Publications
Publication details [#6253]
Jäkel, Olaf. 1995. The metaphorical concept of mind: "Mental activity is manipulation". In Taylor, John R. and Robert E. MacLaury. Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter . pp. 197–229. 33 pp. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Keywords
Place, Publisher
Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter
Abstract
Jäkel addresses the construal of mental processes. Using the technique popularized by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Jäkel examines a broad range of everyday English expressions that have as their subject matter various mental activities and attributes: intelligence, understanding, thinking, problem solving, remembering, and so on. Lakoff and Johnson had identified the vision metaphor as the dominant metaphor of cognition: understanding is seeing. Jäkel's detailed investigation suggests that the vision metaphor may in fact be rather peripheral. He perceives in everyday talk of mental processes and attributes another metaphor, or cluster of metaphors, suggestive of a rather elaborate folk theory of the mind. The dominant metaphors construe the mind as a workshop -a place in which ideas are objects, where thought is the manipulation of objects, where intelligence is the sharpness of the tool used to process the objects, memory is a storehold for objects, remembering is retrieving objects from the storehold for use in the workship, and so on. Professional psychologists and cognitive scientists, of course, have their own metaphors, drawn predominantly from Computer science. The brain is construed as Computer hardware, the mind as Computer Software, and thinking is the running of the Software program on the hardware. (For a presentation, and radical critique of this metaphor, see Searle 1992, especially chapter 9). Jäkel discovered a much more "homely" metaphor, or cluster of metaphors, underlying our talk of the mind. Moreover, taking a glance at some other languages, both European and non-European, he surmises that the mind as a workshop metaphor enjoys considerable cross-linguistic, and cross-cultural validity. Looking into the etymology of some cognitive predicates in the modern languages, he further suggests that the mind as a workshop metaphor was dominant in earlier times, too.
(John Taylor)