Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 460
The image decides what can be said
Conceptual Metaphor Theory reveals how recurring source-to-target mappings can make some organizational inferences feel natural while pushing others out of view
Premise
Metaphor can do more than decorate a message. Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) explains how recurring language can organize an abstract issue through a more familiar domain, carrying roles, causal relations, priorities, and possible actions with it. A reorganization described as a journey invites questions about direction, pace, obstacles, and destination; described as surgery, it foregrounds diagnosis, cutting, necessity, pain, and recovery.
The executive risk is rarely the vivid phrase alone. It is the inferential structure that becomes ordinary enough to disappear from scrutiny. Strategy, change, risk, and leadership language can repeatedly privilege one way of seeing the problem before evidence and options are formally compared.
What the model is: Conceptual Metaphor Theory in Knowledge →
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- FamilyModel
- CategoryTheories & Explanatory Models
- DomainMeaning & Clarity
What these mean
Editorial orientation · Family
Model
In this series, Model names the editorial family primarily used to understand and explain communication: theories, frameworks, effects, traditions, principles and other conceptual resources. It is an umbrella for a route into the field, not a claim that every included object is a predictive model.
Editorial orientation · Category
Theories & Explanatory Models
Explains how or why a communication process works by relating mechanisms, conditions or variables. Its value is an account that can guide inquiry into what produces an outcome, rather than a name for the outcome alone.
- KnowledgeConceptual Metaphor Theory
- Related briefLinguistic Relativity: Test Which Distinctions Translation Makes Routine
- Key conceptSource domain
- Key conceptTarget domain