Page 456 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory
sole right to employ or not to employ. Conversely, for the employee there is no right to be employed; which shows where the true power in this situation lies, despite the superficial linguistic symmetry of the employment relation and its manipulatory potential.
4.5 Wording the World
Much attention has been paid by researchers to lan- guage as a means of'seeing' the world. In well-known studies, Lakoffand Johnson (1980) and Lakoff (1987) have investigated the importance of metaphor as one way of realizing this 'wording.'
Metaphorical wording is different from the classi- cal, referential view of language according to which words are thought of as 'labeling' things in the 'real' world. Metaphors express a way of conceptualizing, of seeing and understanding one's surroundings; in other words, metaphors contribute to one's mental model of the world. Because the metaphors of a lan- guage community remain more or less stable across historical stages and dialectal differences, they are of prime importance in securing the continuity, and con- tinued understanding, of language and culture among people.
While one may disagree with some aspects of this view of metaphor, it is certain that understanding the common, metaphorical use of language is essential for an understanding of how people communicate, despite differences in class, culture, and religion, across geographical distances and even across lang- uages. The study of metaphors may thus be one of the keys to solving problems in foreign language under- standing and acquisition.
However, the view of metaphor as the only way to understand human cognitive capability is too restric- tive. True, metaphors are ways of wording the world. But this wording, in order to obtain the true pragmatic significance that it is usually assigned, should include and respect its own context, because after all, the contexts of people's lives determine what metaphors are available and what their wordings are going to be. An uncritical understanding of metaphor, especially as manifested in a purely descriptive way of dealing with the issue ('Look and describe, but ask no ques- tions') is not only wrong, but downright dangerous from a pragmatic point of view (Mey 1985:223). And even if our metaphors cannot provide all the answers, pragmatic questions still have to be asked. As an illus- tration, consider the following.
Lakoff and Johnson routinely assign the female human person to the metaphorical 'low' position, whereas the corresponding 'high' is taken up by the male; this happens about 10 times in the course of one and a half pages (1980:15-16). Clearly, some expla- nation has to be found for this curious phenomenon, and it seems reasonable to assume that the authors' particular wording (that is, their choice of metaphors) has a lot to do with the way in which society is struc-
tured: men on top, women at the bottom of the 'power pyramid.'
The point here is not to move directly from one 'universe' to another (viz., from the universe of power to the universe of language), but to understand that the way we in which people see the world is dependent on the way in which they metaphorically structure the world, and that, vice versa, the way in which people see the world as a coherent, metaphorical structure helps them to deal with the world. Put in another way, metaphors are not only ways of solving problems: they may be, and in a deeper sense, ways of setting the problems. As Schon remarks, in an important earlier study,
When we examine the problem-setting stories told by the analysts and practitioners of social policy, it becomes apparent that the framing of problems often depends upon metaphors underlying the stories which generate problem setting and set the directions of problem solving.
(1979:255)
There is, in other words, a dialectic movement that goes from word to world and from world to word. Neither movement is prior to the other, logically; ontologically, both movements arise at the same time in the history of human development. In particular, as regards the individual human's development, the child, in acquiring language, is exposed to 'worlding' at the same time as it begins its wording process; one cannot postulate any general, ontological priority of the world as entailing an epistemological or linguistic priority. As Franck and Treichler remark,
[it can be] argue[d] that language constructs as well as reflects culture. Language thus no longer serves as the transparent vehicle of content or as the simple reflection of reality but itself participates in how that content and reality are formed, apprehended, expressed, and trans- formed.
(1989:3)
In order to determine what a particular wording is worth, therefore, one has to investigate the conditions of use that are prevalent in the context of the wording. As to metaphors, the question needs to be asked what kind of 'seeing' a metaphor represents, and in what way this 'seeing' affects one's thinking or determines a particular mind-set (for which it was developed in the first place, in all likelihood).
The consequences of this view of wording are that one cannot understand one's interlocutors unless one has a good grasp of their word-and-world context (which includes, but is not limited to, metaphoring). That is, in order to understand another person's word- ing, the language user has to participate in his or her contexts, to word the world with him or her. Thus, the pragmatic view of language (and, in general, of all societal activity; cf. the quote from Schdn (1979) above) demands a 'sympathetic' understanding, as a practice of'co-wording,' in solidarity with the context.
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