Metaphors

Metaphor refers to a figure of speech in which one thing is understood or described in terms of another thing. The two things are not assumed to be literally the same. For instance, one might talk metaphorically about a thinker “shedding light on an issue.” This does not mean that the thinker has actually lit a candle or turned on an electric light. In the social sciences, the use of metaphors has been studied as a topic, but also metaphors have contributed greatly to the development of theoretical thinking.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980), in their influential book Metaphors We Live By, argued that metaphors were socially and psychologically important. They suggested that culturally available metaphors influence how people think about issues. A metaphor that was once strikingly fresh becomes a shared cliché through constant repetition. The shared metaphor can provide a cognitive framework that directs our understanding of the social world. For instance, the competitiveness of politics, or of academic debate, is reinforced by the habitual use of warfare metaphors, which describe views as positions as being “attacked,” “defended,” or “shot down.”

Within the social sciences, metaphors can constitute the core of theoretical insights. For example, the metaphor of social life as theater has been enormously influential in the history of sociology. This dramaturgical metaphor has given rise to terms such as social actor, social role, and social scene. One can see this metaphor being used in novel, creative ways in the work of Erving Goffman, particularly in his classic book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Goffman, 1959).

Metaphors, like coins, lose their shine through circulation. The idea of a “social role” might have once been metaphorical, but now that it has become a standard sociological term, its meaning tends to be understood literally. Role theorists assume that social roles actually exist and that they can be directly observed, even measured. The more recent metaphor—that the social world is a text or discourse to be read—has also traveled along a similar route. What was once novel and metaphorical, as in the work of Roland Barthes (1977), becomes through repetition to be understood much more literally. The development of methodological practices, whether to identify social roles or to “read cultural practices,” hastens this journey from the excitingly metaphorical to the routinely literal.

It is too simple to claim that metaphors in the social sciences invariably start by being nonliteral, for some have always been inherently ambiguous. Psychologists have often used the metaphor of “the mind as machine.” Even early theorists seem to have been uncertain whether the mind should be understood to be “like a machine” or whether it was actually a machine (Soyland, 1994). What is clear, however, is that as later scientists take up the idea, transforming it into research programs with established methodologies, so progressively the metaphorical element gives way to the literal. When this happens, a field of inquiry may become successfully established, but it will be vulnerable to assault by a younger generation of thinkers, who are inspired by new metaphorical insights.

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