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Part of
How Metaphors Guide, Teach and Popularize Science
Edited by Anke Beger and Thomas H. Smith
[Figurative Thought and Language 6] 2020
► pp. 263–295

Chapter 8
The brain is a computer and the mind is its program

Following a metaphor’s path from its birth to teaching philosophy decades later

| Europa-Universität Flensburg

This chapter analyzes three stops along the life path of the influential metaphor the brain is a computer and the mind is its program. At the first two stops, the philosophers Searle, Hofstadter and Dennett argue about the literal truth of this metaphor in two academic papers. They embed the metaphor in complex metaphorical analogies, i.e., deliberate metaphors, for primarily persuasive purposes. The last stop analyzed is an academic lecture in philosophy which aims at explaining the metaphorical reasoning of the philosophers. The analysis focuses on the professor’s modifications of one of Searle’s deliberate metaphors. These modifications result in a misrepresentation of Searle’s view on the mind. Linguistic evidence indicates that this misrepresentation influences the students’ concept of the mind.

Keywords: recontextualization of metaphors, deliberate metaphors, metaphor across genres, deliberate metaphor use in academic articles, deliberate metaphor use in academic lectures
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodological and theoretical aspects
    • 2.1Steps of the analysis
    • 2.2Metaphor in language, thought, and communication
    • 2.3Recontextualization of metaphors
  • 3.Analysis: How the brain is a computer and the mind is its program is embedded and recontextualized in deliberate metaphors to argue about, and explain, views on the mind in two different academic genres
    • 3.1Searle’s metaphorical refutation of the “strong AI claim”
      • 3.1.1Searle’s first major metaphorical analogy: The Chinese Room Thought Experiment
      • 3.1.2Searle’s second major metaphorical analogy: The stomach example
    • 3.2Hofstadter and Dennett’s rebuttal of Searle’s metaphorical rejection of the strong AI claim
    • 3.3A professor’s recontextualizations of Searle’s stomach example analogy in a philosophy lecture
  • 4.Summary and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 22 April 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ftl.6.08beg
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