The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"--metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them. In (...) this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language. (shrink)

A controversy has arisen over the "interpersonal simulations" used by Bern to support his contention that his self-perception theory accounts for cognitive dissonance phenomena. Specifically, the critics challenge the implication of his analysis that the premanipulation attitudes of subjects in dissonance experiments are not salient in their postmanipulation phenomenology. The present investigation answers this challenge by demonstrating that subjects in a typical forced-compliance experiment are not only unable to recall their premanipulation attitudes correctly, but they actually perceive their postmanipulation attitudes (...) to be identical to their premanipulation attitudes. Accordingly, they do not perceive any attitude "change." The epistemological aspects of the interpersonal simulation methodology are also discussed. (shrink)