Reading overnight Metaphors we live by by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson; far from finished with it, yet I have some major criticisms: (1) Our authors do not, in fact explicitly refuse to, define Metaphor; saying, rather, "The essence (And the quintessent leper's bell of dishonest twaddle, say I, is the grandiloquent use of the word essence rather than a normal conjugation of the verb to be) of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another," and "Whenever we speak of... metaphor it should be understood that [it] means metaphorical concept." This after having said at the beginning,
"[R]evising central assumptions in the Western philosophical tradition..[i]n particular rejecting the possibility of any objective or absolute truth and a host of related assumptions...we have worked out (sic!) elements of an experientialist (i.e., pertaining to human experience and understanding) approach, not only to issues of language, truth, and understanding, but to questions about the meaningfulness of everyday experience." Still, I wanted to read it, and I am reading it, because it is very informative about metaphor (i.e., calling things by the names of things they aren't), and about the particular forms of metaphors, and leaves the field open to me (alone, apparently) to describe the mendacious unreason (or irrational mendacity), conscious or unconscious, deliberate or unintentional, which constitutes the ordinary use of metaphor.