Beyond Representation: Metaphor as a Mechanism for Interpersonal Reconstruction of Embodied Experience.

Abstract

Human experience is fundamentally embodied, involving the continuous interaction of external perception, bodily awareness, physiological states, and affective responses. However, because subjective experiences are multidimensional and personally situated, communicating their qualitative character presents a fundamental challenge. Existing theories of metaphor have primarily emphasized its role in conceptual representation, reasoning, and meaning construction, whereas less attention has been given to how metaphor enables individuals to make embodied experiences accessible to others. This paper proposes that metaphor functions as a mechanism for the interpersonal reconstruction of embodied experience. The central argument is that metaphor does not merely represent one concept through another; rather, it provides structured experiential cues that integrate perceptual, bodily, and affective dimensions, enabling listeners to partially reconstruct aspects of how a speaker experiences a situation. This reconstruction does not involve the transfer of identical subjective states but the construction of potentially overlapping experiential representations shaped by the source domain, the listener's experiential history, and contextual interpretation. By extending embodied approaches to metaphor with an interpersonal perspective, this framework contributes to broader psychological accounts of communication, social cognition, and the sharing of subjective experience.