Metaphoric cognition as social activity: Dissolving the divide between metaphor in thought and communication

Metaphoric thought is often viewed as a property of individual minds that is quite separate from people’s social, communicative actions with metaphoric language and gesture. My goal in this article is to argue that metaphoric cognition is fundamentally linked to human social activities. I defend this idea by focusing not only on metaphor use in overt communicative situations, but by suggesting ways that individual metaphoric cognition is implicitly social. Many of the experimental tasks used in psychology to demonstrate the psychological reality of conceptual metaphors reflect intricate couplings between cognitive and social processes. This argument demands a reorientation in how metaphor scholars interpret empirical findings related to conceptual metaphor theory, and more broadly aims to dissolve the long-standing theoretical divide between metaphoric cognition and metaphoric communication.