Metaphor as a Way of Thought

By: Boris Kriger

Narrated by: Bryan L. Bernard

This audiobook explores metaphor not as an ornament of language but as the fundamental mechanism of human cognition. It argues that every act of understanding—scientific, poetic, or everyday—is rooted in the transfer of structure from one experiential domain to another. Metaphor is presented as the mind’s first technology, a generative tool through which complexity is compressed into meaningful form. Far from being a deviation from literal speech, it is shown to be the very fabric of thought itself, underlying logic, mathematics, and the formation of conceptual categories.
Revisiting Donald Davidson’s influential thesis that metaphors have no meaning beyond their literal content, the audiobook reconstructs the debate that defined late twentieth-century philosophy of language. While acknowledging Davidson’s rigor and his commitment to semantic clarity, it demonstrates the limits of his reductionism by tracing how metaphor actually produces new cognitive and ontological structures. Through dialogue with Black, Ricoeur, Lakoff, and contemporary cognitive science, the author situates metaphor at the crossroads of philosophy, linguistics, and natural philosophy, restoring its status as a principle of knowledge rather than a stylistic device.
Integrating insights from physics, biology, and psychology, Metaphor as a Way of Thought proposes a unified vision of meaning creation across disciplines. The audiobook concludes that to think is to inhabit metaphors, to live within patterns of resemblance that shape perception and reality alike. Each dominant metaphor—of flow, light, path, or network—functions as a world-making matrix, defining how societies imagine time, matter, and mind. Thus, understanding and transforming our metaphors becomes an ethical and creative task: by changing the images through which we think, we change the world we live in.

©2025 Boris Kriger (P)2025 Boris Kriger