But we would probably not view them as arguing at all: they would simply be doing something different. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, experience them differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently. …the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. But Lakoff and Johnson imagine what might change if there were a society where instead of war, argument is structured as a dance: For example, you can take a position, defend a position, your point can be attacked, you can have different strategies, and win or lose an argument. In English, arguments are understood and talked about as war: argument is war. Metaphors can deeply shape our thinking, a core idea of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s book, Metaphors We Live By, one of the founding works in cognitive linguistics. In this post, we are going to explore war metaphors as applied to debates and arguments. In our last post on metaphors, we discovered that much of our daily language contains metaphors we’re unaware of – like spending time or falling into a coma.
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