Conduit Metaphor

Conduit Metaphor

The idea of conduit metaphor can be found in the article "Body, Brain, and Communication: An interview with George Lakeoff" by "Iain A. Boal". In this article the person interviewed is George Lakeoff a linguistics professor at University of California (Berkeley). Boal in this article discusses what the conduit metaphor really means and what significance it holds for common people. In this article, other aspect of conduit metaphor that is discussed includes communication on the World Wide Web. Conduit metaphor is a metaphor that describes communication between two mediums. Conduit metaphor proposes that ideas are objects and are transferred via a channel. Although it has its own limitations, it is very important in our society, today.

Let us begin by discussing how conduit metaphor's discoverer, Michael Reddy, defined it. According to Reddy "our major metaphor for communication can be derived from a general metaphor for mind in which ideas are considered as objects and thought as manipulation of objects"; memory acts as storage. So, ideas or objects can be retrieved from the memory. Taking this into consideration he came up with the theory of conduit metaphor which he described ideas as objects that can be put into words; language was described by a Reddy as a container, and thus you send ideas in words over a conduit (a channel of communication) to someone else who then extracts the ideas from the words. So, it is implied that understanding of an idea or concept is achieved intuitively in the brain and thus a better conduit leads to a better understanding of what is being said.

Lots of examples can be found from our dialect, which are in accordance with this conduit metaphor theory. E.g. "Did you get it", "The professor stuffed our heads with so many things today", "It went right over my head"etc. are all examples that imply that something (an idea) was being sent out and the listener had to grab it.

One thing that comes as an immediate result of conduit metaphor is that ideas can be extracted, and that it is possible for them to exist independently of people. This implies that meaning is a thing. This may seem like a very provocative idea to a common naive person. But it is true only in certain special circumstances and fails to work in certain cases. Let's take an example. I emigrated from India to U.