Beyond Words: The Cognitive Force of Metaphor

A new study by Marie Teich, Wilmer Leal, and Jürgen Jost provides insights into the structural and cognitive dimensions of metaphors, revealing how they shape our thinking and language – far beyond their role as rhetorical devices. The article was recently published in PLOS Complex Systems.

To the point:

• Beyond Rhetoric: Metaphors are not just stylistic devices but stable linguistic and cognitive structures.
• Mapping Meaning: Two key metaphorical processes link concrete and abstract concepts in a structured network.
• Broad Impact: Findings have implications for linguistics, philosophy, AI, and the mathematics of cognition.

Metaphors are a fundamental aspect of human language and cognition, allowing us to understand complex concepts and relationships by mapping them onto more familiar and concrete domains. However, the nature of metaphors and how they work is still not well understood. In a new recent paper, published in PLOS Complex Systems, Max-Planck-Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences researchers Marie Teich and Wilmer Leal together with director Jürgen Jost have developed a formal framework and large-scale empirical methodology to analyze metaphors and their role in conceptual metaphor theory.

Key Findings

The study confirms the fundamental assumption in conceptual metaphor theory that metaphors are enduring linguistic and cognitive structures, not merely rhetorical figures. Using complex systems tools, the researchers identified a metaphor network with distinctions between abstract and concrete categories, and two significant metaphorical processes: mappings from concrete to abstract topics and the emergence of new mappings between concrete domains. The study also found that metaphors concentrate on two small sets of everyday topics, with one within the concrete group serving as both strong source and target domains, and the other in the abstract group primarily acting as targets. These findings indicate that metaphor is a creative process driven by contrast and tension between topics which allow re-conceptualizations and the emergence of new similarities. 

Implications and Future Research Directions

The study's findings have significant implications for researchers in cognitive linguistics and the philosophy of language, particularly those focused on conceptual metaphor theory, figurative language, and semantic structure. The large-scale empirical methodology proposed by the authors can be used to do fundamental research in Conceptual Metaphor Theory providing new insights into the nature of metaphor and figurative thinking.

Beyond the humanities, this work opens interesting research questions for machine learning and artificial intelligence, particularly in areas concerned with analogy and representation learning. The methods also hold promise for the mathematics of cognition and formal epistemology, offering tools to study how abstract meaning arises from structure-preserving mappings across conceptual domains.

About the authors:

Marie Teich completed her PhD at the Max-Planck-Institute of Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig in the subject of digital humanities. Before that, she studied Physics at the University of Heidelberg, focusing on questions of information theory and model inference in the context of cosmological models. Since 2024 Marie has moved to Kyiv, to the American University Kyiv. Parallel, she is working at the Kyiv School of Economics and several civil adult educational platforms in Ukraine. She co-organizes international academic summer schools and research that focuses transdisciplinary on Ukrainian sociatal and cultural transformations.

Wilmer Leal is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Florida working on applications of category theory and sheaf theory to chemistry, temporal data, neural network dynamics, and process design. He develops formal tools and code implementations to model reasoning and structure in complex systems across disciplines, often with the goal of deriving dynamic programming algorithms from categorical or sheaf-theoretic formulations. Before joining the University of Florida, he obtained his Ph.D. summa cum laude from Leipzig University and the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences. He is a DAAD and Lindau Alumni, and currently serves as Computer Scientist in Residence in the Department of Chemical Engineering at UF. Prior to his doctoral studies, he earned bachelor’s degrees in both chemistry and mathematics from the University of Pamplona, Colombia.

Jürgen Jost is the founding and longtime director (since 1996) of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig and serves as an Honorary Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Leipzig. He is also a principal investigator at ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig and a Guest Member of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. Jost is a member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz, the Saxonian Academy of Sciences in Leipzig, and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and serves as an External Faculty Member at the Santa Fe Institute for the Sciences of Complexity (USA). He has received several prestigious honors, including the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG) in 1993, an ERC Advanced Grant (VARIOGEO) in 2010, and the Science Prize of the Teubner Foundation for the Advancement of Mathematical Sciences in 2018. He is also a Fellow of the Max Planck School of Cognition.

His emeritus group conducts interdisciplinary research that combines pure mathematics with innovative approaches to complex systems across diverse scientific domains, introducing mathematical concepts and methods in novel ways.