingly complex images and understanding of the world we refer to through it. "Metaphors do not so much work by recognizing similarities between things; rather "it would be more illuminating . . . to say that metaphor creates the similarity than to say it formulates some similarity antecedently existing" (Black, 1962, p. 83)."

Now, having already stolen the Black quote from The Educated Mind, I'm going to follow the lazy person's route of adding a further quote, and then simply copying the section on metaphor from that book below.

"A further constituent of Mythic understanding, then, is metaphor, and the richer and more flexible the metaphoric capacity, the greater its potential contribution to early understanding.  Metaphor is one of our cognitive grappling tools; it enables us to see the world in multiple-perspectives and to engage with the world flexibly.  Metaphor is clearly much more profoundly a feature of human sense-making than it is the largely ornamental and redundant poetic trope some have taken it to be."

So what is the role of metaphor in early education? And how can we incorporate it routinely into teaching? And, for limited IERG interests, how can one incorporate it as a component of the "mythic planning framework."

Role of metaphor in early education

On the one hand, it would seem we don't have to worry too much about metaphor development and use, in that it seems to come along with language, or is complicit in our ability to construct our collective language individually. But, as with any of our "cognitive tools" we can presumably learn them more or less well, and it would be good to make sure our students learned them more well.

Clearly, facility with metaphor is important for what we call the imaginative life of the child, and the ability to be creative and inventive. Much of our novelty in thinking is tied in with this odd ability to stitch together meanings that previously did not reside in some simple logical connection with each other. Listening to children's discourse--or reading recordings of it--one can see constantly the flow of meaning along metaphoric connections, while logical connections are less frequent, and less valued, because it is the person who is fluent at making metaphoric connections that can carry the game or the story into new and interesting directions.

(Aside: Egon Leubner, who was interested in schizophrenia, described Arthur Koestler's model of Creativity as revealing. Koestler suggested that the creative person, coming to a homonym in language, scanned many more possibilities for the direction of the sentence than did the uncreative person, who would rather opt for a routine or clich?d form. Leubner saw this model as clarifying a feature of the language of schizophrenics that had puzzled him. In analyzing chunks of their discourse, he showed how, rather like the creative person, the schizophrenic also scanned widely but seemed to have lost the control mechanism that determined the meaning and sense that was to be conveyed.)

So metaphoric fluency would seem to be complicit in most of those skills we value in school and society, which we lump under such general labels as crativity, imaginativeness, etc. Its role in early education would seem to be the putting in place of this ability. It seems to see particular exercise in children's fantasy play, where they are invited to be inventive with words in crating new images and situations. It is, as Aristotle might say, the key skill that can make us poets--which is, if not our birthright, a right we should all have as users of language. But, for some reason, it is a right very few exercise, and there is very little emphasis in schooling on its stimulation and development.

Questions that might be addressed in the on-line Forum:

1. How to incorporate metaphor routinely into teaching?

2. How to make metaphor a component of the mythic planning framework?

Well, that's more than enough Introduction. So, I am now inviting you to be metaphoric thinkers. Metaphor in teaching is likeÉ..

And please do continue this in the on-line Forum (under About the IERG on the Home Page).

Excerpt from The Educated Mind on metaphor:

Metaphor, like myth, has long been a puzzle to scholars.  Those of a positivist inclination have tended to sweep it under the academic rug, claiming it is just a linguistic frill which can always be reduced to the kind of literal language with which they are more at home.  This last sentence is, of course, awash with metaphors--inclination, sweeping under rugs, frills, reduction, literal, at home with, all involve metaphor.  I could have written:  "Positivists ignored metaphor because it entailed no features not reducible to literal language."  That would reduce, but certainly not eliminate, the metaphoric load.  Does it say the same thing?  How would one reduce Yeats's reference to "the rag and bone shop of the heart"?  Could one produce a literal equivalent, in which the cluttered, discarded, disjointed, rubbishy features of a rag and bone shop are referred to the condition of his emotional life in old age?  If we could reduce such phrases to literal equivalents, why is metaphor so pervasive?

Let us begin with the claim that metaphor is a product of language development, and will therefore be evident in mythic thinking and in young children.  Ernst Cassirer has pointed to the inevitable relationship of myth and language, arguing that "no matter how widely the contents of myth and language may differ, yet the same form of mental conception is operative in both.  It is the form which one may denote as metaphorical thinking" (Cassirer, 1946, p. 84).  He points out that since the time of the Roman grammarian Quintillian it has been taken for granted that all mythic thinking is permeated by metaphor.  L?vi-Strauss has suggested that "metaphor . . . is not a later embellishment of language but is one of its fundamental modes--a primary form of discoursive thought" (L?vi-Strauss, 1964, p. 102).

Whatever we make of the somewhat speculative claims about metaphor being a visible expression of a kind of root of language, the prominence of metaphor in mythic thinking is undeniable.  Do we see anything similar in young children as they develop language?  Consider the following scenario.  A five year old boy has been selling juice at the front step on a hot day, along with his four year old sister, and three year old brother.  Their last customer, a telephone repair man, as he gratefully downed his ten cent glass of orange juice, asked jokingly whether they didn't have any beer or scotch.  After he left, the five year old went into the house and asked their mother whether they could have some beer and scotch for their stand.  He emerged a minute or so later, shrugged, and told his siblings, "Mom killed that idea."

The three year old has no more difficulty interpreting the meaning of the sentence than the four year old.  Both know that they cannot have beer and scotch.  Whether they have heard or used the metaphor of killing an idea before, they know it now without any explanation, and they understand this kind of metaphoric usage as an entirely normal form of speech.

Such naturalistic observations do not seem to require empirical studies to support the conclusion that very young children use metaphor easily and frequently, but empirical studies can perhaps help clarify the process of metaphoric development.  An extensive series of studies of the genesis and growth of metaphoric competence has been reported in Winner, 1988.  Among the early and, to the experimenters, more unexpected findings was the prodigal production of metaphors by some very young children.  Also, in comparative tests of recognizing appropriate metaphors, it was discovered that the "highest number of appropriate metaphors was secured from the pre-school children, who even exceeded college students; moreover, these three- and four-year olds fashioned significantly more appropriate metaphors than did children aged seven or eleven" (Gardner and Winner, 1979, p. 130).  Gardner and Winner report that they found most intriguing "the capacity of at least some children to perform this game at an astonishingly high level.  Not only do such youngsters frequently contrive clever names for the very objects which have stumped our adult pilot subjects; more dramatically, some of them can nearly effortlessly come up with a whole series of appropriate and appealing metaphoric meanings" (Gardner and Winner, 1979, p. 133).

Metaphor in its grossest appearance involves talking about something in terms derived from something quite different.  It is a "deviant naming" or "peculiar predication" (Ricoeur, 1991, p. 8), and establishes a new relationship between heterogeneous ideas in a way that adds something to, or throws new light on, the thing talked about as though it were something else.  Metaphors do not so much work by recognizing similarities between things; rather "it would be more illuminating . . . to say that metaphor creates the similarity than to say it formulates some similarity antecedently existing" (Black, 1962, p. 83).

It is the generative power evident in metaphor that makes it particularly interesting to this educational scheme.  The ready use of metaphor gives evidence of the human generativity which is central to learning--and young children's common fluency in use and recognition of metaphor is consequently something educators should find centrally important.  Expansion of understanding seems often to ride on the kind of generative grasp one finds exemplified in metaphor--and that, again, follows a logic quite different from the content associations presently so prominent in educational textbooks.  As Nelson Goodman puts it:  "Far from being a mere matter of ornament, [metaphor] participates fully in the progress of knowledge:  in replacing some stale 'natural' kinds with novel and illuminating categories, in contriving facts, in revising theory, and in bringing us new worlds" (Goodman, 1979, p. 175).

In the beginning, to use W.V. Quine's words, metaphor "governs both the growth of language and our acquisition of it" (Quine, 1979, p. 160), and "[m]etaphorical use of language differs in significant ways from literal use but is no less comprehensible, no more recondite, no less practical, and no more independent of truth and falsity than is literal use" (Goodman, 1979, p. 175).  And we might add to this Max Black's perhaps overly neat claim that all sciences begin in metaphor and end in algebra.

So for any "maker," whether poet or scientist, it would seem that Aristotle's observation is just:  "The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor" (The Poetics, 1459a).  The generative side of metaphor is crucial to recognize because "ordinary words convey only what we know already; it is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh" (Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1410b).  The social and educational importance of developing the capacity for metaphor relies both on the empowerment of the individual and also on the fact that "the quality of any culture is in large part the quality of the metaphorists that it creates and sustains" (Booth, 1979, p. 70).

Well, I could go on piling up authorities, helping to clarify the centrality of metaphor to human generativity.  The urge to do so is caused by the paucity of attention currently paid to metaphor in educational research and educational writing, compared to that given to logico-mathematical forms of thinking.  Perhaps metaphor is less a simple consequence of language and more a cognitive capacity implicated in language development itself.  This claim, essentially Cassirer's, is somewhat speculative; what is not speculative is the pervasiveness of metaphor in all language-use, its prominence in the linguistic behavior of very young children, and its centrality to the generative functions of the human mind.  Especially if one holds a constructivist view of learning--a view of the child's mind as not simply copying impressions from the world but as constantly constructing and reconstructing an individual conception of the world--then metaphor becomes a key tool in aiding flexible, productive learning.

Metaphor is sometimes represented as a kind of opposite to logic, but it is perhaps worth emphasizing that the two are far from discrete in our thinking.  Cassirer makes the point that metaphor is one implication of language development, but that language carries with it the further implication of logic.  As we become increasingly conscious of language--and the most potent instrument for increasing awareness of language has been writing--logic becomes more prominent.  We see the network of logical relationships implicit in language and can begin to make them explicit, because by understanding them we can gain more secure pragmatic control over the world language tries to grasp.

Metaphor develops earlier and more easily than logic, both historically and in our individual experience.  They are not, of course, discrete implications of language development; metaphor and logic represent points on a continuum of language uses.  In any productive, generative thinking, we are likely to find the two at their somewhat distinct, but properly cooperative, work.  Lakoff and Johnson's assertion that metaphor "unites reason and imagination" and "[m]etaphor is thus imaginative rationality" (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, p. 193) is perhaps somewhat arcane, though it catches the sense in which metaphor is not some logic-less rambling, but a vitally productive feature of our constructive thinking.  It also echoes Wordsworth's observation of nearly two centuries earlier, that imagination "is Reason in her most exalted mood" (The Prelude, XIV, line 192).

These observations about metaphor, along with the findings--surprising to some--that young children's production and grasp of metaphor are commonly superior to that of older children and adults, points again to a neglected conclusion about young children's thinking.  In the past, children's thinking has been assumed, even presupposed, to be unqualifiedly inferior to that of adults.  All the theories of intellectual development we have--and most influentially Piaget's--take current adult forms of thinking as a kind of ideal and children are seen to develop to the degree that their thinking approximates the adult forms.  In Piaget's case, this reflected the biological metaphor which undergirded his psychological theorizing; so the adult was taken as the completed form and the earlier immature forms were simply stages towards it.  Such theories as Piaget's are "hierarchical integrative"; in which later stages encompass the achievements of the earlier stages.  That is, they recognize only gains in cognitive competence.  They do not recognize losses.  In particular, they do not recognize that in recapitulating the process of Western intellectual development, children might be paying an intellectual cost that we as a civilization have paid.  But as long as this cost goes unrecognized, we can't ask either whether it is worthwhile or whether it is necessary.

Metaphoric capacity, in some respects, declines as children become older.  Gardner and Winner express puzzlement at this decline, which I will in the next chapter argue is in part encouraged by the way we typically induct children into literacy, though it may be more significantly connected with the critical period for operation of the mental "module" that governs language development.  While one cannot draw any clear inferences from brain developments, it is at least suggestive to bear in mind that synapse development peaks in humans between nine months and two years, at which point the child has 50% more synapses than the adult.  Metabolic activity in the brain reaches adult levels by nine or ten months and soon exceeds it, peaking around age four.  Massive numbers of neurons die in utero and the dying continues during the early years, leveling off at about seven years.  Synapses wither from the age of two through the rest of childhood and into adolescence, when the brain's metabolic rate falls back to adult levels.  Pinker infers from such observations that "[l]anguage development, then, could be on a maturational timetable, like teeth" (1994, p. 289).  Given the close connection between language development and metaphor, and the importance of fluent and flexible metaphoric control for nearly all forms of thinking, it would be prudent to emphasize support for metaphoric fluency in early education.

If we could devise a developmental profile of individuals' metaphoric capacities in Western societies, it would certainly not follow the triumphantly progressive pattern of current theories of psychological development.  So we might wisely recognize that Western intellectual development has involved, and involves for us individually, some losses; that in some regards young children's intelligences are less constrained and are more competent than those of their typical adult teachers.

What we need to sort out, then, if we are to get a clear grasp of Mythic understanding, is those important intellectual functions in which children are typically superior to adults, and, then, what on earth are we to do about them?  If, for an overly crude example, some degree of metaphoric fluency and imaginative vivacity is necessarily to be sacrificed for literacy, what do we do?  Well, this is too gross and dramatic an example, of course, but it brings out precisely the kind of trade-off that I think is a part of education.  We will always want to preserve as much as possible and lose as little as possible, but the current bland and comfortable belief that any skill gain comes at no cost, at no potential loss, just cannot any longer be sustained.  If we fail to recognize potential or actual intellectual losses, we will certainly be able to do nothing to minimize them.  And this is, I think, precisely the situation we are in, losing much more than we need because we do not recognize what is at risk.

A further constituent of Mythic understanding, then, is metaphor, and the richer and more flexible the metaphoric capacity, the greater its potential contribution to early understanding.  Metaphor is one of our cognitive grappling tools; it enables us to see the world in multiple-perspectives and to engage with the world flexibly.  Metaphor is clearly much more profoundly a feature of human sense-making than it is the largely ornamental and redundant poetic trope some have taken it to be.

"Thought is metaphoric, and proceeds by comparison [seeing one thing in terms of another], and the metaphors of language derive therefrom" (Richards, 1936, p. 940).  The connection we can note here between what might seem initially the distinct topics of binary structuring and metaphor indicates how this attempt to characterize constituents of Mythic understanding tends, like any analysis, to suggest inappropriate divisions in something that is better conceived as an organic whole. 

METAPHORICAL THINKING and EDUCATION

Introduction by Joi Freed-Garrod

The essence of this way of thinking is to understand and experience one thing in terms of another : this is not the same thing as making a comparison, because the two things may not be alike in any way

- Metaphorical thinking is natural because life experiences are relational and interactive

- Metaphorical thinking is a process which aids our capacity to think creatively and critically; it provides opportunities for our imagination to work "outside the box"

- The arts utilize metaphor as a means to understand interrelationships between media/events/persons as well as express those understandings in imaginative and flexible ways. For example,  Maxine Greene writes:

"I do not see how we can educate young persons if we do not enable them on some level to open up spaces for themselves : spaces for communicating across boundaries, for choosing, for becoming different in the midst of intersubjective relationshipsÉthrough encounters with the arts, students may become aware of the ways in which certain dominant social practices enclose us in molds or frames, define us in accord with extrinsic demands, discourage us from going beyond ourselves, from acting on possibility"    (1991, "Texts and Margins", Harvard Educational Review, 61 (1), 28)

Examples of metaphors:

- love as magic: some common terms to support this metaphorical connection are : 'bewitched', 'cast a spell', ' love potion', 'in a trance';

- school as a factory: some common terms to support this metaphorical connection are : 'training ground', 'technicians', 'assembly line', 'compartmentalized';

- school as a garden: some common terms to support this metaphorical connection are : 'growing', 'blooming', 'nurture', 'branching out', 'roots and wings';

- the teaching - learning relationship might be thought of in terms of: a rocking chair; a crazy quilt; the wings of a butterfly;

- states of being that are derived from/connected to music in metaphorical terms: fit as a fiddle; tight as a drum; feeling blue ('blue' notes are heard in jazz) or flat; blow one's horn; in harmony with.

Think about the ways/times you speak and think using metaphor in your everyday life!