On-the-Fly Mental Metaphors – 2019 Psychological Review Articles

This pilot study takes its trajectory from Gentner and Grudin’s ‘The Evolution of Mental Metaphors in Psychology: A 90-Year Retrospective’ (1985). Their chief goal was to trace changes in the models of the mind that psychologists had held in the first hundred years of psychological research by methodically sampling nine decades of the long-running and prestigious Psychological Review. The importance they attributed to metaphorical expressions in scientific communication to the point of reflecting and even shaping such models of the mind—a central point in psychological research—is particularly appealing to a linguist. This innovative research is still relevant to contemporary discourse. There are ongoing discussions around the use and importance of metaphors in scientific reasoning and science communication (Taylor and Dewsbury 2018). The present study, limited to the year 2019, focuses on the evolution in the kinds of metaphors and metaphorical expressions utilized to describe mental phenomena by the psychologists who chose the Psychological Review as their medium. Predictably, the nature of the mental metaphors has continued to change over time. It is perhaps worth remarking that the mind can be described (and/ or ‘metaphorized’) in terms of its processes, which, in the articles under analysis, are researched mainly in the domain of cognitive psychology. There are four articles on cognitive psychology out of five in the chosen issue. Apparently, there is still a tendency to use metaphorical expressions as functional ways to shape scientific explanations. Continuity and differences from Gentner and Grudin’s study were highlighted and discussed.