Good Is Up; Bad Is Down

In the last thirty years there has been an abrupt and rather curious explosion of academic concern regarding, broadly speaking, the "non-literal". What had been a subject of interest only to a limited group of rhetoricians, namely, the issue of metaphor, has suddenly become a central concern for an increasingly large number of philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists, who have written about this subject in a variety of fields, from the study of language to epistemology to the philosophy of science. No longer regarded as merely poetic embellishment, some impressive claims have been made about the significance that we ought to attach to an understanding of metaphors, models and analogies.As the "Preface" to More Than Cool Reason puts it: "Metaphor is a tool so ordinary that we use it unconsciously and automatically, with so little effort that we hardly notice it. It is omni-present: metaphor suffuses our thought, no matter what we are thinking about. It is accessible to everyone: as children, we automatically, as a matter of course, acquire a mastery of everyday metaphor. It is conventional: metaphor is an integral part of our ordinary thought and language. And it is irreplaceable: metaphor allows us to understand ourselves and our world in ways that no other mode of thought can."What new ideas does the new discovery for metaphor bring to us? What, as the title indicates, does metaphor reveal about human mind? As a cognitive tool, what features does metaphor possess and how does it work? What does come as the grounding for metaphor? Can metaphors in literature and culture work as a cognitive tool? These are questions to be discussed in this paper.The paper is divided into four parts: Chapter 1, language and cognition; Chapter 2, metaphor and cognition; Chapter 3, literature, culture and metaphor; Finally, conclusion.The first chapter serves as an introduction to the whole paper. Starting on the concept of cognition, the author introduces different definitions of cognition, pointing out that thought has generally been considered as the core and the process of cognition, namely, thought is equivalent to cognition.About the relationship between language and cognition, there exist two different views. According to the objectivist view, natural language is a closed and automatic system. Since it is independent of human reason, it must possess definite meaning that can give an objective description of reality. This philosophical view about the nature of reason has been widely accepted in the west for over 2000 years, and then Lakoff remarks "we are at present at an important turning point in the history of the study of the mind. It is vital that the mistaken views about the mind that have been with us for two thousand years be corrected." According to what Lakoff terms experientialism, natural language is both a result and a part of human cognition. Cognition comes as the base of language, and the function and the structure of languages have grown out of human experiences.Starting on the latter view, cognitive linguistics goes beyond the 'logic' of traditional clause patterns and sheds new light on language by adopting the experiential view, the prominence view and the attentional view, etc. Categorization constitutes one of the major experiential bases for cognitive linguistics; another experiential base comes from the new view on metaphor. In cognitive linguistics, metaphor is defined as understanding one conceptual domain in terms of another conceptual domain, e.g. one person's life experience versus another's.How does human being know the world through language? Martinet's double articulation theory gives us a satisfactory answer in the sense that multiple meaning can be expressed by infinite combination of sounds and monemes. However, there remains a basic question to be answered that how new meanings are expressed bylexical symbols, especially how the process of polysemy is achieved. It is the categorization theory and the subsequent prototype theory that further answer this question. The pro...