The Ascending Staircase of the Metaphor: From a Rhetorical Device to a Method for Revealing Cognitive Processes

Abstract

This paper is concerned with cognitive research advances in a comparative study of the metaphor within educational contexts. By focusing on the role of metaphorical processes in reasoning, we investigate the metaphor over a period of time from 334 B.C. to 2014: specifically, from Aristotle’s seminal rhetorical theory – tradition acknowledges him as the founding father of the metaphor as a research method and as a scientific tool – up to Lakoff and Johnson’s [1] and Gola’s [2] arguments. The pivotal role of metaphor in the evolution of linguistics and neuroscience is represented through three diagrams in a Cartesian reference system, highlighting its ascending staircase paradigm: the undisputed star of many essays and theories, as stated by Eco and Paci [3], either despised or cherished as it happens with any star. The abscissas (i.e., x-axis) and the ordinates (i.e., y-axis) draw the biography of metaphor: since birth, Aristotle describes its embellishment qualities in the linguistic labor limae, but it is even more exalted as a sign of ingeniousness which develops different research perspectives. This paper aims to clarify the development path of the metaphor: until the seventeenth century, after losing its cognitive quality detected in paternal writings, it was diminished as a similitudo brevior, a “will-o’-the-wisp” or sentenced to a sort of “linguistic deceit”. Furthermore, the paper aims to share a theoretical and methodological approach which releases the metaphor from the rhetorical cage where it has been enveloped by some ancient and modern authors of the rhetorical tradition. Indeed, we embrace the idea that metaphor is not merely a part of language, but reflects a primordial part of people’s knowledge and cognition. In so doing, we show who and how has outlined that the pervasiveness of metaphors cannot be overlooked in human understanding and life, although, among the mysteries of human cognition, metaphor remains one of the most baffling.