Page "Conceptual metaphor" Paragraph 26

Lakoff's 1987 work, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, answered some of these criticisms before they were even made: he explores the effects of cognitive metaphors ( both culturally specific and human-universal ) on the grammar per se of several languages, and the evidence of the limitations of the classical logical-positivist or Anglo-American School philosophical concept of the category usually used to explain or describe the scientific method.

Lakoff's reliance on empirical scientific evidence, i. e. specifically falsifiable predictions, in the 1987 work and in Philosophy in the Flesh ( 1999 ) suggests that the cognitive-metaphor position has no objections to the scientific method, but instead considers the scientific method a finely developed reasoning system used to discover phenomena which are subsequently understood in terms of new conceptual metaphors ( such as the metaphor of fluid motion for conducted electricity, which is described in terms of " current " " flowing " against " impedance ," or the gravitational metaphor for static-electric phenomena, or the " planetary orbit " model of the atomic nucleus and electrons, as used by Niels Bohr ).