In actual fact, peak world population growth was reached in 1963 with an annual growth rate of 2.3 percent. The implicit content conveyed by this metaphor is that population growth is a powerful force which has been suddenly unleashed and which is expanding rapidly in all directions, destroying everything around it. For instance, the common conception of demographic growth is heavily shaped by the metaphor “population growth is a bomb”, which was popularized by Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book entitled The Population Bomb.

An argument can of course be seen in other ways than as a battle, but we use this concept to shape the way we think of argumentation and the way we go about arguing.īecause metaphors make abstract things concrete, they are a powerful tool for influencing the way that people think of certain things and phenomena.

The very way an argument is conceptualized is shaped by this metaphor. This metaphor shapes our way of viewing and talking about arguments, so that it is not uncommon to hear people say things like “He won that argument,” “I attacked a weak point in his argument” or “My argument got shot down at the last board meeting.” Since linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson published their monograph Metaphors We Live By in 1980, scholars have devoted considerable attention to the use of metaphor as a cognitive tool that enables people to apply what they know from their direct physical and social experience to understanding more abstract things.įor example, a common metaphor used with respect to argumentation is that “argument is war”.

Lakoff metaphors we live by