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Discourse Processes
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Hyperbole, Homunculi, and Hindsight Bias: An Alternative Evaluation of Conceptual Metaphor Theory
Matthew S. McGlone
a a

Department of Communication Studies, University of Texas at Austin Accepted author version posted online: 11 Aug 2011.Version of record first published: 27 Oct 2011.

To cite this article: Matthew S. McGlone (2011): Hyperbole, Homunculi, and Hindsight Bias: An Alternative Evaluation of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Discourse Processes, 48:8, 563-574 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0163853X.2011.606104

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Discourse Processes, 48:563574, 2011 Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0163-853X print/1532-6950 online DOI: 10.1080/0163853X.2011.606104

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Hyperbole, Homunculi, and Hindsight Bias: An Alternative Evaluation of Conceptual Metaphor Theory
Matthew S. McGlone
Department of Communication Studies University of Texas at Austin

To its credit, conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) has drawn signicant attention to the question of what gurative language can tell us about human concepts. However, the answers CMT theorists have offered are typically unsubstantiated by the empirical evidence, and occasionally unfalsiable. This reply to Raymond W. Gibbs Jr.s positive evaluation of the theory offers an alternative assessment that is more critical of its shortcomings. This critique summarizes four basic problems with CMT: The theory (a) is attributionally ambiguous about the locus of metaphoric motivation, (b) commits a form of the infamous homunculus problem in philosophy of mind, (c) employs circular reasoning to formulate hypotheses and interpret linguistic evidence, and (d) is not parsimonious. All of these problems are evident in Gibbss piece, and thereby undermine his defense of CMTs explanatory value.

In his article in this issue, Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. defends conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) from its critics. Although several psychologists, philosophers, and linguists have been critical of CMT over the years, Gibbs chiey focuses on my 2007 critique (see McGlone, 2007). It comes as no surprise that I disagree with his rebuttal; however, I do sympathize with two aspects of his cause. First, I share his conviction that we can learn something about human concepts from gurative languagea term I use in this article to exclusively refer to conventional and novel metaphoric expressions (as opposed to irony, periphrasis, and other
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Matthew S. McGlone, Department of Communication Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station A1105, Austin, TX 78712, USA. E-mail: matthew_mcglone@mail.utexas.edu

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non-metaphoric tropes). However, whereas I take these expressions as reecting relational similarities and associations between concepts, Gibbs interprets them as evidence that the concepts themselves are metaphorically structured. In what follows, I make the case for why theoretical parsimony is on my side in this dispute. Second, I agree that the most promising avenue for testing CMTs tenets is the study of embodiment phenomena. In particular, recent work investigating spatiotemporal reasoning and correspondences between vertical position and affect take the crucial third step of CMT research (i.e., testing hypothesized metaphoric correspondences in nonlinguistic behavior) I pleaded for in my critique (see McGlone, 2007). Moreover, I myself have recently demonstrated a correspondence between temporal agency and event-related affect that comports with some embodiment claims (McGlone & Pester, 2009). That said, I still do not think any of these ndings force the conclusion that happiness, time, or other abstract topics are conceptually subsumed by more concrete topics like space (more about this later), but they do, nonetheless, suggest some strong and interesting associations between concepts. My disagreements with Gibbs (this issue) and other CMT proponents boil down to four basic problems. The theory (a) is attributionally ambiguous about the locus of metaphoric motivation, (b) commits a form of the infamous homunculus problem in philosophy of mind, (c) employs circular reasoning to formulate hypotheses and interpret linguistic evidence, and (d) is not parsimonious. All of these problems are evident in Gibbss piece, and thereby undermine his defense of CMTs explanatory value. Each problem is described in detail in the following.

ATTRIBUTIONAL AMBIGUITY Gibbs (this issue) begins his piece with an analysis of former President Bushs use of the phrase stay the course during the 2006 Congressional elections. In this analysis, Gibbs poses a question about the phrase that sets the stage for the theoretical claims that follow:
Was Bushs use of the phrase stay the course motivated by a more general underlying metaphorical concept, such as Progress toward a goal is a journey, or did he simply use this clichd expression because it conventionally means not changing plans without any underlying metaphorical conception about the U.S. strategy for the Iraq war? (p. 530)

Although Gibbs does not directly answer the question he poses, it is fair to say from what follows that he favors the former account (usage was motivated by the progressjourney metaphor) over the latter (usage was motivated by its

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conventional not changing plans meaning); but, on what grounds? The CMT account is highly suspect here, even if we stipulate that by Bushs use he really means Bushs speechwriters use of the phrase. To whom can we condently attribute the motivation (conscious or unconscious) to invoke a conceptual metaphor? It is plausible that the sailors who introduced this nautical navigation phrase (according to my idiom dictionary; Makkai, Boatner, & Gates, 2003) into general usage broadly contemplated the potential correspondences between progress and journeysgoal as destination, goal pursuers as navigators, plans as vessels, and so forth. Does any and every use of (or encounter with) the phrase entail contemplation of this set of correspondences? That is a key question for CMT proponents to answer because if the answer is no, then it is not clear what is especially conceptual about understanding this gurative expression any more than other words or phrases, all of which unremarkably refer to concepts. Gibbs would have us believe that (a) the phrases composition and (b) our ability to appreciate his analysis of its metaphorical implications are evidence that the answer is yes. However, metaphor comprehension and appreciation are distinct, process-dissociated activities (Gerrig & Healy, 1983), with the former relying on a truncated representational structure far simpler than the latter. Near the end of his piece, Gibbs concedes that, in fact, neither the previous question nor other key questions about gurative language comprehension have been addressed by CMT research:
First, does one initially access the complete conceptual metaphor (e.g., Love relationships are journeys) from memory and then apply it to infer the metaphoric meaning of an expression (e.g., Our marriage is a roller-coaster ride from hell)? Second, if the conceptual metaphor is accessed prior to interpretation of expression, does it come with a package of detailed meaning entailments or correspondences that are also inferred as part of ones understanding of what the expression means?; or, must people compute source-to-target domain mappings online to determine which entailments of the conceptual metaphor are applied to the meaning of utterance? Finally, do conceptual metaphors arise as products of understanding and are, therefore, not necessary to create an initial understanding of a metaphorical expression? There are, as of yet, no empirical studies that provide exact answers to these questions [italics added]. (Gibbs, this issue, p. 550)

I nd this concession to be as startling as it is straightforward. Over 30 years after CMTs initial formulation, there are, as yet, no studies that directly demonstrate the degree to which gurative language is mediated by conceptual metaphors. Should there be those studies by now? Given the sheer volume of extant CMT-motivated research Gibbs (this issue) reviews, it is surprising and unfortunate that virtually none of it has addressed the fundamental questions he raises in the previous passage. Moreover, the absence of this theoretically essential research would seem to undermine his ultimate conclusion that CMT

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has great explanatory power, and must be considered to be foundational for any comprehensive theory of metaphor (p. 556). Until there is a substantial body of empirical evidence demonstrating conceptual metaphoric mediation of gurative language comprehension, claims about the theorys foundational status are little more than hyperbole.

CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS AS HOMUNCULI The homunculus problem rst received signicant attention in debates about how the mind processes imagery (Gregory, 1990). Theorists who attempted to explain imagery by positing special image-processing modules were, in effect, saying that a little man resides in the mind who identies incoming images as people, dogs, owers, cars, and so on. The problem with such theoretical constructs is that they are not really explanations; they are just reformulations of the original problem (i.e., If the homunculus processes imagery, how exactly is he doing the work?). Analogously, CMT explains the problem of metaphor comprehension by positing metaphors in our minds that tell us how to interpret metaphors we encounter in discourse, and also how to use them appropriately ourselves. The only explanatory primitives that the theory offers are the hypothesized sourcetarget correspondences (which merely restate metaphor meaning in an analogical formalism) and something called the invariance hypothesis, according to which metaphorical mappings preserve the cognitive topology (that is, the image-schematic structure) of the source domain (Lakoff, 1990, p. 54; also cited by Gibbs, this issue, p. 536). No matter how many times I reread and ponder Lakoffs (1990) original formulation of the invariance hypothesis or subsequent treatments by his adherents, I am always struck by the contrast between how little it really says and how much it is supposed to explain. All it really says is that gurative expressions will always cohere with ones perceptual experience of the source concept upon which the guration is based. Thus, a building metaphor about theories will always allude to source attributes consistent with my perceptual schema for buildings (foundation, doors, etc.), and never to attributes that are not part of my building schema (avor, hair, etc.). Whatever explanatory value there is to this tenet would seem to vanish if we stipulate that the speaker in question is not suffering from aphasia, schizophrenia, or synaesthesia. Morever, as Gibbs (this issue) concedes, the invariance hypothesis actually fails to explain why certain image-schematic source attributes are routinely exploited in gurative language (foundation, doors, etc.) while other equally schematic attributes (staircases, elevators, etc.) are ignored. The kluge he proposes as a remedy (based on work by Grady, 1997, 1999) is a set of low-level, primary conceptual metaphors that constrain which attributes of complex, higher-level conceptual metaphors get

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expressed (Gibbs, this issue, pp. 536537). This move is as unsatisfying as it is unparsimonious, akin to positing handler homunculi whose job it is to keep the head homunculus on message.1 Ultimately, the claim that verbal metaphors are motivated by and understood by means of mental metaphors (low or high level, primary or complex, abstract or embodied, etc.) does not explain metaphor so much as it explains it away. That is an untenable theoretical position to defend. CIRCULAR REASONING

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CMT theorists treat metaphoric expressions in discourse as both the predictor of conceptual metaphor representational structures and as the predicted outcome of these structures. I and others (e.g., Murphy, 1996) have criticized this and other vestiges of circular reasoning over the years, but CMT theorists have largely ignored these concerns.2 Question-begging logic is on display in several passages of Gibbss (this issue) piece:
CMT primarily relates to certain kinds of metaphor (i.e., those with implicit target domains, such as in I dont see the main point of that paper, which is motivated by Knowing is seeing), but not necessarily others (i.e., so-called resemblance metaphors where the source and target domains are explicitly stated, as in My job is a jail). (pp. 530531)
1 An even worse kluge was proposed by Turner (1990). Cognizant of the invariance hypothesis failure to distinguish between image-schematic source properties that map to the target domain and others that do not, he amended the processing directive implied by the hypothesis as follows: In metaphoric mapping, for those components of the source and target domains determined to be involved in the mapping [italics added], preserve the image-schematic structure of the target, and import as much image-schematic structure from the source as is consistent with that preservation (p. 254). In other words, attributes of the source domain that are relevant to the conceptual metaphor are preserved, and attributes that are not relevant are not preserved. This claim can be interpreted as either explicit (and egregious) post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning or an implicit claim that some metaphoric homunculus is deciding a priori which source attributes are relevant to the target domain and which are not. Neither interpretation suggests that Turners amendment adds any explanatory precision to the invariance hypothesis. 2 Although most CMT theorists have ignored criticisms of their circular reasoning, Kertesz and Rakosi (2009) recently took the novel approach of arguing that such criticisms are predicated on defective notions of circularity, and instead characterized the logic of CMT as cyclic, not circular. It is notable that their refutation was predicated on what they acknowledged is a novel account of fallacies (p. 703), which makes its debut in their article. This novel account is called for, they argued, because extant metatheoretical frameworks (epistemology, systemics, etc.) are inadequate for evaluating cognitive linguistic theory. I am not aware of how their claims have been received in philosophical circles. However, the notion of circularity I have addressed in my critiques corresponds to the formulation articulated in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Honderich, 1995): A sequence of reasoning is circular if one of the premises depends on, or is even equivalent to, the conclusion (p. 135).

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In this passage, Gibbs treats the existence of conceptual metaphors as simply a given, not a theory or a hypothesis. However, saying that some verbal metaphors have implicit source domains is begging the question, especially in light of his aforementioned concession that psycholinguistic research is still moot on conceptual metaphors alleged role in comprehension. We do not actually know whether verbal metaphors have implicit source domains, and the extent to which they are thought to depend on conceptual metaphors reects no empirical evidence, just the intuitions of CMT advocates. Furthermore, as Keysar and Bly (1995) demonstrated, ones intuitions about the relation between a gurative expressions meaning and its alleged conceptual structure are susceptible to hindsight bias (Fischoff, 2007; Fischoff & Beyth, 1975). Gibbs (this issue) attempts to write off their criticisms by claiming that the idioms used in their studies are based on metonymy, not metaphor. I do not understand why the idioms they used (e.g., The goose hangs high) are metonymies (would Up is good apply?) but stay the course is metaphorical, but no matter; the point of Keysar and Blys piece does not reside in the materials they used, but in the reasoning process their participants exemplied. After their participants learned fabricated meanings for idioms and formulated theories about why they had those meanings, they resisted consideration of other meanings, even when these meanings were historically correct. CMT theorists reliance on their intuitions about idiom meanings opens them up to the same bias. An objective evaluation of a gurative expressions metaphorical (or metonymic, for that matter) motivation requires evidence independent from our intuitions. This proviso applies with equal force to linguistic analyses of conceptual metaphors and to most of the psycholinguistic studies Gibbs and his colleagues have conducted.

PROBLEMS WITH PARSIMONY Several years ago, Jennifer Harding and I conducted studies of temporal language comprehension that, prima facie, yielded results consistent with the CMT framework (see McGlone & Harding, 1998). Gibbs (this issue) accurately summarizes our conclusions, but gets some of the details wrong about our ndings. Specically, in Experiment 2, we found that people interpreted an ambiguous spatiotemporal proposition (The meeting originally scheduled for next Wednesday has been moved forward two days) in a manner perspectivally consistent with unambiguous propositions preceding it. When preceded by moving-event expressions (e.g., The deadline passed two days ago), people were inclined to infer that the meeting had been rescheduled for Monday (consistent with a pastbound direction of temporal movement); when preceded by moving-observer expressions (We passed the deadline two days ago), they were more likely

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to infer that meeting had been moved to Friday (consistent with future-bound temporal motion). Although these ndings are consistent with the CMT claim that times conceptual structure is predicated on space, they do not force this claim. Instead, we opted to explain the nding in terms of Ray Jackendoffs (1983; see also Jackendoff & Aaron, 1991) thematic relations hypothesis, according to which time and space have independent, but thematically parallel, structures. This explanation, we reasoned, is the more parsimonious one given our ndings. Gibbs (this issue) takes issue with our reasoning in the following passage:

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The difculty with this explanation, however, is that time and space have a directional relation such that time is understood in terms of space, but space is not understood in terms of time. Thus, the directional relation between time and space suggests that time is metaphorically understood (e.g., Time is motion), which is exactly the claim of CMT (Gibbs, 1994). One can argue, then, that the abstract similarity position is untenable as an account of verbal metaphor understanding, with the McGlone and Harding (1998) data being consistent with the tenets of CMT. (p. 548)

This argument does not hold up to Occams Razor for at least two reasons. First, why are Gibbs and other CMT theorists so convinced that space cannot be understood in terms of time? Psychologists like Fraisse (1963) and Friedman (1990) reported research in which people predicate reasoning about spatial distance on temporal duration (e.g., Austin is 90 minutes north of San Antonio). Notably, these researchers did not draw the conclusion that space is conceptually structured by time from their ndings. Second, even if the empirical evidence did unequivocally point to a unidirectional inuence of spatial relations on temporal ones (as suggested by Casasanto & Boroditsky, 2008), that would not force the conclusion that the time concept is structured by the space concept. Numerous researchers have demonstrated over the years that verbal metaphors are often intrinsically directional without going the extra step of claiming that the directionality demonstrates that the topic concept is conceptually scaffolded on the vehicle concept (Glucksberg, McGlone, & Manfredi, 1997; McGlone & Manfredi, 2001; Miller, 1993; Ortony, 1979; Verbrugge & McCarrell, 1978). Thus, An insult is a razor is more apt and meaningful than A razor is an insult, but that in and of itself is not evidence that the conceptual structure of insults is predicated on razor knowledge. Parsimony problems also call into question the conclusions Gibbs (this issue) draws from Thibodeau and Durgins (2008) replication, extension, and critique of online metaphor comprehension studies by Keysar, Shen, Glucksberg, and Horton (2000). In their studies, Keysar et al. found that when target novel gurative expressions were encountered after others that ostensibly invoke the same conventional metaphor, they were read no faster than when preceded

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by semantically equivalent literal expressions; in contrast, when novel targets were encountered after related novel expressions, reading times were reduced. Based on these results, Keysar et al. concluded that conventional metaphors are dead (i.e., not active in comprehension), and that only novel metaphors prompt readers to compute sourcedomain conceptual mappings. Thibodeau and Durgin took issue with these conclusions because of problems they detected in the stimulus materialsspecically, the aptness and conventionality of certain target expressions. Using new stimulus materials that eliminated these problems, they found comprehension facilitation for novel targets in novel and conventional contexts. Gibbs interprets these ndings as a refutation of Keysar et al.s results and negative conclusions about CMT (p. 548). Thibodeau and Durgin (2008) would surely be more sympathetic to Gibbss (this issue) stance than to mine, but the conclusions they drew from their results differ from his in two important respects. First, they acknowledged that in revising Keysar et al.s (2000) problematic materials, they committed a methodological oversight of their ownto wit, they did not test for the possibility that the facilitation effect obtained with their new materials could be attributed to lexical priming. Thus, it is possible that literal associations between words in the context cues (e.g., I had to take a moment to let off steam) and the novel target expressions (Otherwise, my boiler would burst) facilitated comprehension of the latter, rather than activation of metaphoric angerheat mappings. The psycholinguistic literature is replete with demonstrations of lexical priming effects in literal text comprehension (Graesser & Bower, 1990; McKoon & Ratcliff, 1986; Potts, Keenan, & Golding, 1988; see also Kreuz & Graesser, 1991), so it is premature to infer that any metaphoric mediation occurred here without ruling out this explanation. Moreover, the facilitation effects Thibodeau and Durgin reported are quite modest (100150 ms of a mean reading time of approximately 2,000 ms)more comparable in magnitude to lexical priming effects (e.g., Graesser & Bower, 1990) than to a processing advantage induced by the prior activation of a mental model (e.g., Glenberg, Meyer, & Lindem, 1987). Second, although Gibbs (this issue) infers that the facilitation effects are conceptually mediated, Thibodeau and Durgin (2008) did not presume that their ndings shed any light on the mechanism by which facilitation occurred. Their chief interest was the communicative advantage conferred when metaphors are generative, regardless of whether the locus of generativity resides at the level of lexical association or abstract conceptual mappings. This stance is reected in their acknowledgment that lexical priming could have produced the effects Thibodeau and Durgin reported:
Because our theory of communicative facilitation is neutral with respect to the mechanism by which related metaphors facilitate each other, we accept that priming

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could play an important role in this process, but emphasize that the functional outcome of such priming probably corresponds closely to structure mapping. (p. 532)

In other words, Thibodeau and Durgin were tipping their hats to parsimony. Their ndings may be consistent with CMT tenets, but they are also consistent with the simpler explanation lexical priming offers. Unless evidence favoring the more complex account is obtained, science dictates that the simpler one should be embraced. In this respect, Thibodeau and Durgins conclusions align with McGlone and Hardings (1998) agnosticism regarding conceptual metaphors role in temporal language comprehension. Why Gibbs scolded us for this stance, but overlooked Thibodeau and Durgins theoretical neutrality, is unclear. As I mentioned at the outset, Gibbs (this issue) and I are in agreement that several recent studies of embodiment phenomena appear to have taken the crucial third step in research (i.e., testing hypothesized metaphoric correspondences in nonlinguistic behavior) I called for in my 2007 critique (Casasanto, 2009; Casasanto & Boroditsky, 2008; Casasanto & Djikstra, 2010; Meier & Robinson, 2004; Meier, Robinson, & Clore, 2004; Meier, Robinson, Crawford, & Ahlvers, 2007; Williams & Bargh, 2008a, 2008b). Most of these studies had not been published before my piece was accepted for publication in 2004, else I would have included them in my review. I applaud the authors ingenuity in creating novel experimental paradigms for measuring spatial and motoric behaviors (e.g., memory for vertical position) to test hypotheses about the spatial entailments of hypothesized conceptual metaphors (e.g., Good is up and Bad is down). All of these ndings are thought-provoking in and of themselves, and some hold important implications for the study of audition, vision, kinesiology, religious thought, social interaction, and other seemingly disparate research areas. However, interpreting these ndings as evidence for CMT is presumptuous if parsimony is to prevail. The problem here is that all of the aforementioned studies test hypotheses about conceptual metaphors that link a unidimensional source domain, such as warmth, with a unidimensional target domain, such as affection (Affection is warmth, Better is bigger and Worse is smaller, Good is up and Bad is down, God is up and The Devil is down, Positive is high pitch and Negative is low pitch, Power is up and Weakness is down, and The future is ahead and The past is behind). In contrast, the metaphors CMT theorists have focused most of their attention on entail multiple mappings between domains (e.g., Love is a journey entails mappings between relationships and vehicles, lovers and travelers, speed and excitement, etc.). In contrast to these multiple-mapping metaphors, single-mapping metaphors bear more than a passing resemblance to the one-shot mappings Gibbs (this issue) denies conceptual metaphoric status to, ostensibly because they do not map rich conceptual domains (p. 532). His point is well-takenthe invariance hy-

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pothesis (Lakoff, 1990), rules for conceptual blending (Fauconnier & Turner, 2003), and other numerous CMT tenets do not apply in an obvious way to singlemapping metaphors in which the domains involved are relatively impoverished and the mappings between them are one-shot by necessity. Thus, it is questionable whether third step research conducted with single-mapping metaphors can be taken as evidence for CMTa theory formulated with multiple-mapping metaphors in mind. Another problem from the standpoint of parsimony is that a far simpler explanation for dimensional single-mapping metaphors has been available for years. In their highly inuential work, The Measurement of Meaning, Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum (1957) articulated a theory of metaphor specically focused on correspondences between dimensions such as affection and temperature, emotion and vertical position, and size and pitch. Their associative account characterized metaphor as the parallel alignment of two or more dimensions of experience, denable verbally by pairs of polar adjectives, with translations occurring between equivalent portions of continua (p. 23). Osgood et al., like Jackendoff (1983), assumed that the dimensions translated in a metaphor (e.g., affection and temperature) are independently represented, and that relevant gurative expressions (warm welcome, cool reception, etc.) reect their perceived alignment. Parsimony, of course, favors the proposal that makes fewer assumptions. Thus, I conclude that Osgood et al.s associative alignment explanation is representationally rich enough to account for the aforementioned singlemapping metaphor phenomena without positing the existence of a metaphoric mental structure. Whether there are other nonlinguistic metaphor phenomena that warrant the richer representational tenets of CMT remains an issue for future research.

CONCLUSION When CMT grew from a theory into a school of thought, I was initially intrigued; but as I have watched it curdle into a cult of conrmation bias, I am deeply dismayed. Strip away the lofty, mechanistic language and its core claim is this: People use and understand metaphors in discourse because they have metaphors in their heads. That is not a theory. It is just begging the question, akin to when the physician in Molieres (1996/1666) famous play, Le Misanthrope, explained that opium makes one sleepy because it has a virtus dormitivaLatin for a sleep inducing quality. An evaluation of CMT must acknowledge its shortcomings as well as its strengths. In my estimation, Gibbs (this issue) underestimated the former and overestimated the latter. If he and other CMT proponents would like to improve CMTs explanatory value, they would be well-advised to start by addressing its noticeable absence of explanatory primitives that are conceptually

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simpler than the phenomena it presumes to explain. Next, they should conduct basic research demonstrating that these primitives play a role in online gurative language comprehension. Critically, the hypotheses they test must not invoke metaphor-interpreting homunculi, and their conclusions must be interpreted in a noncircular, parsimonious fashion. Unless and until these critical research reforms are implemented, CMT will remain a virtus dormitiva in the study of discourse processes.

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