Joel Weinsheimer ( Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method 
“If thought is indivisible from language, then thought is more fundamentally metaphorical rather than logical. Metaphor is a specifically linguistic process of concept formation ( Bildung ), since a concept is altered and expanded when a word is transferred from one thing to another so that the new thing becomes intelligible. Yet the process is not merely verbal because it is the new thing to which the word is applied that changes and enlarges the concept, the meaning of the word. Metaphor is the linguistic basis of the bilateral and reciprocal nature of application that Gadamer underlines so strongly. Induction and deduction, by contrast, are unilateral, hierarchical, and unidirectional: they proceed either from the particular to the universal or vice versa, but not both. Metaphor, by contrast, consists in a reversible, oscillating, circular movement. If pages are like leaves, then leaves are also like pages. Each sets up a resonance in the other, thereby leveling the hierarchy. Whereas induction and deduction are vertical models of thought, concerned with the ‘higher’ universal and the ‘lower’ particular, metaphorical transference operates horizontally. Like the iconic relation of existent to existent, or the emanation of the real from the real, metaphor connects two things on the same plane. To say that a table has legs does not subsume it to the body; to say that the human body has a trunk does not abstract something common to it and a tree. Neither descending nor ascending, neither subsumption nor abstraction, metaphor is a lateral movement. Like deduction, metaphor begins with a concept, but the concept is changed by the transferred application; like induction, it ends with a new concept, but by the metamorphosis of a previous one. Because it is horizontal, metaphor flattens out the difference between particular and general, unfamiliar and familiar . . . . even in such defamiliarizing tranferences as ‘the pages of the tree,’ the unique appeals back to the familiar and the singular to the common.”
Why do I like this? Let me count the ways.
1) Metaphor is temporal (rather than spatial, perhaps), historical. Metaphorical transference expands the meaning and application of words and concepts as time moves forward. Words and concepts are elastic. There is growth and process and potentially progress. Deduction and induction by contrast operate in a timeless logical present.
2) Metaphor is linguistic. It affirms the intimate, inseparable connection of language and thought.
3) Because it is temporal and linguistic, metaphor is embedded in the real world, the world we inhabit. As Weinsheimer emphasizes, it’s not just that a concept is stretched by new metaphorical applications. Since the concept or word is applied to a new thing , the world is invariably involved. Deduction doesn’t need the world, or pretends it doesn’t. Metaphor eludes Platonism. Metaphor does not privilege the universal. Nor does metaphor dissolve into flux; it does not privilege the particular either.
4) Because it is temporal and linguistic, metaphor is social. It highlights the fact that thought and conceptualization take place in human interaction, dialogue, dialectic.
5) Metaphor acknowledges the inherent and irreducible relationality of things. There is an “oscillation” from one meaning to another, one thing to another, so that each determines the other.
6) #5 could be restated as, Metaphor acknowledges the perichoretic relationality of things.
7) And #6 could be expanded to say, Metaphor expresses a Trinitarian view of thought and language. Gadamer has uncovered vestigia Trinitatis in language and thought. In addition to the perichoretic echoes of the notions of “bilateral” and “reciprocal” and “reversible, oscillating, circular,” we can note how Gadamer (in Weinsheimer’s reading) connects metaphor to the “iconic relation” of existent to existent, the emanation of real from real, an emanation without dilution of reality. That is simply to note a created structure that reflects the Son’s eternal procession from the Father.