Metaphors, Stories, and Knowledge of the World

In recent years, metaphors and stories have been the subject of much analysis by scholars of cognitive science. These researches showed that both metaphors and stories can be viewed as tools for thinking, and that such metaphors as the stories are expressions of that imaginative rationality that plays a role so important in the theory of embodied cognition. This paper starts right from the relationships between metaphors and stories, in the belief that, in a narrative, every metaphor is not only in context, but also takes a meaning not reducible to that which would singularly. I will argue that the narrative is a kind of “connective tissue”: the story organizes image schemas, metaphoric projections, conceptual and linguistic metaphors in terms of a network. I then ask how it is this process of integration. To this end, I will discuss some arguments put forward by narratology, comparing them with some thesis developed by the narrative theory of the philosopher Paul Ricoeur. On the one hand, we will see the important function that is performed in the narrative by the categories of time, agent, agency, process, and the resulting continuity exists between stories and scientific forms of thought. On the other hand, we see that the narrative does not just set the world, to give order and consistency, but also helps to refigure the world, to offer a different image of it. This aspect of the narrative also seems important to extend the reach of narrative in science.