A few months ago, I skim-read Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, a fairly academic treatise on the use of conceptual metaphor in language, a book regarded as seminal in the field of metaphor studies (it’s a thing!) and in the more broader field of cognitive linguistics: .
This short but dense book looks at how English speakers use “conceptual metaphors” to bridge between physical and social experience and more abstract ideas like time, teamwork, and feelings. What I found revelatory about the book was its claim—which Lakoff and Johnson explore through several powerful examples—that certain metaphors are so embedded in our everyday use of language that we hardly stop to think about them at all, even as they arguably influence the course of our thinking.
A great example from the book is argument is war. In English, we don’t just frame arguments as competitive (winning and losing them)—we often speak of them in violent terms: attacking your opponent, being on the defensive, and shooting down ideas.
As Lakoff and Johnson have it, the conceptual metaphor argument is war affects how we understand the nature of the argument. The consequences of this are daunting if we ever hope to have consequential and productive arguments; if our conceptual framework for the abstract idea of argument is premised on an implicit understanding of every argument as a battle between opponents, with a victor and a loser, then English-speaking societies would seem to have themselves in a real bind.
After all, aren’t we capable of having respectful, productive arguments? Can’t two people with diverging opinions enter into an exchange with one another where statements are presented and then rebutted without resorting to (metaphorical) bloodshed? I’m tempted to suggest that argument is war has doomed argument to be a lost cause of a concept, and that we may as well drop it from our worldview altogether. But that seems unrealistic. I think there’s still a place for argument—so long as we can shift the cognitive frame of argument is war.
But rather than shift this metaphoric frame, what if we just ignored it instead? One idea raised by Lakoff and Johnson for dealing with what appear as “problem” conceptual metaphors like argument is war is to create new ones. People develop new metaphors all the time, often to powerful effect. Why can’t we all do the same with conceptual metaphors?
One immediate challenge to this inventive approach is the lack of shared understanding. In creating a new conceptual metaphor, you may be all on your own. You can’t necessarily just say that argument is tennis and expect that people will follow—Wow! That comment was an unforced error! That’s not really how language works.
Perhaps a better idea, also suggested by Lakoff and Johnson, is to expand existing conceptual metaphors in new ways. So, instead of creating new conceptual metaphors, this approach leverages the shared knowledge of existing metaphors and incorporates new patterns of thinking and stretches them in new ways. While I don’t have any great suggestions for how to build off of argument is war in a positive way that offsets the inherent problem of the metaphor, I can imagine tweaking the metaphor to discuss having a ceasefire or meeting for a diplomatic summit or working towards a resolution rather than shooting down arguments.
In the A/E/C world, I can think of one key conceptual metaphor that is perfectly suited for this type of metaphorical expansion: the team is a building. Teams have strong foundations and undergo re-structuring. Plenty of collaborative groups and teams leverage this conceptual metaphor, not just the A/E/C world, but our industry, for obvious reasons, has such rich real-world context to layer into this metaphor.
For instance, we talk about team-building, which refer to any activities that “build the team,” regardless of the state of the team’s “building.” What if we expanded this idea of team-building so that it referred to the various states of a team “building” over its lifetime? In other words, we could refer to activities aimed at strengthening as “team-maintenance” activities. For a team coming off of a difficult project or having lost a member, maybe these activities are “team-refreshes.”
Remember that this is more than a word game—there is real potential value in having team members understand the point of the activity. Our team went out to bowling the other night to do some maintenance of the strong working relationships we have.
Once your eyes have been opened to the potential for tweaking and expanding the conceptual metaphors that underlie so much of our thinking, there’s no limit to the strange (and potentially helpful!) ways you can rethink critical aspects of our lives.
Taylor Coe 