Risch Andreas.pdf - Osteopathic Research

about the osteopathic view on health and disease. For him it’s important to define
health in it’s relationship to disease distinguishing at the same time between disease
and illness. He also stresses the issue if osteopaths look at health from an ethical
point of view (life-death) or a biological one (wellbeing-suffering) and where is the
difference between osteopathy and allopathic medicine. In the newer osteopathic
literature the issue of how osteopaths make their personal and professional
experience and how it can be evaluated is discussed.
However, difficulties in understanding the underlying processes of what the concepts
of osteopathy consist of still remain. Therefore by examining osteopathic language
especially by analyzing it’s metaphoric concepts about health can help to gain a
better understanding of the philosophical, scientific and professional concepts of
osteopathy related to thought, communication and practice in a contemporary, sociocultural
context.
4 Metaphor and modern metaphor theories
The word metaphor derives from old Greek language and means literally “to carry
over” or “to transfer”. A metaphor “is projecting or mapping” a certain understanding
or experience from a “source domain” on to a “target domain” and provides meaning
and explanation, e.g. “Truth is like Fire”, “Speaking the truth is shining and burning”.
Although the metaphor was considered for long time in history somewhat tricky and
treacherous and primarily decorative it received a complete new meaning in the 20 th
century with the progressive research in cognitive linguistics. Richards and Black
attributed the metaphor for the first time a cognitive quality in their theory of
interaction believing that the interaction of words is a creative process and help the
emergence of meaning.
With the publication of their book “Metaphors we live by” G. Lakoff and M. Johnson
(1980) set a milestone for metaphor research in philosophy, psychology and
cognitive linguistics.