| "Metaphor, Mind and Music: Understanding Metaphor and its Cognitive Effect," is an attempt to describe the effects that metaphor can have on an audience and how this effect is achieved. I begin with an analysis of several prominent theories of metaphor to determine the benefits and drawbacks of work already done in this area. I evaluate the work of Donald Davidson, Max Black and Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson, among others. I develop my own theory attempting to avoid past problems.; In order to create and explain this theory, I present the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson who offer a theory of conceptual metaphors. Their work helps us to define what a metaphor's cognitive effect really is, but it is weak in its explanation of how this effect is created. I will offer an explanation to replace Lakoff and Johnson's that is based upon a theory of situation models (multimodal movies). Situation models are built from neural representations of our past experiences. Language cues us to construct an approximate model of what is being described. On this theory, a metaphor is characterized by the fact that it presents us with material that does not immediately fit in to our working situation model. With some effort, we can find a way to fit a metaphor into our situation model in a way that keeps the model consistent. This effort is worthwhile because we will tend to consciously focus on the metaphor and finding its meaning. This extra effort often results in extra cognitive impact since we will process the information in the way we do when we are learning something new. With metaphor, the effect is that we may come to permanently associate two things that we previously did not and would not merely through everyday experience. I illustrate the strength of this theory by applying it to poetry and music. |
