Metaphor Mapping

Origin. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980).

Mechanism. Makes explicit the metaphor already structuring the problem's description, then substitutes alternatives. Conceptual metaphors carry entailments; a problem described as a battle imports enemies, victory, and casualties, and the imported entailments constrain solutions before any deliberation begins.

Procedure. Extract the governing metaphor from the language actually used. State its entailments. Substitute a metaphor with different entailments (battle → dance → garden → conversation). Re-derive the solution space under each.

Applies to. Domains where the vocabulary is settled and the vocabulary is the problem — organizational conflict, disease, negotiation, language policy.

Limitations. A substituted metaphor is not a neutral one. Its entailments are simply different, and the practitioner must state which correspondences hold and which fail, or the substitution smuggles in a new set of unexamined commitments.