A CLEARING IN THE FOREST

Most lawyers understand metaphor as merely a matter of expression-perh aps useful for rhetorical purposes, but perilous to the analytic logic that should direct the movement from an authoritative rule to the dec ision of a concrete case. Many philosophers understand metaphor as ent irely devoid of semantic content. For them, linguistic meaning is soci ally contingent and essentially arbitrary; metaphors are powerful devi ces capable of affecting the senses and sometimes giving birth to new meanings. Advances in cognitive theory undermine these assumptions abo ut reason and meaning. The emerging picture is of a human rationality that is embodied rather than abstract, imaginative rather than proposi tional, flexible rather than definitional, and grounded in experience rather than involving deduction from abstract principles. Cognitive pr ocesses such as conceptual metaphor, metonymy, image schemas, and radi al categories are central to human reason and understanding. Indeed, h uman rationality cannot be understood apart from the pivotal role of e mbodied imagination in all aspects of cognition, language, and thought . These developments alter the contours of entire debates in numerous disciplines, especially in law. A human rationality that is grounded i n experience supports neither the determinacy aspired to by analytic l ogic nor the arbitrariness assumed by most social coherence theories. On one hand, the import of transfigurative processes such as metaphor is that there can be no linear, algorithmic function that links experi ential input to imaginative output. But, on the other hand, rationalit y is not purely arbitrary, subjective, or radically indeterminate; it is framed and constrained by the systematic nature of these conceptual processes. In this article, I demonstrate these claims by exploring h ow cognitive metaphor shapes our fundamental conception of law. Our co nventional understand-of law is as an external restraint on an otherwi se unfettered individual freedom-a forest of constraint surrounding th e clearing of freedom. An examination of this apparently trite metapho r reveals that it is rich in conceptual content, nonarbitrary in meani ng, complex in structure, and systematic in operation. It demonstrates the ways in which conceptual metaphor makes possible comprehension, d efines patterns of inference, and enables semantic productivity. It re veals, in short, the richly complex and deeply imaginative character o f an embodied human rationality.