The roots of metaphor: the essence of thought

Abstract

The essence of metaphor’s reliance on two domains, a source and a target, is argued as stemming from a fundamental characteristic of higher cognition—that of conceptualizing more than one cognitive/embodied domain at the same time. This cognitive duality is argued to underlie a plethora of conceptual activities including comparison, contrast, categorization, as well as metaphorizing. Why “two” domains seems the emergent and optimal means of such meta-cognition, rather than a higher number of domains, which might confer some advantages, is argued to arise from a grand compromise between an extreme necessity of humans to create and rely-upon shared complex meanings, and the complexities in enabling such shared meaning across multiple domains.