Metaphor: Interface between the Cognitive View and the Truth-conditional View

Since metaphor was proposed to be a matter of thought instead of language over two decades ago, the research in this area has made most of its progress by the cognitivists. For the cognitivists represented by Lakoff, metaphor is not a mere poetic or rhetoric device, but is central to our everyday language. Furthermore, according to them, we categorize the world and break it into concepts mainly through metaphors, and truth conditions simply cannot account for metaphor. However, this cognitivists' view has been severely counterattacked by the truth-conditional semanticists. Their main criticism is that the cognitivists do not provide a way to go from our internal representations to the outside world. It is also criticized that the cognitive theory of metaphor as cross-conceptual domain mappings is too broad and general, and that they do not explain why a particular metaphorical expression should be subsumed under one mapping rather than another mapping, i.e., their schemes and structural relations are not predictive. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to propose a model for metaphor interpretation that combines the virtues of the two opposite views of metaphor. Truth-conditional semantics cannot ignore cognitive aspects of language, so-called states of affairs or mental representations, while cognitive theories cannot neglect vigorous representation of meaning with objective reality. This paper will try to present a preliminary outline of this combining model.