The assertion that figure is conceptual is ancient. It is common in the history of rhetoric, despite I. A. Richards's implicit and unaccountable claim in 1936 to have discovered the conceptual status of figure. In Longinus's On the Sublime , we find the claim that figural understanding is all the more powerful when it is so automatic that we do not recognize its figural nature. This view places Burke in a tradition of rhetoricians whose famous exemplars include Giambattista Vico. Several literary critics have proposed that the everyday mind is irreducibly imaginative.
Thought is metaphoric . . .
Aristotle discussed ways in which specific figurative usages can be appropriate or inappropriate, and he claimed that metaphors based on analogical conceptual relations must have two reciprocal forms, reversing source and target. In 1982, Calvert Watkins argued that poetic thought is inseparable from everyday language and that to analyze everyday language we must analyze poetic forms of thought. Indo-European etymologies, for example, often rest upon metonymy and metaphor. But essentially, we have had to wait until the last twenty years for systematic empirical research on the cognitive mechanisms of figural thought, the constraints on figural thought, the system of conventional figural conceptions, the relation of figural thought to language, and the ontogenetic development of figural thought. A loose association of cognitive scientists, linguists, rhetoricians, philosophers, and psychologists has come to test the proposition that conceptual projection is basic to thought and language.