Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-21-2016
Abstract
In all facets of our lives, humans construct meaning to understand their place in the world and their relationships to one another and to broader environments. Within this semantic web, words, stories, and metaphors play a key role in the meaning-making process, with the latter serving as a particularly important means of fluidly integrating thoughts, values, and actions across cognitive domains. Derived from the Greek roots “meta” (over/across) and “phor” (to carry) and literally meaning “carrying across,” metaphor guides an understanding of one thing in terms of another. It is such a pervasive tendency in human speech and thought that researchers have established we utter one metaphor for every 10–25 words, or about six metaphors per minute (Geary 2011). This holds true in medicine and public health, wherein our prevalent, ever-evolving metaphors of disease have the social power to literally position people and resources within a culture.
Publication Title
The American Journal of Bioethics (AJOB)
Grant
5T32NR012704-05
Funder
National Institute of Nursing Research, National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Recommended Citation
Whitehouse, Peter J., "Asking More of Our Metaphors: Narrative Strategies to End the "War on Alzheimer's" and Humanize Cognitive Aging" (2016). Faculty Scholarship. 51.
https://commons.case.edu/facultyworks/51
Comments
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in The American Journal of Bioethics on 9/21/2016, available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/15265161.2016.1214307.