Metaphor as Dynamical–Ecological Performance

Abstract

ABSTRACT The revolution in metaphor studies has revealed the motivating presence of underlying conceptual metaphors in people’s use and understanding of metaphorical language and gesture. Metaphorical expression is typically viewed now as bodily enactment of mentally represented metaphorical concepts. My aim in this article is to advance the idea that metaphorical performances are always part of dynamical, ecological cognition and must always be characterized as embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended. The dynamical–ecological perspective emphasizes how human thought and action continuously change over time with metaphor, more specifically, emerging in partial and probabilistic ways given what particular ecologies best afford. I describe different metaphorical performances as they arise in varying situations as people face adaptive challenges. Part of my claim is that metaphorical meanings only exist within the context of their bodily articulations in specific ecological contexts. Embracing a dynamical–ecological approach to metaphor comes with the significant conclusion that metaphor is not a discrete event or activity that is suddenly “there” inside people’s minds but is a dynamical constraint on action that is distributed across brains, bodies, and real-world ecologies.