Lakoff and Johnson’s Treatment of Metaphors of Cause and Effect

A very comprehensive account of metaphor in the cognitive science literature is given by Lakoff and Johnson (1999; also see review by F. Steen). Their extended description shows how metaphor transfers understanding from a source to a target domain. Lakoff and Johnson join others (e.g., Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, 1991) who view cognition as a unified, embodied process ranging from attention and perception, through mental processing, to behavior. For this paper I am focusing on certain metaphors that are effective in transferring understanding about causal relations – how one event may cause another – because cause and effect questions arise so frequently.

Prototypical causation, according to Lakoff and Johnson, is the application of physical force by human agency resulting in motion or change of some sort. In other words, causation is metaphorically understood to be force, particularly force wielded by humans, that has effect.

Recall that the “source” of a metaphor is the domain you know a lot about, understanding of which will be transferred to the “target”, or the domain you know less about. Humans know a lot about the movement of their bodies, which makes it an excellent source domain candidate. Accumulation of knowledge about bodily movement begins before birth, becomes integrated with language, and develops in increasing complexity, variety and across levels of abstraction. Lakoff and Johnson (1999) present this source domain as an empirically defined basis for understanding causation via the operation of metaphor. It has logic as extensive (and as limited) as is each person’s bodily movement and behavior, plus what is communicated socially and culturally through language and the senses.

The core element of the complex metaphor structure of causation is object manipulation by an agent and involves these terms: A cause, the agent originating the cause, an effect or effects, and the affected entity (which is moved or has something moved to it or away from it).

Many variations are found for each of these terms, each coloring the causal events. The terms and their various forms metaphorically entail additional meaning, such as the locations to or from which things are moved, containers, and obstacles to movement.

Below I present metaphoric definitions of each of these terms. In addition to the kinds of illustrative examples given below, Lakoff and Johnson (1999) present extensive evidence that these linguistic forms represent a systematic correspondence between the logic of bodily movement and, in these examples, the logic of causation. They report also that this evidence is found widely among English and non-English-speaking peoples.

(Note: In the summaries below, the expression “is conceptualized metaphorically as” designates the term following it to be the source domain of the metaphor, while the term preceding is the target. Even these summaries are necessarily lengthy in order to let you see how a system of very simple metaphors work together to form complex understandings.)

Principal Terms	Illustrative Examples
A Cause is conceptualized metaphorically as a force, involving movement	What would move him to…?
An Agent originates a cause and can be conceptualized metaphorically as:
Human (who move, push, pull, bring, send, drive, thrust, project, give and take) (or representations of humans)	He brought it to…; She pushed for…; The boss’s comments sent a…; His forecast projected…; Can you give…? His action takes away from…
An Effect is a change of state of the Affected Entity and is conceptualized metaphorically as either one or the other of the following:
A movement of the Affected Entity
to another Location or into or out of a bounded region,	What would motivate him now to be creative?
Into another category	He had been a winner. Now he suddenly was put in the position of a loser.
Or being made into another shape	He felt half his normal size but needed to project himself bigger than life.
Birth or being borne	Playing company politics spawns resentment in some minds.
Replacement (in place)	He would have to reinvent himself.
A causal path is conceptualized metaphorically as a series of Locations such that arriving at one makes the next accessible; purposeful change is a destination and long term, purposeful activity is a journey.	At the job fair he pictured himself in this new position, and then he knew what to say. By emphasizing how his experience translated to various job requirements, he sailed through each interview to where offers were plentiful.
A movement of Possessions (acquisitions or losses) to or away from the affected entity
Here purposeful change is acquiring desired objects.	His efforts brought many advantages. Reinventing himself took nothing away.
Difficulties are conceptualized metaphorically as obstacles or impediments while moving; freedom is conceptualized metaphorically as no obstacles or impediments; enabling is absence or removal of obstacles.	It is clear sailing now, and he can take his career anywhere, so long as his radar guides him around the icebergs. Some possibilities offered more opportunities for him to develop his talents.
Agents, Affected Entities, Locations and Possessions may be conceptualized metaphorically as Containers (bounded two- or three-dimensional spaces); containers have insides and outsides, may be deep, shallow, spacious, restricted, etc.	Single parenting took a lot out of him. She searched her memory. That crosses the line of acceptability. He is back in her good graces. The role was too limiting. She was deeply into her new life.

A more complete rendition of metaphor structure is given by Lakoff and Johnson (1999). The portion of the metaphoric account that I have given here certainly does not cover everything. However, it takes in a wide swath of everyday “intuition” about causation as expressed in common-sense language.