The Metaphoric Constitution of Temporal Thought and Linguistic Meaning in Philosophy of Language

This paper examines the relationship between metaphor, temporal cognition, and linguistic meaning within contemporary philosophy of language. Drawing on Elisabeth Camp’s account of metaphor as imaginative construal, this study explores how metaphor can reorganize inferential and perspectival structures without necessarily altering truth-conditional content.Temporality serves as the central case study. Time is not directly perceptible; its articulation relies extensively on systematic metaphorical mappings from embodied experience. Through analysis of recurrent schemas that organize inferential availability, modulate salience, and calibrate perspectival orientation, the paper traces how temporal discourse reflects structured cross-domain projections. Cross-linguistic findings from Aymara, Mandarin, Hebrew, and geocentric systems further indicate that temporal metaphors are neither incidental nor uniform. Rather, they are culturally sedimented yet cognitively consequential configurations that shape how temporal relations are apprehended and evaluated.The paper concludes that metaphor functions as a condition of intelligibility for abstract thought. In the case of temporality, metaphor neither constitutes an alternative ontology nor a dispensable rhetorical device; instead, it provides the structured field within which temporal phenomena become conceptually accessible and linguistically articulable.