Book review of Bipin Indurkhya

Bipin Indurkhya:
METAPHOR AND COGNITION (Kluwer Academic, 1992)

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Bipin Indurkhya focuses on how metaphor creates similarity. This is, in itself, a paradox. By definition, a metaphor implies that there are at least two different ways to represent a situation. At the same time, we assume that these different representations are not arbitrary but they somehow "interact" (are coherent). Indurkhya points out three level of reality. The "God's eye view" of the world is independent of any cognitive being perceiving it. Cognitive beings interact with it via their sensorimotor system. This system creates the second level of reality, whose "ontology" depends on the sensorimotor system (different beings perceive a different reality because they are equipped with different sensorimotor systems) but whose pattern of stimuli depends on the structure of the world. The third level is the network of concepts created and used by the cognitive agent. This is the place where different representations of the same reality can be created, yielding different cognitive models. As the cognitive being "grows", there are two ways that this can occur while maintaining coherence with the environment: restructuring the network of concepts to better accomodate new data (typically, creating new concepts), or changing the mappings from the network of concepts to the environment in order to account for new sensorimotor data. The latter process is the one that originates metaphors. A metaphor is the projection of one conceptual network (the source) into the environment of another conceptual network (the target). Some concepts of the source maintain their conventional interpretation (the way the cognitive system usually interprets them) but others will require an unconventional ("metaphorical") interpretation.