隐喻与中医理论创新

Metaphor in the Theoretical Innovation of Traditional Chinese Medicine

隐喻通过熟悉的、已知的“始源域”来认知不熟悉、未知的“目标域”,是人类的一种基本的认知思维模式,其在自然科学和社会科学的创新中发挥着重要的作用。在自然语言中,隐喻无处不在,传统中医概念与理论是以天文、地理、人事等为“始源域”,投射到“目标域”人体,而构建起来的基于隐喻认知的理论。随着现代医学的飞速发展,当代中医将面临许多中医学从未发现或意识到的人体生命现象与临床问题,现象需要解释,问题需要解决,二者都需要理论创新。隐喻蕴含的类比创新属性和中医学的隐喻认知特点,共同决定了当代中医理论创新仍然需要隐喻作为重要的科学探究模式与解释方法论。

Metaphor is a basic cognitive thinking mode of human beings to recognize unfamiliar and unknown“target domains”through familiar and known“source domains”,which plays an important role in the innovation of natural and social sciences.Metaphor is everywhere in natural language.The concepts and theories of traditional Chinese medicine(TCM)are based on metaphor cognition by projecting astronomy,geography,social fields,and other source domains to the target domain,the human body.With the rapid development of modern medicine,contemporary TCM faces many unprecedented or unrealized human life phenomena and clinical problems.The phenomena need to be explained and the problems need to be solved,both of which require theoretical innovation.The attributes of analogy and innovation contained in metaphor and the cognitive characteristics of metaphor in TCM together determine the fact that modern theoretical innovation of TCM still needs metaphor as an important mode of scientific exploration and interpretation methodology.