Paper for the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy

Conference paper

Spring 2025

Washington, DC

Reflection, Not Conception: Getting Metaphor Right Mark Johnson has developed a theory of metaphorical cognition that has three essential dimensions: a Deweyan model of inquiry rooted in actual situations; an emphasis on the aesthetic dimension of all experience and cognition; and a theory of conceptual metaphor operating at the basis of our cognitive efforts. In this paper I will argue that this third theme is misplaced, and that metaphorical cognition is not and cannot be understood as a conceptual process. Concepts are involved in metaphorical cognition, as they are in all experience and thought, but metaphorical thinking is not itself conceptual. It is not guided by rules or categories, nor does it seek a general understanding of things. Most crucially, it rests on an act of conflation, thinking one as another, an act directly opposed to conceptual thought, which famously seeks to “collect and divide” experience into kinds. But metaphor bears none of the hallmarks of conceptual thought. Instead, I will suggest that metaphor must be viewed on the lines of Kant’s notion of reflective judgment, our capacity to engage particulars, actual situations, without conceptual guidance. And the central goal of reflective judgment is to bring greater specification, not general meaning, to experience. It is this model, I claim, that allows us to grasp the work of metaphorical cognition in its fully aesthetic and Deweyan sense. Dewey’s Model of Inquiry Cognition for Dewey is one dimension of a problematic situation, and cognition is a response to its problematic character. The situation dictates the character of the inquiry, insofar as the inquiry emerges from the situation, and inquiry seeks to address it or resolve it in some way. As Johnson describes this Deweyan view, Thinking itself is an action, for it transforms experience as it develops. Successful thinking is thus part of an arc of experience that starts with your problematic situation and eventually, if thought is effective, returns to transform your situation. (Johnson 2017, 44) The most common error philosophy commits, on Dewey’s view, is to remove or isolate cognition from its actual context and to study it as a reality unto itself—as pure, transcendent, transcendental, ideal, structural, linguistic, etc. In doing so, philosophy can too easily forget the original and actual priority of the situation over cognition, treating thinking instead as the source of experience as well as its determining factor. But the central insight in Dewey’s model of inquiry is that the situation we inquire into tells us (if we perform a proper inquiry) whether it has been resolved, whether our cognition is relevant and true; the culminating character of the situation transformed by cognition is the standard by which that cognition must be judged. In a similar vein, an account of concepts and conception in Dewey’s thought must take its place alongside many other meaningful ways in which we seek to address and resolve experience, all of which are judged by the same standard—the character of the final situation itself. And not all meaning or cognition is conceptual. Emotions, feelings, habits, the arts, narratives, poetry, sport, ritual, language, etc. are a few of the nonconceptual ways we as individuals and communities engage problematic situations and seek to bring them to resolution. It is not that concepts are absent from these efforts, but only that they are not the determining factors in these ways of resolving experience. Rituals, for example, unfold to resolve experience alongside concepts, but they do not unfold in a conceptual manner. Their cognitive work has a different structure and purpose. The same is true of the arts and of sports, which are, while conceptually informed, not conceptual in nature. My claim is that in identifying metaphorical cognition with conceptual thinking, Johnson has fundamentally mischaracterized metaphor and its role in experience. Metaphor is, alongside conception, a form of inquiry that seeks to resolve actual situations, but its essential structure and functions are not conceptual. They are reflective. And their primary function in experience is to specify actual experience more finally and carefully. Why Metaphor is Not Conceptual There are many views on what concepts are and what conceptual thinking is. I am referring here to the standard Socratic view of concepts as abstract categories that organize experience and thought, a view which is given greater depth and power by the Kantian model of conceptual determination, which operates at both the transcendental and empirical levels. For Kant, concepts have an abstract structure that acts in experience to provide the very structure of our experience, its objects and events, as well as the structure of cognition. The very structure and meaning of experience is thus determined by the conceptual fore-structures that operate imminently to establish experience as such. We can see that Johnson views metaphorical cognition as operating in the same determinative, conceptual manner, namely, as the principal factor determining the meaning of experience and inquiry. He writes: The metaphors define what the relevant phenomena are, what counts as evidence, and what makes for an adequate explanatory framework…. The implications of the constitutive nature of our most abstract theories are webs of body-based metaphors. (Johnson, 2017, 43-44) Indeed, the thrust of Johnson’s conceptual account of metaphor is to show that bodily structures determine meaning in a Kantian, constitutive manner. Their status is decidedly a posteriori, but their function is the constitutive. But let us briefly consider the following ways in which metaphor defies conceptual, determinative standards of meaning: 1) If conceptual thinking involves categorizing things properly, then metaphor, a blatant act of conflation, is a dramatic failure. Metaphor is, if nothing else, an act of conflation in which we think of one thing as another. That is the essential insight of Johnson’s work, namely that this conflation of things is a meaningful form of cognition, not a poetic frill or a logical error. To the extent that, conceptually, one kind of thing cannot be another, metaphor flagrantly thwarts the aims of conceptual thinking. 2) If conceptual thinking means following a rule, i.e., carrying out some general principle within experience, metaphor falls short. There is no law of metaphor. Johnson traces metaphorical cognition back to its sources in concrete life, but these sources are not rules. Swimming (keeping your head above water) is not a rule by which we understand a big workload; a journey is not a rule for conceptualizing a career; and swallowing is not a rule by which we think about pride. Metaphor has sources and a structure, as Johnson has eloquently shown, but these are not conceptual structures grounded on rules. They are concrete meanings. 3) If conceptual thinking means using abstract, general standards to provide meaning to concrete things, metaphor exhibits an inverse logic, one in which the concrete, not the abstract, serves as the standard of meaning. It is the concrete nature of walking that allows us to think of our reasoning as moving step by step. It is the concrete act of planting seeds that allows a lesson taught today to eventually blossom in a student’s mind. The concrete is the vehicle or standard by which the abstract is understood. This is another way metaphorical cognition represents a direct inversion of conceptual thought. 4) If conceptual thinking requires internal coherence and consistency among its results, metaphor clearly fails, as it allows multiple, incompatible structures to inform a single idea (e.g., notions of balance, blindness, give and take, all inform the idea of justice), and it allows a single concrete structure to inform a wide array of divergent subjects, (e.g., we think of balancing justice, duties, emotions, finances, interests). There are clearly some kinds of relations and patterns among various metaphors, to be sure, but these lack the systematic coherence that we would expect from conceptual thought. In sum, what do concepts do in experience? They provide definitions or categorical meanings which act as fore-structures, providing experience and thought with their own structure and meaning. They provide rules by which thinking must proceed. They provide abstract, general meanings by which particular things are known. And they produce meanings in experience that are systematically connected, not randomly or capriciously ordered. Metaphor clearly fails in all of these ways, and yet, as Johnson has shown, metaphor is a meaningful, cognitive process that is central to experience and cognition. If this is the case, we need to examine conceptual metaphor again, without the “natural attitude” of Socratic philosophy, namely, that all cognition must ultimately be conceptual and determinative, and see if we can identify its true character and role in experience. The Phenomenology of Metaphorical Cognition My claim is that if we examine metaphorical cognition phenomenologically, at work in experience, we find the Kantian logic of reflection at work: metaphors engage indeterminate/problematic aspects of experience, working independently of concepts first to specify them so that second we can generate implications for experience. A business meeting ends abruptly and acrimoniously, leading a group of people to share their impressions. 1. I feel like something important was broken. I am not sure how we can repair the bond between the two sides. 2. I had some hope before the meeting, but now I think we are at a dead end. 3. I was following the tug-of-war and thought the developers were going to win, but now I am not so sure. 4. You know, after all we have put into this company, to hear what John said about us was a bitter pill. What can we say about these various ways of understanding the meeting’s meaning? 1) Each metaphor relies on something concrete to characterize something else about the meeting. A bond, a dead end, a tug-of-war, a bitter pill—each of these has a concrete meaning, i.e., something that can be carried out in imaginative thought. 2) Each metaphor generates implications as the concrete meanings are conflated with various aspects of the meeting. The first metaphor already draws an inference: since a bond has been broken, it might be “repaired.” This is true of actual bonds, of course, and this concrete inference is employed to think about what might be done in response to the meeting. The other sentences do not state the implications of the metaphor, but the implications are clear: since we have hit a dead end, we must either give up the journey that the meeting was on or find another path. Since the tug-of-war was not decided, we can expect more efforts to “win,” and many future actions in the office will no doubt be interpreted as efforts to “pull” things in one direction or another. Similarly, since we were given a bitter pill, we can infer that the person who “gave it to us” is not sympathetic to us and cannot be trusted as before. In sum, we do not use metaphors merely to describe or characterize things, but to generate implications, to guide thinking in specific ways, towards specific points. Now we must notice that: 1) Metaphorical cognition inverts the conceptual relation between idea and thing. In conceptual thought, concepts provide the standards by which things are known and cognized. Here, however, it is the thing, the concrete meaning of pulling a rope or breaking a bond, that serves as the standard for the more abstract meaning of the meeting. We understand the meeting’s events in and through the concrete element. 2) Concrete meanings are not rules or categories. Hitting a dead end on a journey is neither a category of things nor a general rule. Nonetheless, it functions as a standard or source of meaning in the metaphor. 3) None of the metaphors produces categorical results or determinative conclusions, as conceptual thought does. Metaphors do not tell us what kind of thing something is nor how a rule must play out in experience. In the case above, we do not after the metaphor recategorize the meeting as another kind of thing or identify the rule by which it was conducted. Instead, the metaphors concretely characterize one thing as another, conflating them, in order to identify specific aspects of the problematic situation that have gone unnoticed. Reflective Judgment Kant’s model of reflective judgment is best-known via his account of aesthetic judgment. In fact, however, for Kant reflective judgment is an essential component of all cognition, as it involves our capacity to engage with the particularity of experience independently of conceptual determination. Its essential role in cognition is, as Rudolf Makkreel argues, to prepare the particulars of experience for consideration by thought, whether conceptual or otherwise. Reflection makes what is indeterminate in experience “more distinct” so that, for example, concepts can potentially subsume them. Or, for example, so that we can assess them aesthetically via the actual feeling that the experience possesses in our engagement with the manifold. This model of judgment presents different possibilities for cognition beyond conception in at least two senses: 1) it presents a form of judgment that is not grounded in concepts and 2) it demonstrates that reflection can prepare experience for thought, whether this thought is conceptual or not. In sum, reflection is our capacity for engaging particulars independently of conceptual rules and of making what was indeterminate about experience more distinct so it can be thought about. We can identify the essential preparatory work at every level of thought. Take the theoretical cognition involved in in physics, for example. Having established a number of natural laws, e.g., gravity, atomic forces, electromagnetism, etc., physicists may seek to unify them under one concept or law. But they stand at this point merely as different laws that have no essential relation to one another. Bringing them under one concept means, necessarily, surveying the laws together, comparing them, back and forth, to prepare them for thought, i.e., as a provisional group that might be understood as flowing from a single, “higher” law. The scientist asks: “What are these laws together, such that I might think them as different expressions of a single rule? What is the distinctive character of these things (the particular laws) together, their composition, that I might then conceptualize?” And the scientist operates without a rule for how these different laws should be gathered, compared, and characterized. EXAMPLES of TOUCH and ART. We might identify it as the creative moment involved in all theoretical cognition. This is reflection, a cognitive act, as Makkreel argues, of comparison, ordering, and contextualization performed without reliance on concepts. And it is required as preparation for every actual act of conceptual thought. But such preparation makes experience distinct even when we do not wish to conceptualize it, as in the case of aesthetic judgment, which is neither grounded on a concept nor results in conceptual meaning. Aesthetic judgment is the preparatory work of making experience sufficiently distinct so that we can feel its particular character in the very process of reflection and form a judgment on the basis of this feeling. Metaphor as Reflective Cognition My claim is that Kant’s account of reflective judgment identifies the essential way metaphorical cognition functions in human experience. Metaphor helps us to specify what is indeterminate in experience, characterizing something in our experience as a specific, concrete element (i.e., conflating them), so that we can generate implications for experience. After an intense, emotional discussion with students, a teacher asks himself, What just happened in the classroom? And he thinks, The students finally woke up The students staged a coup d’état The students tried to kill the father Each metaphor takes what is indeterminate, puzzling about the situation, and characterizes it in a very specific way—as waking from sleep, as a political revolt, as a child killing the father—each of which allows us to think about the situation and its implications with greater specificity. Metaphor is the act of characterizing the indeterminate in an experience in order to make it more distinct, to give it a specific structure that we can think with. This is reflective thought. It is a form of concrete thinking in which concrete elements, not concepts, serve as the standards or means by which others things are understood; it engages with the particularity of experience, not its categorical meaning; and it produces insights concerning the specific character of experience, not new categories or firm conclusions derived from rules. Kant viewed all cognition as conceptual of course, but he recognized in aesthetic judgment our capacity to judge experience in another way. By suspending conceptual determination in order to engage the contents of experience directly, we ultimately use the concrete feeling this process contains as the standard of aesthetic meaning. We know the character of the painting in the character of the feeling. Metaphor however, shows a third way that reflection operates. The preparation of metaphor in our engagement with actual situations is the act of conflating what is indeterminate about the situation with a concrete meaning, e.g., the students waking from sleep, rowing a boat together, tasting a bitter pill. This conflation establishes something meaningful, as Johnson recognizes, something we can think with because of its concrete character. But the cognitive act rests on conflation, not conception. And the final work of metaphorical cognition is what Dewey refers to as dramatic rehearsal, in which we play out the meanings of the conflated situation to generate its implications for experience. If we wish to understand metaphorical cognition in a fully Deweyan sense, and in fidelity to its actual, phenomenological character, we must see it as a reflective form of inquiry.