Ecological Cognition and Metaphor

ABSTRACT

In this article, we argue for the need to further incorporate the study of metaphor with the newest tendencies within cognitive science. We do so by presenting an ecological view of cognition as a skull-and-body-transcending activity that is deeply entangled with the environment. Grounded in empirical examples we present and examine four claims fleshing out this ecological perspective on cognition and metaphor: (a) metaphor is a product of an organism-environment-system, rather than merely a product of an inner mental process, (b) metaphoric meaning is relational. It emerges from projections of structure between a living organism and its perceived or imagined environment, (c) underlying metaphor is the notion of metaphoricity, which is a scalar value involving a doubleness in experience, and (d) metaphoricity relies on experiential affordances that can be directly perceived or felt in the environment. Overall, we propose that metaphor should be understood and thought about in terms of affordances rather than mental ability. Studying metaphor as affordances is to focus on metaphor as part of our active doings that equally involve cognitive, social, and linguistic dimensions. Within an ecological framework, there is no contradiction between studying the details of linguistic, multimodal, and embodied behavior in situational contexts while considering the cognitive dimensions of this behavior too since cognition is re-conceptualized as constituted by actions in an environment.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ For an overview of the historical developments of the term ecology, see Eliason (2015).

² For a discussion of the differences between distributed language and cognition versus extended cognition, see Steffensen (2009). For an overview of radically embodied cognition in relation to extended mind and EP see Chemero (2011, p. 2) For a discussion of the differences between enactive and extended cognition, see Gallagher (2017, p. 2).

³ This way of thinking about the nature of cognition and environment owes a great deal to the pragmatist tradition, in particular John Dewey. Already in the first half of the 20th century Dewey designated the proper object of cognition as, not the individual mind, or the individual body, but always the organism–environment seen as a functional whole (Dewey, 1929).

⁴ See Gibbs (2013b, 2017), p. 1 for an overview of the critique of CMT.

⁵ Early experimental studies on metaphor from an EP perspective have made similar observations; see for instance Verbrugge and McCarrell (1977).

⁶ For a more thorough account on how to understand the workings of affordance in relation to social interaction and affect, see Jensen and Pedersen (2016).

⁷ For critiques of this ingrained idea of the skull as the principal boundary limiting the arena of cognition, see Cuffari and Jensen (2014); Fuchs (2017); and Gallagher (2017).

⁸ As an example, Steen’s theory of deliberate metaphor (DMT) rests on the separation between the levels of cognition, language, and communication/context (Steen, 2008). Indeed, the teasing apart of these levels is the theoretical foundation of DMT. Without it, there would be no way to distinguish between deliberate and non-deliberate metaphor. However, from an ecological perspective this separation is problematic. In the ecological view cognition is from the very start embedded in structures in the environment and as such cognition will always entertain elements of (what we chose to call) sociality and context.

⁹ In a recent article Falck (2018) investigates how metaphorical and nonmetaphorical uses of the word “bridge” can be correlated to real world experiences and thus seen as embedded in an ecological web of uses and constraints. For other studies of the metaphorical use of “bridge,” see Forceville (2006) and Strack (2004).

¹⁰ The link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4wYRcbAa2E&amp=&pbjreload=10

¹¹ In this way, the video also makes use of condensation (El Refaie, 2003) in which a complex phenomenon is compressed into a single image (or a series of images), as well as a personification of a broader problem.