Like good bricoleurs, human beings use their experiences as embodied individuals as models or image schemas to understand other parts of the world around them these basic models, in turn, are the building blocks of increasingly intricate and complicated cognitive models. Many familiar metaphors are based on models of bodily movement metaphors of improvement are often based on forward motion.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue, for example, that the most basic cognitive models derive from our experiences as individuals living within a body. Like other forms of cultural software, cognitive models like those involved in metaphor and metonymy can be distributed widely through human language. On the other hand, many people share the same cognitive models because they create similar ones independently through their own experiences. This process of imaginative extension also resembles the classical rhetorical tropes of metaphor and metonymy. People create more complex cognitive models from existing ones through imaginative extension. They argue that metaphor and metonymy are special cases of cognitive modeling that people use to understand the world. Cognitive theorists have taken this insight one step further.

11 METAPHOR, METONYMY, AND COGNITIVE MODELSĮarlier I mentioned Clifford Geertz’s suggestion that cultural understanding operates through classical rhetorical figures like metaphor and metonymy.

Lakoff metaphors