Radagast revived wrote:Hot-head, keep cool, boiling with rage, a fiery temper...
Oh, anger and heat, sure. It was anger and head I wasn't sure about - and again, 'hotheaded' doesn't mean angry, or even specifically quick to anger, but simply impetuous - which, yes, includes being susceptible to anger, but not just that.
And I dont subscribe to your definition of metaphor, which is based on poetic theory that only considers an expression to be metaphor if it is used creatively, neither do most cognitive linguists who have written about metaphor since Lakoff. Thats why cognitive linguists tend to talk about conceptual metaphors, there is an underlying conceptualization of a category such as e.g. anger, which then can be used to produce new metaphors that are instantly intelligible. For example I can say "his face was glowing with rage" or "she was flaming with anger" without having heard those expressions before and others are likely to understand them without even blinking, but if I say the anger "ran freezing through her bones" that draws on a different and perhaps novel conceptualization, and produces a different kind of meaning (I would say that in this case it forces the listener to imagine what that kind of anger would be like, because it is a new metaphor).
Actually, I think the relevant definition would be that a metaphor's sense is not truth-functional (or, in some theories, is truth-functional only in a problematic way) but yes, that does flow from the traditional meaning.
For instance, "Juliet is the sun" is clearly false taken in one way, but in another way it is not false. Crucially, this second way is not a way that is itself amenable to a direct propositional interpretation. Metaphors are directions toward
seeing as, as Davidson puts it, not
seeing that. [Metaphors can also be prima facie true, they're just a little harder to spot then. So when Juliet says 'a rose by any other name would smell as sweet', taken literally this is true, but the real meaning is metaphorical, expressing how she sees the issue of conflict between objective (social) and subjective identity, and that's not something that can straightforwardly be 'false').
We can contrast this with something like "his face was glowing with rage". In one sense this is false, and in another it may be true. But the sense in which it is true is not any qualitatively different from the sense in which it is false: it's just that "to glow" has two meanings "to emit light" and "(of human skin, particularly of the face) to redden". Somebody who is glowing with anger literally is glowing with anger - their face turns red and they are angry. Similarly, 'flaming', a more extreme equivalent ('flaming' also has a meaning regarding behaviour). There's nothing more meaningful or metaphorical here than when we say someone is 'glowering', it's just that in that case the light-emitting meaning is no longer used (or was never borrowed). Sometimes these polysemies originate in metaphor - other times the two meanings have 'always' co-existed, and sometimes the the 'metaphor' explanation is just a folk etymology for a naturally-derived homophony.
So when we talk about peoples moods or tempers or thoughts or minds being 'hot', or 'cold'/'cool', that's not a metaphor - that's just polysemy. 'Hot' and 'cold' happen to be the words we use to label two contrasting types of mental states (and 'hot headed' vs 'cool headed' is just a metonymy replacing 'mind' or 'mental state' (etc) with 'head', where those things are believed to be located.
So if I tell you that X is cool-headed, that Y is burning with rage, that Z is itching for a fight, you can tell me whether those things are true or not. Whereas if I tell you that A's rage is running freezing through his bones... you can't tell me whether that's true or not, because you don't know what it means. Because at the moment, until you and I and everyone else fixes a new meaning on those words (polysemy) or on that particular fossilised expression as a whole, that expression doesn't have a propositional meaning at all. Instead, it just provokes, or suggests, or inspires - it encourages you to see things
in a particular way. It's a metaphor. Similarly, if Romeo tells you that Juliet is the sun, you can't say that he's wrong - he's not giving you a fact, he's trying to show you how the facts appear to him, how he is experiencing them. Whereas if Romeo tells you that Juliet is burning with lust for him, we damn well can tell him that he's wrong (not that we know for sure ourselves, of course, but we can deduce from the evidence). Because whether Juliet is burning with lust is, even if that sense of 'burning' isn't the first one in the dictionaries, a very straightforward question with a clear meaning and a fact of the matter that we can work to discover.
I'm not saying that Lakoff doesn't have a point (though he's not exactly intellectually robust in how he expresses it!), that some patterns of polysemy may be different in different languages. But by co-opting the language of metaphor, he tries to sneak in psychological and conceptual baggage through the back door (that's not a metaphor - in meta-argument, 'the back door' is just a common name for the pathway of an unexamined belief) - and in the process he confuses the far more important and interesting distinction between depiction-that and depiction-as.
(And, indeed, what would be an interesting question, to what extent patterns of metaphor are influenced by either language or culture).
EDIT: but this is all at a tangent to the OP, and in any case we've had this argument before and clearly neither of us is going to change our mind.
I should also add that as well as polysemy and metaphor, we also have two other things in this issue: perception and perceptual classification (i.e. the belief that people actually feel particular things in parts of their body either alongside or as part of feeling an emotion), and then folk philosophy of mind (i.e. the belief that certain mental states have certain physical locations), both of which are interesting topics that may, at least in theory (if probably not in practice), be independent of both vocabulary issues and patterns of metaphor.