Metaphors and judicial frame: why legal imagination (also) matters in the protection of fundamental rights in the digital age

The shift from a concept of the metaphor as an exclusively linguistic phenomenon to a concept that involves a cognitive process and a conceptual framework occurred with the publication of the volume Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff and Johnson in 1980.1 This study marked a genuine paradigm shift, from which research was launched into the role and potential of the metaphor in a wide variety of fields (from politics to religion, from economics to the law, and so on). Two central theses of modern cognitive linguistics were endorsed by the subsequent studies: the idea that language is not autonomous from other human cognitive activities (such as perceiving, reasoning, and so on) and the conviction that there is a close link between meanings and concepts. The fundamental theoretical assumption underlying research into the conceptual paradigm is therefore that the metaphor is more a phenomenon of thinking than of language.2 According to this view, every metaphor has a ‘source domain’, a ‘target domain’ and ‘source-to-target mapping’.3 The metaphorical processes that are developed through shifts from one domain to the other are considered to correspond to the cognitive structures that condition human understanding.