Basis of the Cognitive Theory of Metaphor: A Critical Analysis

In the book Metaphors We Live By, published in 1980, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson presented a view on the phenomenon of metaphor unique for that time. They suggested that metaphor is a basic category of human thinking, thus noticeably increasing the theoretical significance of metaphor for researchers engaged in linguistic-cognitive problems. With the theory of cognitive metaphor, which also implicitly contains a method for analyzing information obtained by studying metaphors, the authors proposed their theory of truth, which they called experientialist. Lakoff and Johnson considered the provisions of this theory as the basis for the analysis of metaphors of natural language. And, despite the interest shown by many researchers in the methodological and conceptual components of the cognitive theory of metaphor, its ontological and epistemological foundations (experientialist theory of truth) remain practically unreflected. In this article, the author analyzes the content of the experientialist theory of truth, which was supposed to fix the status of full-fledged participants in the cognitive process for metaphors. Having studied in detail the specifics of the experientialist theory of truth, the author concluded that this theory is an example of classical epistemological relativism and does not bring anything new to this direction. Besides, it has several disadvantages that negatively distinguish it from analogs. Examples of such shortcomings are internal inconsistency, the use of specific concepts without clarifying their meanings, "fitting" the meaning of terms to the needs of the developed theory. Given all of the above, the author concluded that the followers of the cognitive theory of metaphor should abandon the ontological and epistemological foundations developed by its authors (experientialist theory of truth) and include the metaphor analysis methodology they created into a more consistent and conceptually strong epistemological paradigm.

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