It is neither possible nor appropriate to review here the literature on the many dimensions of metaphor relevant to this section. Figure 1 distinguishes different concerns.
 

It is intriguing to note the kinds of policy-making environment envisaged in science fiction for the distant future. But even million of years hence, there is an unfortunate similarity to the dynamics of board meetings today, just as they themselves appear to bear a strong resemblance to those in Roman times. Even in imagining such distant futures, galactic councils are envisaged as operating under some variant of Robert's Rules of Order.

1. Use of metaphors in business

This section provides commentaries related to the challenge of the Patterns and Metaphors area of the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential

Related Sections

1. Central role of "symbol"

1. Ubiquity of symbols

1. Context

With the explosion of information in a multiplicity of fields, it is natural that many concepts have emerged in different domains. Whether in presenting new concepts for communication amongst peers, or for the education of a wider audience, or in organizing shared concepts in policy making, there is a tendency to group concepts into sets.

1. Societal problem setting

In a key paper, Donald Schön (1979) argues that "the essential difficulties in social policy have more to do with problem setting than with problem solving, more to do with ways in which we frame the purposes to be achieved than with the selection of optimal means for achieving them." For Schön "the framing of problems often depends upon metaphors underlying the stories which generate problem setting and set the direction of problem solving."

1. Root metaphors

There is of course a multitude of metaphors on which politicians draw to increase the power of their communication and these have been extensively studied (see Van Noppen, 1985), including metaphors implicit in the Communist Manifesto (Angonet et al, 1980). It has even been said that "The politician without metaphor is a ship without sails" (Fairlie, 1979). But such uses of metaphor tend to correspond to the communicative or illustrative function.

In the humanities subtle distinctions have long been made between metaphor, analogy, allegory, synecdoche, metonymy, parable, symbol, and the like. The assumption made here is that these may usefully be considered as forming a continuum that may indeed be segmented in a number of ways. But it would seem to be the case that the long and intense debate on the appropriateness of some particular pattern of segmentation has obscured the possibility of vital and unexplored uses of metaphor in response to the crisis of the times.

1. Models, analogies and metaphors

1. Resurgence of metaphor

Since the early 1970s there has been a progressive increase in studies of metaphor. Interest in the subject outside the literary world has markedly increased, accompanied by a number of breakthroughs in understanding about the function of metaphor. There is a very extensive literature on metaphor. A bibliography of post-1970 publications on metaphor records 4193 items (J P van Noppen, et al, 1985). A subsequent edition of this bibliography covering the 1980s, contains some 3,500 entries (J P van Noppen, et al, 1990).