Metaphorical Imagination

This book tells the story of an intellectual journey with metaphor. It questions the basis of evidence in social research, especially the 21st century fallacies surrounding it. Metaphor itself serves as the story-teller here.

As the book shows, social research evidence is hidden deep inside metaphor, and is uncovered by the use of the social research method. Through research we make methodological compromises to ensure our intellectual survival. It also highlights that all truth-values are embodied, paradoxical, metaphorical, and postdisciplinary, and that ethically responsible research is possible only within embodied cognition of a research problem. A researcher’s spatiotemporal context converges and diverges across a body cell to the celestial universe, and from all-realist human history to all-forthcoming, over a momentary fee will, as one embodied cognition.

Building upon embodiment philosophy, alethic hermeneutics, critical social theory, and ethical intuitivism, the text revisits the epistemology and ontology of evidence and challenges the dualist norms of social research, points to the failings, and flags up directions for researchers who take evidence seriously. It introduces a cognitive methodology in social research that creates a normative balance for an experiential-intuitive approach to ethically responsible social research. It also claims a unique cognitive schema—the prodigal-within-prodigy paradox, which unifies the traditional theory of metaphor and the post-1980s cognitive theory of metaphor, characterised by mutuality in divergence and convergence of research evidence.