Further Reading: The Anchoring of First Explanations

Essential

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press. The foundational work on how metaphors structure thought. Lakoff and Johnson demonstrate that metaphors are not just decorative language but the cognitive infrastructure through which we understand abstract concepts. Essential for understanding root metaphors. (Tier 1)

Pinker, S. (2002). The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Viking. A detailed account of how the blank slate metaphor shaped behavioral science, education, and social policy. Pinker traces the political and moral forces that maintained the metaphor beyond its empirical warrant. (Tier 1)

The Chemical Imbalance Model

Moncrieff, J. et al. (2022). "The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review." Molecular Psychiatry, 28, 3243–3256. The comprehensive review that summarized decades of evidence against the serotonin hypothesis. (Tier 1)

Kirsch, I. (2010). The Emperor's New Drugs. Basic Books. A careful analysis of antidepressant efficacy data, arguing that much of the benefit is due to placebo effects. Controversial but well-sourced. (Tier 1)

Harrington, A. (2019). Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness. W. W. Norton. A historical account of how biological psychiatry became dominant and the framing consequences of that dominance. (Tier 1)

Root Metaphors Across Fields

Research on root metaphors in specific fields includes: Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor (1978) on disease metaphors, Evelyn Fox Keller's work on metaphors in biology, and Donald Schön's The Reflective Practitioner (1983) on how professional knowledge is structured by tacit frameworks. (Tier 2)

The Rational Actor in Economics

Thaler, R. H. (2015). Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics. W. W. Norton. Thaler's personal account of challenging the rational actor metaphor from within economics. Entertaining and informative. (Tier 1)

Gigerenzer, G. (2008). Rationality for Mortals. Oxford University Press. Gigerenzer's argument for "ecological rationality" — that human decision-making is adapted to real environments, not optimized against abstract benchmarks. A genuine alternative framing. (Tier 1)

Path Dependence

Arthur, W. B. (1994). Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy. University of Michigan Press. The formal economic treatment of path dependence — how initial conditions constrain subsequent trajectories. Directly applicable to conceptual path dependence. (Tier 1)

For Instructors

The "Name the Metaphor" exercise is remarkably effective. Ask students: "What is your field's root metaphor?" Most will be unable to answer immediately. The struggle to identify it — and the surprise when they succeed — demonstrates the invisibility of the constraint more effectively than any lecture.