Why are metaphors directional?

One of the fundamental insights concerning metaphor we have made over the past several decades is its "directionality." Metaphor exhibits a wild variety of forms that range across all human subjects, and yet there is one pattern that stands almost universally true: in metaphor, we think about more abstract things in terms of the more concrete. Meaning moves from the concrete to the abstract.

• Friends leave a party abruptly, after some awkward exchanges, and we wonder, Did they feel the walls closing in?

  
  

• I leave a job interview and think, He got in a few punches, but I think I bobbed and weaved well enough.

  
  

• A judge in a courtroom addresses the jury, reminding them that, Your proceedings are to be locked in a black box during the entire process.

In each case, we are trying to make sense of the more abstract aspects of our experience, e.g., social exchanges at a party, a job interview, jury attitudes. And we are doing this by thinking of them as something concrete, walls closing in on someone, defensive boxing, locked boxes. This is the directionality of metaphorical thought.

This directionality is curious, especially given the other ways in which metaphor is not predictable or well-behaved. Why should metaphor obey this one "rule" while so blatantly ignoring so many other rules of cognition? This is not a question that the current theories have really addressed. Conceptual Metaphor Theory, for its part, seems to assume that since the concrete meanings employed in metaphor come from early bodily experiences which become familiar body schemas, metaphor must use them. In other words, we use them because they are there. I do not think this is a sufficient answer, given that 1) we do not always think metaphorically and 2) we clearly possess other cognitive resources, e.g. concepts, categories, rules, etc. Why do we sometimes choose these over others?

We can formulate the question precisely in this way:

What is it about abstract targets that stands in need of more cognition? What do such targets lack that metaphor provides? Specifically, what do they lack that the concrete sources of metaphor provide?

I suggest the answer is contained in the question: Abstract things lack concreteness. And thinking, no matter how abstract its subjects, needs to be concrete.

 Copyright © Tim Adamson, 2026. All Rights Reserved. Please do not distribute without the author’s permission.