Stephen Jay Gould's Metaphors We Live By

Lakoff & Johnson define conceptual metaphors as understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another and argue that the way human beings think and talk is largely metaphorical. Lakoff and Johnson prove that humans often speak in metaphors when they talk about any concept without noticing it. Conceptual metaphors play a very important role in our lives and combines both linguistic and cognitive domains. They identified three categories of conceptual metaphors:

Even though Haas and Flower do not mention George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, or even metaphors, in their article, I will be using metaphors to get a better understanding of what these reading strategies are like. Lakoff and Johnson’s analytical tools and ideas about metaphors (, seen in Metaphors We Live By, help me, and others,

Lakoff and Johnson state, “[w]e have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action” (3). They are saying that metaphors are used all the time and not just when people talk, but when they think and in what they do. This is exactly true because after learning about metaphors, and getting a better understanding of them, I have realized how much I, and others, apply them to everyday life without even realizing it, or trying to. Using a metaphor to describe Haas and Flower’s reading concepts will therefore make for a better grasp of what the concepts mean.

As described by Dr. Atul Gawande in his book Complications, medicine “is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge… fallible individuals” making medicine different from other scientific fields

Metaphors help readers visualize and develop a greater understanding of the text, which in this case, is neuroscience. In conclusion, Elizabeth Kolbert's use of metaphorical expressions stimulates imagery and connections, which in turn, appears to strengthen the thesis of her essay to the

A metaphor, used as a communication skill, is best described in a political way. Think of Reagan’s Voodoo economics, or Bill Clinton building a bridge to the 21st century. Politicians can easily scam an ignorant voter, should one not understand a metaphor. For example: Clinton refers to building a bridge, but does not tell us with which tools he

In George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s book, Metaphors We Live by, they express that we tend to overlook everything and not see the true identity of objects in our everyday lives. We don’t tend to look at objects as metaphors as well. Lakoff and Johnson

Medicine is often called an art rather than a science. While I do not agree with this assessment entirely, because I believe in the value of empirically-gathered evidence, I do understand why many patients are frustrated by what often seems like contradictory studies supporting different health treatments. One week it seems as if there is an article in the newspaper stressing that preventative screening is valuable; the next week there is an article stating that too much testing can yield too many false positives. One week exercise is stressed as a means of weight loss, the next week a healthy diet. From a layperson's and even a provider's perspective, this can seem confusing. There is also an unfortunate degree of confusing chatter from the commercial purveyors of medicine, promoting specific drugs or treatments.

The original conceptualization of evidence based medicine was the integration of clinical experience with conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current research. However, there are differences in opinion regarding the value of evidence based medicine. An article written by Hermann W. Borg entitled “The Evidence Based Transformation of American Medicine” indicated that the ideal originally presented with evidence based medicine reflected a process of decision making by individual physicians in treating individual patients. This author notes that the ranking of evidence using randomized controlled trials as the highest level of evidence has devalued the role of intuition, clinical experience and theory derived conclusions in practice. Part of the concern addressed is the distorted use of evidence based practice by administrators, pharmaceutical companies and payers. Instead of an individualized approach to care

Another major issue is that we as clinicians are given mixed messages. A prime example concerns statin therapy for primary prevention. Two different highly respected guideline bodies have taken the same evidence and created different recommendations. We also see guidelines from societies that only focus on a specific population. These differences create confusion both for the clinician and the patient. Usually when these differences occur, we default to a place in our heads that basically say if the experts do not agree, I might as well do what I think is best, with or without

I read into the use of metaphors in The Washington Post article mentioned earlier and located a statement that the Lockheed Chief Executive Robert J. Stevens said (i.e. "Increasingly, the work that has been done in EIG has fallen under this general discussion area of a potential conflict of interest," said Lockheed chief executive Robert J. Stevens. "We just simply respect the fact that the government wants to raise the standard here."). Next, I forced the idea that metaphors indicate how we are perceiving, organizing and evaluating our experiences to help me understand metaphors in conflict.

Dr. John Ioannidis is a “meta-researcher” and “one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research” and he proposes that the majority, upwards to ninety percent of medical research-studies are untrustworthy. The general population tends to, like Ionnadis once did, believe that everything physicians did was basically right, but his own research into the

Marshak, R. (1996) Metaphors in organizational settings: Impact and outcome. In D. Grant & C. Oswick (Eds.), Metaphor and organizations (pp. 147-165). London: Sage

After reading this chapter and the section specifically about the use of metaphors in film, I realized that metaphors are essential when it comes to non-fiction and fiction films. I agree with Nichols that Metaphors are powerful and help us understand something in a different perspective. For example, if a film is about a complex subject like politics and there is no metaphors I personally will be disengaged. For a few reasons: one some aspects of politics are confusing and two the topic is not interesting. By using just facts and the standard definition of something will bore your audience.

(ibid., 2010) There are such metaphors among orientational metaphors. An interesting point about this kind of metaphor is that they map relatively little from a source to a target. Source domains have skeletal image schemas. These basic image-schemas derive from our experience or interactions with the world. This physical experience enables emergence of the image-schemas that structure many of our abstract concepts metaphorically. The image-schemas can be foundation of other concepts. The target domains of many structural metaphors are image schematically structured by their source. (Kövecses,