Account of One-Party Rational Arguments by Lakoff and Johnson

A metaphor could be understood as a symbolic modelling of a concept. As in engineering and physics where models are used all the time to represent complex physical phenomena by simpler conceptual devices, metaphors might be simplified representations (i.e. models) of a more complex reality. In the book "The Metaphors We Live By" pp. 88, Profs. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson present an interesting sort of "physiology" of one-party rational arguments based on three conceptual metaphors: AN ARGUMENT IS A JOURNEY/PATH, AN ARGUMENT IS A CONTAINER and AN ARGUMENT IS A BUILDING. Each of these three handle a particular, but complimentary, aspect of the concept of rational argument. Quoting from the book:

Content: You have to have enough supporting evidence and say enough of the right things in order to make your point and to overcome any possible objections.
Progress: You have to start with generally agreed upon premises and move in linear fashion toward some conclusion.
Structure: RATIONAL ARGUMENT requires appropriate logical connections among the various parts.
Strength: The ability of the argument to withstand assault depends on the weight of the evidence and the tightness of the logical connections.
Basicness: Some claims are more important to maintain and defend than others, since subsequent claims will be based upon them.
Obviousness: In any argument there will be things which are not obvious. These need to be identified and explored in sufficient detail.
Directness: The force of an argument can depend on how straightforwardly you move from premises to conclusions.
Clarity: What you are claiming and the connections between your claims must be sufficiently clear for the reader to understand them.

 The authors state that the three metaphors of the same concept are linked by shared entailments and explain better the dimensions of the concept. I think that the three metaphors are instances of a more encompassing metaphor, namely a pipe. This has the three elements, i.e. path (beginning, development, ending), container (contain water) and structure (how stable is the concatenation of "pipes" and "angles" of the reasoning?). The more general pipe metaphor is better explained though by pointing to the three features in the sub-metaphors.

How does this approach match with Toulmin's?

to be continued