CONCEPT
Conceptual Metaphor Theory
Lakoff and Johnson's 1980 thesis that abstract thought is systematically structured by mappings from concrete, bodily experience — the discovery that metaphor is not decoration but constitution.
Conceptual Metaphor Theory holds that human abstract reasoning is not a neutral, disembodied process operating on raw data but a metaphorical process in which abstract domains are understood through systematic mappings from concrete, sensorimotor experience. Introduced by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By (1980), the theory overturned the view that metaphor is a literary ornament and established it as a structural feature of cognition itself. The mappings are not arbitrary: they import entailments — logical implications, inferential patterns, evaluative orientations — from the source domain to the target domain, whether or not the speaker is aware of the transfer. Remove the metaphor and the thought does not survive the extraction, because the metaphor is the thought.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The evidence for conceptual metaphor is not hidden in laboratories. It sits on the surface of everyday language, visible to anyone who looks and invisible to nearly everyone, because the metaphors structuring thought have become the medium through