Genomics: shifts in metaphorical landscape between 2000 and 2003

This article examines the shifts and changes in the metaphors used to describe the human genome and the human genome project (HGP) between 2000 and 2003, with the year 2001 as a trigger for genomic and metaphorical reflection. We want to answer questions, such as: Did the findings announced in 2001 shake the metaphorical foundations on which the HGP had been built or not? Did novel metaphors capture the imagination of scientists and the public or did old metaphors survive throughout this period? What influence does the continuity or discontinuity in metaphorical framing of the HGP have on the public perception of the HGP as well as on its scientific understanding? To answer these questions we have systematically compared the metaphors used in one major scientific journal, Nature, and in one major UK newspaper, the online edition of the Guardian/The Observer during a period of two months around June 2000, February 2001 and April 2003.     

When Do Natural Language Metaphors Influence Reasoning? A Follow-Up Study to Thibodeau and Boroditsky (2013)

In this article, we offer a critical view of Thibodeau and Boroditsky who report an effect of metaphorical framing on readers'' preference for political measures after exposure to a short text on the increase of crime in a fictitious town: when crime was metaphorically presented as a beast, readers became more enforcement-oriented than when crime was metaphorically framed as a virus. We argue that the design of the study has left room for alternative explanations. We report four experiments comprising a follow-up study, remedying several shortcomings in the original design while collecting more encompassing sets of data. Our experiments include three additions to the original studies: (1) a non-metaphorical control condition, which is contrasted to the two metaphorical framing conditions used by Thibodeau and Boroditsky, (2) text versions that do not have the other, potentially supporting metaphors of the original stimulus texts, (3) a pre-exposure measure of political preference (Experiments 1–2). We do not find a metaphorical framing effect but instead show that there is another process at play across the board which presumably has to do with simple exposure to textual information. Reading about crime increases people''s preference for enforcement irrespective of metaphorical frame or metaphorical support of the frame. These findings suggest the existence of boundary conditions under which metaphors can have differential effects on reasoning. Thus, our four experiments provide converging evidence raising questions about when metaphors do and do not influence reasoning.     

Untying the Gordian knot of creation: metaphors for the Human Genome Project in Greek newspapers

This article studies the metaphorical expressions used by newspapers to present the near completion of the Human Genome Project (HGP) to the Greek public in the year 2000. The analysis, based on cognitive metaphor theory, deals with the most frequent or captivating metaphors used to refer to the human genome, which give rise to both conventional and novel expressions. The majority of creative metaphorical expressions participate in the discourse of hope and promise propagated by the Greek media in an attempt to present the HGP and its outcome in a favorable light. Instances of the competing discourse of fear and danger are much rarer but can also be found in creative metaphorical expressions. Metaphors pertaining to the Greek culture or to ancient Greek mythology tend to carry a special rhetorical force. However, it will be shown that the Greek press strategically used most of the metaphors that circulated globally at the time, not only culture specific ones.     

“This will clear your mind”: The use of metaphors for medication in psychiatric settings

Psychiatric medications are an important part of the interaction between patients and clinicians in psychiatric settings. This article examines metaphors used by patients and clinicians to talk about the effects of antipsychotic medication. Metaphors provide a way to communicate about issues of identity and change involved in giving and taking medication. Although metaphorical language can contribute to misunderstandings between patients and clinicians, metaphor is also a major way in which clinical experiences are given shared meanings.     

Metaphorical and Associative Thinking in Healthy Children and in Children with Asperger's Syndrome at Different Ages

The study of healthy children and patients with childhood autism (Asperger's syndrome) showed that metaphorical thinking is normally efficient at the age of 7–8 years and that autistic children have an impaired ability to understand metaphors and idioms widely used in verbal communication. The deficit of metaphorical thinking in autism is thought to be due to a decreased activity of the right hemisphere. In a study of associative thinking, healthy schoolchildren displayed a high degree of association between words describing sensual objects and autistic patients displayed an impairment of objective associations and a predominance of proper names, which is indicative of the left-hemispheric type of association. The impairment of the speech and mental activity (metaphorical and associative thinking) testified to changes in the interhemispheric interaction in autistic children, which is likely to show up in a decreased functional activity of the right hemisphere and an increased activity of the left hemisphere.     

Metaphor Identification in Large Texts Corpora

Identifying metaphorical language-use (e.g., sweet child) is one of the challenges facing natural language processing. This paper describes three novel algorithms for automatic metaphor identification. The algorithms are variations of the same core algorithm. We evaluate the algorithms on two corpora of Reuters and the New York Times articles. The paper presents the most comprehensive study of metaphor identification in terms of scope of metaphorical phrases and annotated corpora size. Algorithms’ performance in identifying linguistic phrases as metaphorical or literal has been compared to human judgment. Overall, the algorithms outperform the state-of-the-art algorithm with 71% precision and 27% averaged improvement in prediction over the base-rate of metaphors in the corpus.     

Biomedicine on the Spatial Periphery: The (Re)Production of a Metaphorical Landscape by Rural Health Care Practitioners in Northern California

I examine the use of spatial concepts by rural health care practitioners in Northern California and suggest that rural and urban spatial metaphors are important means of expressing and (re)producing problems associated with their search for legitimacy and moral authority within a field of relations defined by biomedicine. I present three broad ways in which spatial metaphors are used by rural health care practitioners to continuously enact a "metaphorical landscape." I situate this landscape in the context of a hierarchical field of relations within biomedicine, which is itself underpinned by a distinct urban bias and the uneven distribution of material and technological resources. I suggest that this landscape is partly the result of the rural health care practitioners' position within this field of relations and partly the result of implicit and historically situated frameworks of spatial meanings derived from capitalism.     

Metaphors we think with: the role of metaphor in reasoning

The way we talk about complex and abstract ideas is suffused with metaphor. In five experiments, we explore how these metaphors influence the way that we reason about complex issues and forage for further information about them. We find that even the subtlest instantiation of a metaphor (via a single word) can have a powerful influence over how people attempt to solve social problems like crime and how they gather information to make "well-informed" decisions. Interestingly, we find that the influence of the metaphorical framing effect is covert: people do not recognize metaphors as influential in their decisions; instead they point to more "substantive" (often numerical) information as the motivation for their problem-solving decision. Metaphors in language appear to instantiate frame-consistent knowledge structures and invite structurally consistent inferences. Far from being mere rhetorical flourishes, metaphors have profound influences on how we conceptualize and act with respect to important societal issues. We find that exposure to even a single metaphor can induce substantial differences in opinion about how to solve social problems: differences that are larger, for example, than pre-existing differences in opinion between Democrats and Republicans.     

Natural Language Metaphors Covertly Influence Reasoning

Metaphors pervade discussions of social issues like climate change, the economy, and crime. We ask how natural language metaphors shape the way people reason about such social issues. In previous work, we showed that describing crime metaphorically as a beast or a virus, led people to generate different solutions to a city’s crime problem. In the current series of studies, instead of asking people to generate a solution on their own, we provided them with a selection of possible solutions and asked them to choose the best ones. We found that metaphors influenced people’s reasoning even when they had a set of options available to compare and select among. These findings suggest that metaphors can influence not just what solution comes to mind first, but also which solution people think is best, even when given the opportunity to explicitly compare alternatives. Further, we tested whether participants were aware of the metaphor. We found that very few participants thought the metaphor played an important part in their decision. Further, participants who had no explicit memory of the metaphor were just as much affected by the metaphor as participants who were able to remember the metaphorical frame. These findings suggest that metaphors can act covertly in reasoning. Finally, we examined the role of political affiliation on reasoning about crime. The results confirm our previous findings that Republicans are more likely to generate enforcement and punishment solutions for dealing with crime, and are less swayed by metaphor than are Democrats or Independents.     

A Dataset of Metaphors from the Italian Literature: Exploring Psycholinguistic Variables and the Role of Context

Defining the specific role of the factors that affect metaphor processing is a fundamental step for fully understanding figurative language comprehension, either in discourse and conversation or in reading poems and novels. This study extends the currently available materials on everyday metaphorical expressions by providing the first dataset of metaphors extracted from literary texts and scored for the major psycholinguistic variables, considering also the effect of context. A set of 115 Italian literary metaphors presented in isolation (Experiment 1) and a subset of 65 literary metaphors embedded in their original texts (Experiment 2) were rated on several dimensions (word and phrase frequency, readability, cloze probability, familiarity, concreteness, difficulty and meaningfulness). Overall, literary metaphors scored around medium-low values on all dimensions in both experiments. Collected data were subjected to correlation analysis, which showed the presence of a strong cluster of variables—mainly familiarity, difficulty, and meaningfulness—when literary metaphor were presented in isolation. A weaker cluster was observed when literary metaphors were presented in the original contexts, with familiarity no longer correlating with meaningfulness. Context manipulation influenced familiarity, concreteness and difficulty ratings, which were lower in context than out of context, while meaningfulness increased. Throughout the different dimensions, the literary context seems to promote a global interpretative activity that enhances the open-endedness of the metaphor as a semantic structure constantly open to all possible interpretations intended by the author and driven by the text. This dataset will be useful for the design of future experimental studies both on literary metaphor and on the role of context in figurative meaning, combining ecological validity and aesthetic aspects of language.     

Manipulating Representations

The present paper proposes a definition for the complex polysemic concepts of consciousness and awareness (in humans as well as in other species), and puts forward the idea of a progressive ontological development of consciousness from a state of ‘childhood’ awareness, in order to explain that humans are not only able to manipulate objects, but also their mental representations. The paper builds on the idea of qualia intended as entities posing regular invariant requests to neural processes, trough the permanence of different properties. The concept of semantic differential introduces the properties of metaphorical qualia as an exclusively human ability. Furthermore this paper proposes a classification of qualia, according to the models–with different levels of abstraction–they are implied in, in a taxonomic perspective. This, in turn, becomes a source of categorization of divergent representations, sign systems, and forms of intentionality, relying always on biological criteria. New emerging image-of-the-world-devices are proposed, whose qualia are likely to be only accessible to humans: emotional qualia, where emotion accounts for the invariant and dominant property; and the qualic self where continuity, combined with the oneness of the self, accounts for the invariant and dominant property. The concept of congruence between different domains in a metaphor introduces the possibility of a general evaluation of truth and falsity of all kinds of metaphorical constructs, while the work of Matte Blanco enables us to classify conscious versus unconscious metaphors, both in individuals and in social organizations.     

Modernist and postmodernist metaphors of the policy process: Control and stability vs. chaos and reflexive understanding

The complexity of the policy process is such that analysts often resort to metaphorical representations of its most salient aspects. Sometimes these metaphors are used deliberately but, in most cases, they are implicitly built into their theoretical frameworks. This article argues that commonly used metaphors based on the paradigmatic notion of control have ceased to be relevant to the analysis of contemporary policy dilemmas. Two new conceptions of the policy process have emerged from the new sciences of complexity. Both chaos theory and models based on the concept of organizational closure clearly reveal the self-organizing logic inherent in the problems confronting managers and policy-makers today. The main focus here is on examining the rationales for, and the potentials of, metaphors derived from these paradigmatic innovations - innovations which can be situated within an emerging postmodern culture insofar as they emphasize indeterminacy and the role played by social actors in constructing the social situations in which they find themselves. It is also argued, however, that within very specific contexts the notion of control may still be valid.The author wishes to thank Michael Howlett for his helpful comments on an earlier draft.     

The interpretations of fox possession: Illness as metaphor

Although fox possession is a rare phenomenon in contemporary Japan, it is a matter of concern in psychiatry and in folk healing. The case study presented here deals with the social process of role transformation, from client to shaman, as a way of self healing. The discussion then assumes that fox possession renders multiple interpretations and argues that it is, in fact, a metaphorical representation in much the same way that biomedical interpretation is. The argument also proposes that an etiological (causal) understanding of fox possession is less productive than a metaphorical one.     

The debate about death: an imperishable discussion?

In this concise review we discuss some of the complex edges of the concept of death that arose after the notorious advances in science and medicine over the last 50 years, in which the classical cardio-pulmonary criteria have led to the neurological criteria of death. New complicated questions like the definition of death and the operational criteria for diagnosing it have arisen and we think that they are far from being adequately and satisfactorily solved. A number of important issues--like the reliability and differences between cardio-pulmonary versus brain based criteria of death, if death is an event or a process, the meaning of integration and irreversibility--have not yet received sufficient attention. Here we have approached the death problem from two (biological) complex system perspectives: the organism level and the cellular-molecular level. We also discuss issues from a third systemic approach, that is, the entire society, thus involving legal, religious, bioethical and political aspects of death. Our aim is to integrate new perspectives in order to promote further discussion on these critical yet frequently neglected issues.     

How useful is the concept of habitat? – a critique

The following argument regarding the quantitative value of the habitat concept is presented for discussion purposes. The discussion is not intended as a review of the habitat-population literature (which is immense for any class of organism) and so does not include an exhaustive appeal to authority. Instead, the arguments are, largely, intended to stand or fall on their own merit, and the literature is used selectively to demonstrate a point.     

The living cell as an ecosystem: Hierarchical analog and symmetry

Biology has benefited from a number of analogies and metaphors, in its attempt to rationalize the hierarchical structure of life's manifestations. Oft-cited is the comparison of a living organism to a society. Phenomenological similitude between the two extremes of the biological spectrum - the microscale of the cell and the macroscale of socioecosystems - has become strikingly evident, with the recent accumulation of empirical information on the metabolic infrastructure of the living cell. From the universal perspective of 'physiological determinism' reciprocal (or symmetric) relations are apparent at both levels of complexity. Unification of the biological hierarchy may follow a similar epistemological course to that in contemporary physics.     

Nutrient control of neural stem cells

The physiological status of an organism is able to influence stem cell behaviour to ensure that stem cells meet the needs of the organism during growth, and in response to injury and environmental changes. In particular, the brain is sensitive to metabolic fluctuations. Here we discuss how nutritional status is able to regulate systemic and local insulin/IGF signalling so as to control aspects of neural stem behaviour. Recent results have begun to reveal how systemic signals are relayed to neural stem cells through local interactions with a glial niche. Although much still remains to be discovered, emerging parallels between the regulation of Drosophila and mammalian stem cells suggest a conserved mechanism for how the brain responds to changes in nutritional state.