Metaphor and Symbol

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Ecological Cognition and Metaphor

Thomas Wiben Jensen & Linda Greve

To cite this article: Thomas Wiben Jensen & Linda Greve (2019) Ecological Cognition and
Metaphor, Metaphor and Symbol, 34:1, 1-16, DOI: 10.1080/10926488.2019.1591720
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METAPHOR AND SYMBOL
2019, VOL. 34, NO. 1, 1–16
https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2019.1591720

Ecological Cognition and Metaphor

Thomas Wiben Jensena,b and Linda Grevea,b
a
Department of Language and Communication, University of Southern, Denmark; bThe Science Museums, Aarhus
University, Denmark

ABSTRACT
In this article, we argue for the need to further incorporate the study of
metaphor with the newest tendencies within cognitive science. We do so by
presenting an ecological view of cognition as a skull-and-body-transcending
activity that is deeply entangled with the environment. Grounded in empirical
examples we present and examine four claims fleshing out this ecological
perspective on cognition and metaphor: (a) metaphor is a product of an
organism-environment-system, rather than merely a product of an inner men-
tal process, (b) metaphoric meaning is relational. It emerges from projections
of structure between a living organism and its perceived or imagined environ-
ment, (c) underlying metaphor is the notion of metaphoricity, which is a scalar
value involving a doubleness in experience, and (d) metaphoricity relies on
experiential affordances that can be directly perceived or felt in the environ-
ment. Overall, we propose that metaphor should be understood and thought
about in terms of affordances rather than mental ability. Studying metaphor as
affordances is to focus on metaphor as part of our active doings that equally
involve cognitive, social, and linguistic dimensions. Within an ecological frame-
work, there is no contradiction between studying the details of linguistic,
multimodal, and embodied behavior in situational contexts while considering
the cognitive dimensions of this behavior too since cognition is re-
conceptualized as constituted by actions in an environment.

Introduction
This special issue of Metaphor and Symbol presents a new understanding of cognition that, in turn,
can pave a new way for studying metaphor. The issue contains a variety of contributions, all
informed by a new ecological understanding of the human mind, which combines theoretical
considerations with empirical studies on how to understand metaphorical actions as intertwined
with and embedded in the environment.
In this introductory article, we will flesh out what is meant by the term ecological cognition and
discuss how this change in the concept of mind affects the way we look at metaphor. In short, to
understand and investigate the mind from an ecological perspective is to carefully look at how the
mind is related, not only to bodily functions, but to environmental features as well. However, what
this new perspective on cognition may implicate for the study of metaphor has not been thoroughly
dealt with yet, even though several recent works have touched on the problem in different ways and
with use of different terminology (Fusaroli & Morgagni, 2013; Gallagher, 2017; Gallagher &
Lindgren, 2015; Gibbs, 2012, 2013a; Hampe, 2017; Jensen, 2017; Jensen & Cuffari, 2014).
In coming to grips with an ecological understanding of metaphor we take as a starting point the
claims below. These claims are not to be seen as an exhaustive list of implications in relation to an

CONTACT Thomas Wiben Jensen [email protected] Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M

Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/hmet.
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2 T. W. JENSEN AND L. GREVE

ecological perspective. Rather, they may function as a sketch of a new theoretical map being drawn
in these years; a map that is not yet complete but that is now beginning to exhibit the main
characteristics. Considering this, we argue that an ecologically informed approach to metaphor
needs to be founded in the following assumptions:

(1) Metaphor is a product of an organism-environment-system—rather than merely a product

of an inner mental process. Thus, we need to take into account the way metaphor
performance is embedded in environmental structures.
(2) Metaphoric meaning is relational. It emerges from projections of structure between a living
organism and its perceived or imagined environment. Underlying metaphor is the notion of
metaphoricity.
(3) Metaphoricity is a scalar value that involves a doubleness in experience that is not necessa-
rily dependent on the identification of source and target domain.
(4) Metaphoricity relies on experiential affordances that can be directly perceived or felt in the
environment. This type of sensory information constrains our participation with meaningful
products and involvement with other people.

To summarize, we simply claim that metaphor is to be seen as neither a figure of speech nor
a figure of thought. Rather, metaphor is a figure of action. It is a doing that is embedded in the ways
that we do things in the world, and as such it can be understood as skillful manipulations of
environments of any kind. In this light, metaphor cuts across bodily, psychological, linguistic, and
sociocultural dimensions. Metaphor impacts the way we do things and the way we think about how
we do things. However, as stated above, we need a more detailed ecological account of how
metaphors emerge as part of human action and how they work in different ecological niches.
The aim of this introductory article is to offer such an account. We will do so by first giving
a detailed introduction to an ecological perspective on cognition, action, and language with a special
focus on the notion of affordances. Second, we will put conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) and its
theoretical foundation into an ecological cognition-context. Third, we explicate what an ecological
view on cognition can offer studies of metaphor by illustrating the theoretical and analytical points
above. We provide two empirical examples of different types of metaphoric performance, one from
social interaction and another from an audiovisual campaign. In different ways, they both help to
ground the understanding of how an ecological perspective marks a difference in the way we
conceive the role of metaphor in multimodal interaction and expression.
It is our profound hope that this issue will spark the interest of metaphor researchers within
different fields and inspire them to explore the opportunities of working with metaphor in a different
way than usual, informed by the latest tendencies in cognitive science.

What we mean by “ecological”

The term “ecological” has become increasingly popular in recent years as it is used in a number of
different contexts with different meanings. Thus, for reasons of clarity we would like to specify how
we use it and from where it is derived. Originally the term was coined by the German professor in
zoology, Ernest Haeckel, supposedly combining the words “economy” and “biology” (Eliason, 2015).
In Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, Haeckel (1866) defines ecology in the following way:
By ecology we understand the total science of the relations of the organism to the surrounding outside world, to
which we can, in a broad sense, count all “conditions of existence.” These are in part of organic, in part of non-
organic nature; both the former and the latter … are of utmost importance to the form of the organisms,
because they force this to adapt itself to them. (quoted in Eliason, 2015, p. 80)

Later the term spread to related fields such as botany (Warming, 1895) and chemistry (Richards,
1907), as well as more distant fields such as sociology (Park & Burgess, 1921/1930), psychology
 METAPHOR AND SYMBOL 3

(Brunswik, 1943), and linguistics (Haugen, 1972).1 Not surprisingly, the meaning of the term
differed somewhat as it entered new areas of study. Still, a common feature in the different uses
of the term is an emphasis on the profoundly relational character of entities or elements in the
world. Relations are not just a matter of configuration but have an ontological character defining the
status of the phenomenon under scrutiny. Things/phenomena are nothing in themselves; rather, they
emerge as what they are in and through the relations of which they are a part: Their relations are
their “conditions of existence” as stated by Haeckel. In this way, ecology can be seen as the study of
relations; relations between different types of organisms and their changing environments.
This perspective is also the cornerstone of the most famous adaptation of the term ecology: James
Gibson’s (1979) studies of animal perception followed by a number of scholars at the University of
Connecticut developing the field of ecological psychology (EP) (Mace, 1977; Turvey & Shaw, 1979;
Turvey, Shaw, Reed, & Mace, 1981) (see also Szokolszky, this issue, for a thorough introduction to
Gibson’s EP). Their work developed and refined the use of the term ecology in providing a more
comprehensive and systematic account of Gibson’s pioneering work insisting that there is no divide
between perception and action.
Moreover, in recent years the ecological perspective has found its way into the large and heterogenous
field of cognitive science (Anderson, 2014; Chemero, 2011; Fuchs, 2017; Noë, 2004; O’Regan & Noë,
2001) as well as linguistics (Cowley, 2011; Harvey, 2015; Linell, 2009; Rączaszek-Leonardi, Nomikou,
Rohlfing, & Deacon, 2018; Steffensen & Fill, 2014; Thibault, 2011). The ecological turn in these fields of
study share a focus on the relational nature between meaning, cognition, and environment starting with
the assumption that any type of phenomenon or activity is always constrained—restricted and enabled—
by the material as well as sociocultural aspects of its immediate and extended environment.
Thus, when we talk about cognition as being ecological there is at the same time a historical
reference to the origins of the term as well as the work done within EP while at the same time a more
contemporary reference to recent ways of understanding cognition. The new wave in cognitive
science (see the next section) has been coined using different labels, such as distributed, embodied,
enacted, embedded, and extended cognition (in short, 4E cognition) (Menary, 2010). As such, the
way we use “ecological” in this article is meant as an umbrella term encompassing all of the different
Es. This also implies that we, for reasons of space, do not go into discussions on the subtle internal
differences between these new approaches while instead focusing on the commonalities that, seen
together, set them apart from a more standard in-the-head view of cognition.2

An ecological perspective of cognition

Over the last 10–15 years, our way of comprehending the notion of cognition has changed. In short,
the notion has been pushed, expanded, and elaborated (Clark, 2011; Cowley & Vallee-Tourangeau,
2013; Fuchs, 2017; Gallagher, 2017; Gibbs, 2005; Hutchins, 1995; Johnson, 2007; Noë, 2009; Stewart,
Gapenne, & Di Paolo, 2010). Today cognition does no longer just refer to mental or psychological
in-skull processes (even though their role and existence is not denied), nor does it just refer to neural
processes in the brain (even though they of course play a necessary, yet not constitutive, part), and
likewise it is not sufficient to say that cognition is grounded in bodily processes (even though they
are clearly part of cognition). Instead, cognition is to be understood as emerging from both internal
and external processes that are distributed across brain–body–environment. Thus, Hollan, Hutchins,
and Kirsh (2000) argued that cognition can be distributed in at least three different ways:

● Cognitive processes may be distributed across members of a social group

1
For an overview of the historical developments of the term ecology, see Eliason (2015).
2
For a discussion of the differences between distributed language and cognition versus extended cognition, see Steffensen (2009).
For an overview of radically embodied cognition in relation to extended mind and EP see Chemero (2011, p. 2) For a discussion
of the differences between enactive and extended cognition, see Gallagher (2017, p. 2).
4 T. W. JENSEN AND L. GREVE

● Cognitive processes may involve coordination between internal and external (material or
environmental) structure
● Cognitive processes may be distributed through time in such a way that the products of earlier
events can transform the nature of later events. (p. 176)

From this perspective, cognition is not an individual property per se; rather, it is a property of an
organism–environment-system (Järvilehto, 1998; Steffensen, 2017) in the sense that the phenomenon
we call “cognition” arises from the relation between the agent and its environment, not just from
internal processes in the head.3
In contemporary terms an ecological conception of cognition offers a reconfiguration of the
relationship between action/environment and inner/outer. As recently proposed by Gallagher (2017),
an analogy can be made to our conception of flight:
Saying that cognition is just in the brain is like saying that flight is inside the wings of a bird. Just as flight
doesn’t exist if there is only a wing, without the rest of the bird, and without an atmosphere to support the
process, and without the precise mode of organism-environment coupling to make it possible (indeed, who
would disagree with this?), so cognition doesn’t exist if there is just a brain without bodily and worldly factors.
The mind is relational. It’s a way of being in relation to the world. (p. 12)

This way of looking at cognition confronts the inner–outer dichotomy that has structured more
traditional conceptions of cognition and thus of metaphor. Holding on to the analogy of flight for
a moment, cognition, like flight, can be viewed as skillful action that is at once inner and outer.
Clearly it depends on both physiological and neural components but at the same time it would not
be possible without an environment to uphold the activity. As it would seem strange to argue for
a distinct mental system responsible for flight there is no reason to compartmentalize cognition as
a distinct inner phenomenon separate from our actions since cognition from an ecological perspec-
tive can be seen as “something we do: we enact it, with the world’s help, in our dynamic living
activities. It is not something that happens inside us” (Noë, 2009, p. 64).
Clearly, the same is true of metaphor. Considering that cognition in an ecological framework is
explained as a function, or a quality, of an organism–environment-system a contemporary cognitive
understanding of metaphor is something else than in the works of Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999).
In short, from an ecological perspective, metaphor is a cognitive phenomenon by virtue of being
embedded in the relation between an individual and its environment. It emerges so to speak as part
of an organism–environment-system. In order to appreciate this subtle change in the idea of talking
about metaphor as a cognitive phenomenon, we provide in the following a brief look into the
foundations of CMT.

CMT from an ecological perspective

To properly understand the wake and cumulating success of CMT in the 1980s and 1990s (Lakoff,
1987, 1993; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999) we need to see it as inextricably tied to a second generation
of work in cognitive science. The examination and detailed theoretical deliberation on how people’s
metaphorical and metonymic expressions and abstract reasoning are structured by bodily experience in
numerous ways were undoubtedly one of most substantial and influential contributions to the
embodied turn in cognitive science (Gibbs, 2005; Sharpiro, 2011). The arrival of CMT was a perfect
match between a rising focus on the cognitive foundations of language in linguistics and a highly
increased awareness on the embodied nature of the mind in cognitive science and philosophy. As such,
CMT was part of a general zeitgeist that combined a focus on embodied experience with a strive
toward building a new theoretical framework based on strong generalizations:
3
This way of thinking about the nature of cognition and environment owes a great deal to the pragmatist tradition, in particular
John Dewey. Already in the first half of the 20th century Dewey designated the proper object of cognition as, not the individual
mind, or the individual body, but always the organism–environment seen as a functional whole (Dewey, 1929).
 METAPHOR AND SYMBOL 5

In short, the locus of metaphor is not in language at all, but in the way we conceptualize one mental domain in
terms of another. […] The word metaphor has come to mean a cross-domain mapping in the conceptual system.
The term metaphorical expression refers to a linguistic expression (a word, phrase, or sentence) that is the
surface realization of such a cross-domain mapping (this is what the word metaphor referred to in the old
theory). (Lakoff, 1993, p. 203)

Looking at this quote today, however, it becomes clear that, once again, the zeitgeist has changed.
Thus, the distinctions structuring the quote between on the one side “language” and “linguistic
expressions” and on the other side cognitive concepts and processes such as “mental domain,”
“cross-domain mapping,” and “conceptual system” are not pre-given anymore. Likewise, the basic
opposition between what is conceived as a “surface realization” and an implied deep level seems to
foster a dichotomous thinking structured along an opposition between an inner deep cognitive
structure and an outer social surface that came to characterize part of the theoretical foundation of
CMT. From a contemporary ecological perspective, it is problematic to draw such distinctions,
leading to theoretical oppositions between an inner private geography of individual cognition on the
one hand and an outer landscape of language and communication on the other. Especially since such
a theoretical geography seems to come with a normative formation designating the “deep” cognitive
level as the proper research interest seen as an explanatory precondition for outer manifestations of
metaphoric language in communicative contexts.
Of course, this line of critique against CMT is not new. Almost from the very beginning CMT has
been criticized for neglecting details and variations of language use and not properly considering the
use of metaphor in all its pragmatic and contextual richness.4 Likewise, many studies within applied
linguistics and discourse studies have shown an empirical alternative to CMT, investigating and
studying in detail the many ways that metaphoric language is used in numerous cultural and social
contexts (Deignan, 2002; MacArthur, Oncins-Martínez, Sánchez-García, & Piquer-Píriz, 2012;
Musolff, 2006; Ritchie, 2006; Semino, 2008; Zanetto, Cameron, & Cavalcanti, 2006). Still, for the
most part this type of social critique rarely attempts to directly tackle cognitive questions in relation
to metaphor, often leaving them aside as belonging to another field of study. As pointed out by
Gibbs (2013a), “there remains the strong belief that what is cognitive, social, and communicative
refer[s] to different domains of human experience, with each one having its own specific theoretical
explanations” (p. 57). Also, in a recent anthology (Hampe, 2017) the main ambition is to discuss and
explicate possible common points of interests between discourse- and cognition-oriented
approaches, thereby testifying both to new interdisciplinary tendencies but also to the historical
spilt between these two lines of research. The divisions may have been softened in recent years. Still,
at least historically, much of the social critique of CMT and applied approaches to metaphor have
implicitly reproduced the division between cognitive areas of interest versus linguistic and social
ones by not directly confronting the cognitive theory behind CMT.
From a traditional cognitive point of view, the ability to see and create a potential doubleness in
things, words, inscriptions, gestures, behaviors, and so on has been understood and described as
chiefly an operation taking place inside the human mind. In many ways, this way of looking at
metaphor is intuitively, and intellectually, appealing. The phenomenon we call metaphor seems to be
reserved for humans, and it is undoubtedly dependent on the complex workings of the human brain
and sophisticated level of the human mind. Yet there is another way to think about it. Metaphor, the
human tendency to enact doubleness, to see, feel, experience, and understand one kind of thing in
terms of another can also be seen as stemming from perceived invariances in the environment and
not chiefly from mental operations of cross-domain mappings.5 In order to understand the implica-
tions of this shift in perspective, let us have a closer look at the ecological notion of affordances.

4
See Gibbs (2013b, 2017), p. 1 for an overview of the critique of CMT.
6 T. W. JENSEN AND L. GREVE

Affordances, dynamical systems, and metaphor

Gibson’s notion of affordances (Gibson, 1979) addresses the question of how the environment guides
and scaffolds action and perception in species-specific ways. Affordances are often explained as
action possibilities, which, according to Gibson (1979) are what the environment “offers the animal,
what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill” (p. 127). What we perceive when we perceive our
immediate environment is a field of action possibilities at a pragmatic level rather than an objective
information structure in need of decoding. The core idea is that the agent perceives the possibilities
for action within an environment directly: “what we perceive when we look at objects are their
affordances, not their qualities.
[…] The meaning is observed before the substance and surface, the colour and form, are seen as
such” (Gibson, 1979, p. 134). In this vein, the idea of direct perception counter classical ideas within
cognitive science in arguing that perception is not a question of internally adding information to
sensations.
In short, the idea of direct perception tells us that we see and understand entities in the world in terms
of what we can do with them; we perceive them in and through their action potential, not in terms of
what they “are” independent of their use; that is, the round shape of a cup is seen in and through its
“grasp-ability” (and “drinkability” of its content), the flat surface of a table in and through its “place-
ability,” the smiley face of another human being in and through its “sociability” or “talk-ability”
depending on the circumstances of course6 (see also Szokolszky, this issue, for a detailed description of
direct perception). In this view, cognition is about grasping the affordances of the environment (physical
and/or social) and as such more than an inner mental structure; rather, it is a function of an organism–
environment relation. Relating this to studies of metaphor opens the possibility of looking for meta-
phoricity (potential doubleness) directly in the environment (physical and social) as affordances for
symbolic action (see analytical section for examples of this). In this vein, metaphor and metaphoricity
can simply be seen as “an expansion of the affordance space” (Gallagher, 2017, p. 194). The advantage of
thinking about metaphor in terms of affordances is that it will help us to see metaphor as something we
truly “live by,” not just something we use for abstract thinking or rhetorical achievements (even though
they certainly can be part of both). Studying metaphor as affordances is to focus on metaphor as part of
our active doings, rather than as inner mental processes or stylistic features.
Closely related to the notion of affordances is the concept of dynamical systems focusing on the
coordinated patterns of human action emerging as a functional whole. This perspective involves an
examination of how movement and behavior (verbal as well as nonverbal) unfold—stabilize and
change— over time, thereby creating patterns emerging as dynamical systems. As such, a dynamical
systems approach to metaphor has broadened the understanding of the emergence of metaphor as an
uneven, nonstatic, and nonlinear phenomenon arising from the change and dynamics of human
interaction viewed as a self-organizing living system (Cameron, 2016; Gibbs, 2012, 2013a; Gibbs &
Cameron, 2008; Jensen, 2017). As laid out by Cameron et al. (2009), “a metaphor is no longer a static
fixed mapping, but a temporary stability emerging from the activity of inter-connecting systems of
socially situated language use and cognitive activity” (p. 63).

Context versus ecological niche

An ecological perspective on cognition challenges the underlying premise that the skull constitutes
the principal boundary between the inner and the outer, and consequently the demarcation between
what can be described and understood in biological/cognitive or in sociological/discursive terms,
respectively.7 To better understand what this implies, let us have a look at the familiar notion of
5
Early experimental studies on metaphor from an EP perspective have made similar observations; see for instance Verbrugge and
McCarrell (1977).
6
For a more thorough account on how to understand the workings of affordance in relation to social interaction and affect, see
Jensen and Pedersen (2016).
 METAPHOR AND SYMBOL 7

context. Within the humanities and social sciences “context” is captured as the outer social world of
communication and cultural practices that somehow circumscribe human action. That is, the notion
of context is rooted in the separation of cognitive processes inside us surrounded by the outer
sphere, understood as a kind of “social container,” that holds and encircles the doings of individual
cognizers. Thus, it is taken for granted that outer environmental, or contextual, features can be
neatly kept apart from biological and cognitive functions.8 An ecological perspective, contrary to
this, implies a re-consideration of this way of dividing our reality into biological/cognitive versus
social/discursive domains. Here it is crucial to bear in mind that the notion of an ecological niche is
different from the concept of context in crucial ways. An ecological niche is not an outer frame that
simply surrounds or contains the individual agents and it cannot be captured in an inner–outer
dichotomy. Rather, an ecological niche emerges from the active sense-making of agents employing
the resources of the environment. As argued by Szokolszky (this issue), ‘ecological’ refers to
mutualism as “...the principle of organism (animal or human) and environment being mutually
defined relational aspects of one another” (p.18).
It is the interrelation between thinking and sensing bodies and environmental structures that
make up an ecological niche at the human level. This way of looking at the environment as
a necessary part of our actions and sense-making naturally leads to an inclusion of many different
environmental features such as physical artefacts, as well as cultural compositions, normative modes
and social practices, that would normally be seen as distinct from the realm of cognition. Thus, this
inclusion implies a move away from methodological individualism and a strive toward integrating
cognitive actions with the social nature of human systems on both a micro and as a macro scale.
After this theoretical part, we will now embark on the analytical section exemplifying the four
claims listed in the introduction. Let us now return to our first claim: Metaphor as a product of an
organism–environment-system.

Metaphors emerging from the environment

In a recent article, Gallagher and Lindgren (2015) suggested that some metaphors are best under-
stood as a function of our engagement with the environment. In that sense metaphor is not just
something we express or communicate but something we enact:
Specifically, we can say that an enactive metaphor is one that we enact—that is, one that we put into action or
one that we bring into existence through our action. The fact that we are enacting a metaphor (rather than, for
example, a plan or a design or a solution) means that the action involved can be a kind of play-acting or
pretense (the kind of acting one finds in a theater or in the pretend play of a child). To enact a metaphor means
to act it out. As in acting, this is an embodied process. (p. 392)

In spelling out what is meant by the term enactive metaphor the authors give the example of a child
picking up a banana and pretending it is a phone as a part of playing. Being part of a playful
engagement with the environment, such a metaphorical action is tightly linked to affective and
intersubjective dimensions possibly as a way of changing the world around us (on a micro scale) and
thereby inviting further playful actions. In continuation of this, the important aspect here is that this
kind of metaphoric action is not part of an inner mental operation in which the banana is somehow
represented as a phone; rather, it is literally in the doing, in the grapping movements of the hand and
following manipulation of the environment, that the metaphor is enacted. The child, “in effect,
enacts a metaphor that builds on an affordance presented by the shape of the banana, and on her
7
For critiques of this ingrained idea of the skull as the principal boundary limiting the arena of cognition, see Cuffari and Jensen
(2014); Fuchs (2017); and Gallagher (2017).
8
As an example, Steen’s theory of deliberate metaphor (DMT) rests on the separation between the levels of cognition, language,
and communication/context (Steen, 2008). Indeed, the teasing apart of these levels is the theoretical foundation of DMT.
Without it, there would be no way to distinguish between deliberate and non-deliberate metaphor. However, from an ecological
perspective this separation is problematic. In the ecological view cognition is from the very start embedded in structures in the
environment and as such cognition will always entertain elements of (what we chose to call) sociality and context.
8 T. W. JENSEN AND L. GREVE

previous experience with phones” (Gallagher and Lindgren, 2015, p. 396). Now, this of course begs
the question of if this way of looking at metaphor is reserved to this special kind of action that
involves some sort of physical manipulation of the environment (as Gallagher and Lindgren
themselves seem to suggest), or if the idea of enactive metaphor could be expanded to other types
of metaphorical action as well. We would like to suggest the latter.
As an example, consider the following extract from a video recording (Figure 1) of a couples
therapy session involving a married couple and a therapist.
The sequence is dominated by the therapist who addresses the difficulties in understanding each
other properly in a relationship and what it takes to overcome these challenges. Specifically, the
therapist is instructing the woman to put her “own thing on standby” (l.1) in order to be able to take
the perspective of her husband. The dominant metaphor that emerges from talking and making
sense about this is that of “crossing the bridge” (used in l.3–4 and 8). It is a conventional expression
but it is elaborated several times and used as a semantic structure for the rest of the dialog. Thus, it is
explicated that then the woman crosses the bridge she “go into this [NAME] land over here” (l.4),
she can “wonder (.) how it is over here” (l.4–5), and it is important to be “aware where you are on
the bridge” (l.8–9). In line 9–13 the metaphor is made explicit since the physical tendency “towards
running home” (while being on the bridge) is correlated with the social interpersonal phenomenon
of having difficulties “listening to what he says.”
To understand how the metaphor performance in Figure 1 could be understood as emerging from
an organism–environment-system we need to take a closer look at the physical setting in which the
therapy takes place. Looking at the images we can see that the couple is sitting down in two identical
chairs facing each other with only a short distance between them. The therapist is sitting right in the
middle looking at both of them from the side and thereby capable of directing their attention space. It
is, in other words, an arranged environment set out to advance a close contact between the participants.
The physical as well social/interpersonal space is skillfully used by the therapist as an affordance for
metaphorically talking and gesturing about their social challenges (understanding each other) as if
crossing the physical space between them by use of a bridge. The fact that the man and woman are
sitting down right in front of each other makes it possible for the therapist to enact a gestural space

Participants
Therapist: T, Man: M, Woman:W

1. T: now when you can put own thing on standby

2. W: yeah
3. T: and let it rest at home and prepare yourself to cross the
4. bridge and go into this [NAME] land over here and wonder
5. (.) hear something about how it is over here
6. W: yes
7. T: (0.2) and what I want to a ask you (.) the exercise is to
8. cross the bridge and at the same time be very aware where
9. you are on the bridge(0.3) cause you will probably once
10. in a while have a direction towards running home
11.W: hmm
12.T: cause you will have difficulties liste[ni
ng] to what he
13. says[per]haps
1 4.W : [yes] [ y es ]

Figure 1. Extract from a couples therapy session.

 METAPHOR AND SYMBOL 9

between them equally visible for both. Thus, an ecological interpretation of this sequence involves
seeing the metaphorical performance, not as derived from an inner mental operation, but as enacted
in-and-through the gestural movements marking the basic structure of a bridge and thereby exploring
and exploiting the physical space between the husband and wife. In this way, the metaphorical
structure is as much a structure of the environment as a structure within the mind of the therapist.
It emerges from an organism–environment-system; in this case, the ecological niche of therapist–
patients–environment. Simply put, the metaphor of crossing a bridge easily presents itself when faced
with two people sitting right in front of each other and in need of a better understanding between
them.9 The metaphorical structure and meaning emerge from a perceived invariance in the environ-
ment, which is the possibility of establishing a physical connection by use of gesture analog to that of
a bridge. As such, the idea of crossing the bridge is continuously marked by long sweeping movements
from the left to the right and back again (see third picture).
Thus, it seems feasible to claim that this arranged environment makes possible—or brings forth—
certain types of gestures and metaphorical expressions that exploit the specific affordances of being
placed closely together in this particular manner. The environment in effect offers an action
potential with a doubleness in meaning.

The relational meaning of metaphor

We will now proceed to the next claim; that metaphoric meaning is relational. It emerges from
projections of structure between a living organism and its perceived or imagined environment. As
was the case in the above example, metaphorical meaning is often a question of projecting structure
onto the environment in order to see something new. In an influential article about epistemic action
in dance choreography Kirsh (2011) talked about projection “as a way of seeing something extra in
the thing present” as well as “a way of augmenting the observed” (p. 2310) (see also Gibbs, this issue,
for a similar idea about augmented constraint). Again, we make note of the implication that the
potential doubleness seems to be present in the environment to be perceived directly.
Thus, as an alternative to the standard A IS B structure for metaphor we would like to suggest
a different way of visually representing this process (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Metaphor is projection of a loosely structured and abstract experience onto a tightly structured bodily experience and
thereby highlighting the shared meaning potential between the two.

In a recent article Falck (2018) investigates how metaphorical and nonmetaphorical uses of the word “bridge” can be correlated
9

to real world experiences and thus seen as embedded in an ecological web of uses and constraints. For other studies of the
metaphorical use of “bridge,” see Forceville (2006) and Strack (2004).
10 T. W. JENSEN AND L. GREVE

Metaphoric projection emerges when we try to explain something abstract in a comprehensible way.
What we propose with this figure 2 is enacting doubleness by using a metaphorical expression and/or
gesture in its most basic form about relating different phenomena by projecting structure from one type
of experience to another. A connection is made—not necessarily an exhaustive one—but one that adds
structure and characteristics making the topic of description more palpable and thus meaningful.
Returning to the example, the gestural actions of the therapist highlights the structural invariance
between the movements involved in crossing a bridge and the process of trying to see things from
another person’s perspective. Both processes involve a goal-oriented movement and a subsequent
connection (either physical or emotional) and in this sense the image of crossing a bridge can be
directly perceived at the level of primary meaningfulness “as a way of seeing something extra in the
thing present” and of “of augmenting the observed” (Kirsch 2011, p. 2310).In this light, the gesturing
and different metaphorical expressions of the therapist can simply be seen as ways of relating to the
environment by establishing an ontological correspondence between structures in the environment
and more abstract structures in the topic of conversation. Doing metaphor in this case is to project
structure that enables new types of experience, feelings, and understandings to emerge. It is
embedded in the coordinated behavior of movements, gestures, and verbal actions that together
comprise an action-system that can produce a doubleness in experience.

Metaphoricity in an ecological perspective

In this final part of the analytical section we examine the last two claims about metaphoricity. In
continuation of the dynamic view on metaphor (Cameron, 2016; Cameron et al., 2009; Cienki
& Müller, 2008; Gibbs, 2012, 2013a, 2016; Gibbs & Cameron, 2008; Müller, 2008; Müller & Tag,
2010) an ecological perspective works from the assumption that metaphoricity can be seen as
a gradable phenomenon rejecting the idea of literal and/or figurative meanings as sharply distin-
guishable positions. In short, metaphoricity appears as a more fluid phenomenon focusing on the
process of creating and enacting a doubleness in meaning and experience. This doubleness may in
some cases lead to a “real metaphor,” based on a cross-domain mapping from target to source, but
more often it is only part of the meaning of the source domain that is made available (through
images or interactional behaviors) and the metaphoric doubleness can only be detected by relating
disparate actions and expressions to the whole of the situation (Cameron, 2007; Jensen & Cuffari,
2014). The doubleness co-emerges with an understanding of the working of the ecological niche.
Thus, metaphoricity needs to be seen as a scalar value; something that is more or less activated or
present (Jensen, 2017; Jensen & Cuffari, 2014; Müller, 2008; Müller & Tag, 2010). Notably, meta-
phoricity is not restricted to (the meaning of) words or verbal actions but can emerge as part of a set
of “experiential affordance (felt sense or felt meaning) being opened or made room for” (Jensen &
Cuffari, 2014, p. 282) relying on a variety of bodily activities and sensations.
The workings of metaphoricity are particularly noticeable in audiovisual products involving moving
images (including close-ups, clips, panning, etc.), sound, music, light, and a general temporal orches-
tration of events. Crucially, the metaphors—or metaphoricity—at stake in audiovisual products have
a different ontological character involving sensation, affect, and temporality to a much larger degree
than metaphor in written texts or verbal interaction. According to Müller and Schmitt (2015):
it is a specificity of audio-visual metaphors to be grounded in affective experiences evoked by the moving
nature of audio-visual images. […] Establishing, creating, and finding metaphors is regarded as a process in
which one domain of experiences is seen and felt in terms of another. (pp. 312–313)

From an ecological perspective, an interesting question is, How do these sensory experiences arise
through which we become able to feel one experience in terms of another? In other words, how is
something perceived as an experiential affordance for double meaning?
To pursue this question, let us take a look at the embedded metaphoricity in a short campaign
video from DR (Danish National Television) that was broadcast in fall 2017 as part of a larger
 METAPHOR AND SYMBOL 11

campaign to get people to vote for the municipal elections.10 The trajectory of the video is structured
around the unfolding of the same situation presented in two different ways. Using two frames in
every shot two different versions of the same short story about an old lady receiving a meal from
elderly care is juxtaposed. In the first scene, we see the two meals being opened: a piece of traditional
Danish smørrebrød (an open sandwich with dark bread) with eggs and prawn, versus something that
looks like a micro wave dinner with meat and potatoes. In the second scene, the lady is consuming
the meals in slightly different ways and with different reactions, and in the third scene we see the
remains of the two meals (empty plate versus a full tray). Only here, after 15 seconds, a text appears,
indicating a contextual frame: “How good should the elderly care be?” Finally, the two-shot frame is
dissolved into a single image with the logo of the municipal election, and a caption saying “your old
age, your choice”/“your everyday life, your choice.” Figure 3 is a model of the temporal trajectory of
the film, including audio, visual, and textual elements.
Even though no overt metaphor can be detected in this video the structure and communicative
style of the entire video is saturated with metaphoricity. Furthermore, the metaphoricity can be
perceived directly as a vital part of the way the environment is presented. However, the video is
short (20 seconds long) and the way it conveys its message in and through its stylistic style is quite
subtle. It appeals to its audience, not by means of exaggeration, high-intensity emotion or a fast
flow of events, as in many commercials or campaigns, but rather by use of indirect and under-
stated cues embedded in a meshwork of metaphoricity. Moreover, it is only in the last scene, while
being aware of the context of the election, that its meaning becomes apparent: To vote for the
election is to influence the quality of the elderly care. Thus, what in its totality is a complex
problem of political priorities is effectively comprised and expressed by portraying the same
situation in different ways.11
To disentangle the web of metaphoricity, we need to consider the choice of having two frames
with the same person doing the same thing at the same time. This overall frame immediately elicits
a juxtaposition. It automatically makes us compare and judge the two scenes, and since they are to
a large extent identical, it also has the effect of sharpening our senses as to what sets them apart. All
the scenes are accompanied by the tune of a classic Danish pop song from the sixties, and the facial
expressions of the old lady are often hard to distinguish. This means that the viewer needs to use
different senses carefully to discover the essential differences. These differences are primarily
embedded in the different sound environments that play an essential role in doing much of the
cognitive and affective work for the viewers. It is the difference between the sound of crispy salt

Seconds 0–3 3–9 9 - 14 14 - 15 15 - 18

Visual

Audio & Text Audio: Audio: Audio: Audio: Text:

Frame 1: salt flakes against Frame 1: ”mm” Frame 1: Frame 1: How good
porcelain. (tastes good). Something crispy should the
Cutlery on the
Frame 2: silence – being cut. elderly care be?
Frame 2: plastic being plate.
hesitates to eat.
ripped off. Frame 2: ”hmf” Audio: Music
Frame 2:
(disapproval) turned up.
Fork against
cardboard tray.

Figure 3. Temporal trajectory.

10
The link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4wYRcbAa2E&amp=&pbjreload=10
11
In this way, the video also makes use of condensation (El Refaie, 2003) in which a complex phenomenon is compressed into
a single image (or a series of images), as well as a personification of a broader problem.
12 T. W. JENSEN AND L. GREVE

touching the open sandwich and the porcelain plate versus the crackling sound of thin plastic in the
first scene. The sound of quiet delight in tasting the sandwich and the sound of fresh bread being cut
versus silence and quiet disgust and a sound of discomfort in the second scene. In the end of
the second scene the facial expressions of the lady also visibly differ for a second, emphasizing the
different reactions (see Figure 4). Crucially, we can hear and see the difference directly in the
environment with which the video presents us; they are invariants in the environment of the video
ready to be picked up.
These sensory inputs work as experiential affordances with a potential doubleness that marks,
captures, and constrains our experience. That is, we perceive them at the level of pragmatic
meaning, in terms of what we can do with them, or rather, how they offer another level of
meaningfulness. Treated in isolation, none of them entertain a doubleness, but treated as a
whole, including the juxtaposition of the two frames, they enact a metaphoricity or a potential
for “inter-affective meaning transformation” (Harrison and Fleming, this issue, p. 47). The two
different sensory environments tell us—cued by the textual information at the end of the video—
that the sounds and images are not just images of one random old lady but a metonymy of old
age and elderly care as such. We feel and experience the different conceptions of old age as the
differences in enjoying a delicious meal versus being left with an unsavory meal as your only
option. This doubleness in experience emerges only as we become emotionally engaged in

Figure 4. Different facial expressions.

 METAPHOR AND SYMBOL 13

perceiving the experiential affordances in the environment of the video. The video is about
feeling and seeing one experience (getting old and in need of help) in terms of another (having
a meal).

Conclusion
In the two analyses above we have shown how the environment scaffolds and constrains metaphoric
performance in different ways. To adequately capture the enactment of metaphor we need to
consider the emergence of metaphoricity as a process that is from the very start entangled with
environmental structures. The production of metaphor does not solely take place in there (in the
head), nor completely out there (in the social context); rather, metaphor performance is always
embedded in a relation between individual speakers (or writers) and their immediate or extended
environment in social interaction; between a cultural product and its viewers, and even between
sensory inputs (such as sound and image) and the totality of communicative devices in audiovisual
communication.
Today cognition is in many other disciplines regarded as integrated within a distributed system of
mind, body, and world and clearly the metaphor community could benefit from incorporating these
insights into their analytical framework as well. However, one may ask what difference this makes in
terms of analyzing metaphor. What, if anything, will people have to do differently in their work as
metaphor scholars if they wish to take an ecological perspective seriously? Clearly, this is a question
that needs to be answered if an ecological framework is to gain ground within the metaphor
community. However, a first vital step is not necessarily methodological but rather conceptual. It
concerns the very reconsideration of the notion of cognition that has been laid out in this article.
Indeed, if cognition is understood as an in-skull and in-body phenomenon alone it will be difficult, if
not impossible, to resolve the divide between a cognitivist and a social approach to metaphor that
has haunted the field during the past decades since the concepts of cognition and sociality are often
perceived as mutually exclusive (Hampe, 2017). Within an ecological framework, however, there is
no contradiction between studying the details of linguistic, multimodal, and embodied behavior
in situational contexts while considering the cognitive dimensions of this behavior as well since
cognition is re-conceptualized as constituted by actions in an environment.
A second, more methodological step would be to take the environmental (material and physical)
aspects of language much more seriously when conducting metaphor analysis. As we saw in the above
examples the physical arrangement and material elements mark a difference that makes a difference (to
paraphrase Bateson, 1972) in the actual analysis of metaphor and metaphoricity. Our ability to under-
stand and experience one kind of thing in terms of another seems more closely linked to the physical
circumstances of a situation than metaphor scholars used to think. Different physical (and social)
environments offer different types of affordances: The (often) solitary act of writing embedded in the
linear structure of texts offers possibilities for elaborating, refining, and editing metaphorical structure
due to the visual feedback from the text on the screen or paper, whereas the immediate embodied
actions in social interaction offers possibilities for metaphorical action more directly tied to bodily
movements and direct feedback from interlocutors, and finally metaphoricity in audiovisual products
offers possibilities for experiencing doubleness via movements and spatial configurations with a more
affective nature (Müller & Schmitt, 2015). From an ecological perspective, such environmental con-
siderations should be the starting point for any kind of metaphor analysis. Thus, we propose that to
understand the role of metaphor in cognition and communication the object of study is as much the
ecological niche in which metaphors arise as the supposed intentions or thought processes of indivi-
duals. Finally, this may also mark an expansion of the realm of metaphor analysis. Metaphor—or
metaphoricity—is no longer reserved for linguistic or embodied structures but can also be found in
many different human practices, ranging from rituals in religion or sport, architectural structure (see
Gibbs this issue for examples of this), cinematic experience (see Müller & Kappelhoff, 2018), to all kinds
of social and cultural practices involving some kind of symbolic activity even though it may not be
14 T. W. JENSEN AND L. GREVE

accompanied by words (or at least only in part). The cognitive revolution in metaphor studies more
than 30 years ago offered a new arena for the analysis of metaphor, in the case of not just poetic, but
everyday mundane language. An ecological perspective on metaphor may offer a further enlargement
and augmentation of that arena encompassing a multitude of human activity.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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