Describing an action, event or a state of affairs as a form of violence is often shorthand for condemning whatever falls under that description. To use the term in this way is to assume that violence is wrong by definition. Under the spell of this assumption, the meaning of violence has expanded to include a whole range of abstract categories: language and silence; knowledge, truth, reason and power; law-making and the destruction of law; science and symbols; family, class, race and gender; politics and economics; structures, institutions and nearly every other aspect of the social order.

For some, this semantic extension merely reflects the “protean” transformations of violence (Bernstein 2013, p. 177). For others, it is way of focusing our attention on a persistent but unacknowledged feature of the world. Either way, “violence” is a term of “scandalization” (Winter 2012, p. 197). However, we must distinguish between the motivation for adopting an expanded definition of violence and its intelligibility. We may often be oblivious to the ways in which merely living our lives can implicate us in various wrongs, but, as we will see, calling these “violence” does not add anything to our understanding of the nature of the wrong or what we might do to address it. The central claim in this chapter is that the semantic extension of violence is a metaphorical extension on the basis of a presumed analogy between the concrete domain of forces impacting on objects and the abstract domains of language, law, epistemology and the like. The problem is that this analogy does not hold, which undermines the validity of the arguments that rely on this assumption. This leaves us unable to make sense of violence at all, and consequently also unable to combat it, whatever “it” might be. I therefore argue that we ought to resist the semantic extension of violence for epistemic and moral reasons.

First, some clarifications. The aim here is not to distinguish between “real violence” and “pseudo-violence.” I therefore do not propose any ontology of violence. By implication, I also do not develop any theory about the causes of violence or the appropriate means for resisting or overcoming it. Finally, I do not mean to diminish our concern with violence as a moral problem. On the contrary, the issue is precisely that the indiscriminate application of the concept diminishes its moral force.

The first section provides a general overview of the process whereby concepts are extended from the concrete to the abstract. Drawing on evidence from cognitive linguistics, I explain this semantic extension in terms of conceptual metaphor. The second section examines conceptual metaphor as a product of analogical reasoning, whereby we draw inferences about a less well-understood abstract domain in light of our knowledge about a familiar source domain. The crucial insight here is that, while reasoning by analogy is a normal feature of human cognition, this reasoning is not automatically valid. We can employ analogies consciously and deliberately to generate valid conclusions, but we are also prone to fallacious reasoning under the spell of unconscious, spontaneous and automatic patterns of association. In the third section, I show that extended definitions of violence can be understood as cognitive metaphors underpinned by analogical reasoning, while, in the fourth section, I explain why and how this reasoning goes wrong. The specific criticisms are that arguments that employ such extended definitions either are circular or generate conclusions that have no semantic content or contradict other beliefs to which the reasoner is committed. In the final section of the chapter, I consider how we might sensibly think about violence without falling prey to the fallacious reasoning as explained in the earlier parts of the chapter.

Earlier I referred to the semantic extension of violence as a metaphorical extension. This in itself is not a criticism. “Metaphor” here does not mean a linguistic add-on to the “real,” literal meaning of violence. The semantic extension of violence to various abstract concepts is a means of cognition and not merely decoration. To understand this point, we need to understand something about conceptual metaphor.

What is a conceptual metaphor? It is a set of conceptual correspondences between two different conceptual domains. These correspondences are not linguistic expressions, but a way of thinking (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1993; Gibbs 2011; Thibodeau and Boroditsky 2011).¹ We think metaphorically when we understand one conceptual domain—in whole or in part—in terms of another. A “domain” in this sense is the background knowledge structure against which a concept is understood in a given language (Evans and Green 2006, p. 230). The conceptual domain from which we draw lexical terms to reason about another domain is the source domain, while the domain we are trying to understand is the target domain.

A conceptual metaphor, then, is a “cross-domain mapping” (Lakoff 1993, p. 203) between a source domain and a target domain. To think metaphorically is to map our knowledge about a source domain—the elements that constitute it, its salient features, and the relations between them—onto a target domain. While a conceptual metaphor is such a cross-domain mapping, a metaphorical expression is a particular linguistic realization of a cognitive metaphor (ibid.). Metaphorical expressions use words that are drawn from the terminology of the source domain to speak about the target domain. For example, we can think about the target domain “life” in terms of the source domain “journey.” This cross-domain mapping can then be realized in a variety of metaphorical expressions involving obstacles overcome, forks in the road, dead-ends, new directions, starting over, reaching one’s goals, losing one’s way, and so forth. The cognitive metaphor is the cross-domain mapping that underlies these different linguistic expressions.

We can further distinguish between basic or concrete domains and abstract domains. Concrete domains are still mental representations, but they are representations of embodied experiences: “our bodily movements through space, our manipulation of objects, and our perceptual interactions” (Johnson 1987, p. 29; see also Lakoff 1987, p. 267). These embodied experiences can be represented as images, while abstract domains do not have this kind of experiential grounding and cannot be represented as images (Lakoff and Turner 1989, p. 94; Clausner and Croft 1999, p. 14).

We do not engage in such a cross-domain mappings every time we think about a concept. In many cases, what starts out as a conceptual metaphor—that is, a deliberate mapping—becomes conventionalized, so that we are no longer aware of it as a metaphor. The cross-domain mapping then simply becomes part of the lexical meaning of a word. This is the so-called career of metaphor hypothesis (Bowdle and Gentner 2005; Gentner and Bowdle 2008).

Moreover, not all concepts are metaphorical. The sentence you have just read can be understood without any recourse to cognitive metaphor. Much of our everyday reasoning is conducted in terms of non-metaphorical concepts. However, when it comes to abstract—that is, non-imagistic—concepts, metaphor is the norm rather than the exception (Lakoff 1993, p. 205). Abstract reasoning nearly always involves a mapping of elements and relations from a concrete source domain onto the abstract target domain. In particular, our reasoning about abstract concepts frequently involves inferences about causes, forces, objects, and relations between objects that belong to the domain of spatial reasoning. Spatial concepts can be said to have “universal donor” status (Gentner et al. 2001, p. 242) in that they are the primary source domain for nearly all abstract target domains. In addition, a large part of our mental vocabulary (in English) consists of metaphorical extensions of terms that were first applied to visual perception and manual operation (Fischer 2014, p. 582).

This kind of cross-domain mapping is also a key element in the process of language development: concepts that are first applied to concrete actions, movements, objects and the relations between them are gradually mapped onto abstract concepts and “inferential generalizations [drawn] across different conceptual domains” (Lakoff 1993, p. 209). That is not to say that this experiential base predicts metaphors; they merely motivate the mappings we come up with (ibid., 241). Moreover, many of these mappings are conventional, in so far as they draw on the background knowledge of a particular group of speakers who have to coordinate linguistic expression in order to convey semantic meaning.

For the purposes of the argument I develop in this chapter, it is important to know that new mappings between concrete source domain and abstract target domains also play a role in the development of philosophical terminology (Fischer 2009, p. 80). When it comes to the terminology of violence, I suggest that the term is frequently used as a lexical expression of the metaphorical extension from the concrete source domain of physical forces working on bodies and objects to an increasing array of abstract target domains. My hypothesis, then, is that many contemporary theories of violence are attempts to map the physical acts of violation and the application of force onto new abstract target domains, and then to draw inferences about the latter based on our knowledge about the former.

At this point, the reader might well ask: If this kind of cross-domain mapping is simply how human cognition and language development work, why criticize the semantic extension of the concept violence? My reasons will become clearer after we have a better understanding of another feature of cognitive metaphor, namely analogical reasoning. In the next section, I explain how analogical reasoning relates to cognitive metaphor how it can go wrong, which sets the scene for an in-depth analysis of philosophical reasoning about violence in the third and fourth sections.

The ability to understand the unfamiliar in light of situations, experiences and mental representations with which we are already familiar is a key feature of human cognition (Gentner 1983; Holyoak and Thagard 1989; Holyoak 2012; Bartha 2013). In so far as conceptual metaphor involves a structural comparison between different mental representations and draws inferences about the target domain based on knowledge about the source domain, it involves a form of analogical reasoning. There is a kind of cognitive bootstrapping at work here, in which simple analogical reasoning gives rise to conceptual metaphors. This in turn enables us to engage in more complex, abstract reasoning. One analogy thus becomes the source for another and so on. It is by this process that whole sets of terms that are initially applied to the concrete and publicly visible are gradually applied to the less public and observable (Fischer 2009, p. 80).

While it has long been held that analogical reasoning is something we do consciously and deliberately, more recent evidence from different branches of cognitive science shows that a great deal of analogical reasoning is spontaneous, unconscious and automatic (Fischer 2014, p. 580; see also Day and Gentner 2007; Thibodeau and Boroditsky 2011). This doesn’t mean that we cannot logically and experimentally reconstruct the reasoning process after the fact; merely that it is not a matter of conscious deliberation before the fact. We are most likely to engage in such spontaneous analogical reasoning in the context of problem-solving. When we encounter an unfamiliar experience, phenomenon...