IS: Does Complexity have a circularity problem WAS: Any non-biological complex systems?

[Steve Smith]

Dave -

Thanks for weighing in here, my own studies have not been so formal nor probably as deep.   I have to admit to not knowing that cognitive anthropology was a subject, just as Nick introduced me to evolutionary psychology as it's own field!

I appreciate your introduction of epiphor, paraphor and dead metaphor.  I began a discursion here (which I fortunately deleted) which lead me to read some MacCormac and more to the point Philip Wheelwright on the modern, technical usage of epiphor and diaphor, from the Greek/Aristotelian epiphoria and diaphoria.   I particularly find your coining of paraphor, as I think this is as common in our modern discourse/thinking as "confirmation bias".

I also like your point that the "Scientific Method" is more metaphor than reality, or more to the point, a narrative device to show how a discovery "might have been made" when more often than not, it was backed into while bumping around looking for something entirely different, and often involving a "flash of insight" before then being laboriously wrung out and demonstrated using the somewhat more "engineering" oriented methods of the "Scientific Method" to move from motivated hypothesis to strongly validated theory.

I don't know if you regularly attend WedTech, but this depth/topic of discussion might motivate me to make the long trek into town...  

- Steve

On 6/10/17 9:36 AM, Prof David West wrote:

long long ago, my master's thesis in computer science and my phd dissertation in cognitive anthropology dealt extensively with the issue of metaphor and model, specifically in the area of artificial intelligence and cognitive models of "mind." the very first academic papers I published dealt with this issue (They were in AI MAgazine, the 'journal of record' in the field at the time.

My own musings were deeply informed by the work of Earl R. MacCormac: A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor and Metaphor and Myth in Science and Religion.

MacCormac argues that metaphor 'evolves' from "epiphor" the first suggestion that something is like something else to either "dead metaphor" or "lexical term" depending on the extent to which referents suggested by the first 'something'  are confirmed to correlate to similar referents in the second "something." E.G. an atom is like a solar system suggests that a nucleus is like the sun and electrons are like planets plus orbits are at specific intervals and electrons can be moved from one orbit to another by adding energy (acceleration) just like any other satellite. As referents like this were confirmed the epiphor became a productive metaphor and a model, i.e. the Bohr model. Eventually, our increasing knowledge of atoms and particle/waves made it clear that the model/metaphor was 'wrong' in nearly every respect and the metaphor died. Its use in beginning chemistry suggests that it is still a useful tool for metaphorical thinking; modified to "what might you infer/reason, if you looked at an atom as if it were a tiny solar system."

In the case of AI, the joint epiphors — the computer is like a mind, the mind is like a computer — should have rapidly become dead metaphors. Instead they became models "physical symbol system" and most in the community insisted that they were lexical terms (notably Pylyshyn, Newell, and Simon). To explain this, I added the idea of a "paraphor" to MacCormac's evolutionary sequence — a metaphor so ingrained in a paradigm that those thinking with that paradigm cannot perceive the obvious failures of the metaphor.

MacCormac's second book argues for the pervasiveness of the use and misuse of metaphor and its relationship to models (mathematical and iillustrative) in both science and religion. The "Scientific Method," the process of doing science, is itself a metaphor (at best) that should have become a dead metaphor as there is abundant evidence that 'science' is not done 'that way' but only after the fact as if it had been done that way. In an Ouroborosian twist, even MacCormac;s theory of metaphor is itself a metaphor.

If this thread attracts interest, I think the work of MacCormac would provide a rich mine of potential ideas and a framework for the discussion. Unfortunately, it mostly seems to be behind pay walls — the books and JSTOR or its ilk.

dave west

On Fri, Jun 9, 2017, at 03:11 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

I meant to spawn a fresh proto-thread here, sorry.

Given that we have been splitting hairs on terminology, I wanted to at least OPEN the topic that has been grazed over and over, and that is the distinction between Model, Metaphor, and Analogy.  

I specifically mean

1. Mathematical Model
   
2. Conceptual Metaphor
   
3. Formal Analogy
   

I don't know if this narrows it down enough to discuss but I think these three terms have been bandied about loosely and widely enough lately to deserve a little more explication?

I could rattle on for pages about my own usage/opinions/distinctions but trust that would just pollute a thread before it had a chance to start, if start it can.

A brief Google Search gave me THIS reference which looks promising, but as usual, I'm not willing to go past a paywall or beg a colleague/institution for access (I know LANL's reference library will probably get this for me if I go in there!).

http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9780631221081_chunk_g97806312210818

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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Russ Abbott]

I had never heard the word ouroboros before Dave used it. Thanks for the term. But even though I had never heard the term, the ouroboros was the image that came to mind when I first learned recursion!

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 12:22 PM Steven A Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dave -

Thanks for weighing in here, my own studies have not been so formal nor probably as deep.   I have to admit to not knowing that cognitive anthropology was a subject, just as Nick introduced me to evolutionary psychology as it's own field!

I appreciate your introduction of epiphor, paraphor and dead metaphor.  I began a discursion here (which I fortunately deleted) which lead me to read some MacCormac and more to the point Philip Wheelwright on the modern, technical usage of epiphor and diaphor, from the Greek/Aristotelian epiphoria and diaphoria.   I particularly find your coining of paraphor, as I think this is as common in our modern discourse/thinking as "confirmation bias".

I also like your point that the "Scientific Method" is more metaphor than reality, or more to the point, a narrative device to show how a discovery "might have been made" when more often than not, it was backed into while bumping around looking for something entirely different, and often involving a "flash of insight" before then being laboriously wrung out and demonstrated using the somewhat more "engineering" oriented methods of the "Scientific Method" to move from motivated hypothesis to strongly validated theory.

I don't know if you regularly attend WedTech, but this depth/topic of discussion might motivate me to make the long trek into town...  

- Steve

On 6/10/17 9:36 AM, Prof David West wrote:

long long ago, my master's thesis in computer science and my phd dissertation in cognitive anthropology dealt extensively with the issue of metaphor and model, specifically in the area of artificial intelligence and cognitive models of "mind." the very first academic papers I published dealt with this issue (They were in AI MAgazine, the 'journal of record' in the field at the time.

My own musings were deeply informed by the work of Earl R. MacCormac: A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor and Metaphor and Myth in Science and Religion.

MacCormac argues that metaphor 'evolves' from "epiphor" the first suggestion that something is like something else to either "dead metaphor" or "lexical term" depending on the extent to which referents suggested by the first 'something'  are confirmed to correlate to similar referents in the second "something." E.G. an atom is like a solar system suggests that a nucleus is like the sun and electrons are like planets plus orbits are at specific intervals and electrons can be moved from one orbit to another by adding energy (acceleration) just like any other satellite. As referents like this were confirmed the epiphor became a productive metaphor and a model, i.e. the Bohr model. Eventually, our increasing knowledge of atoms and particle/waves made it clear that the model/metaphor was 'wrong' in nearly every respect and the metaphor died. Its use in beginning chemistry suggests that it is still a useful tool for metaphorical thinking; modified to "what might you infer/reason, if you looked at an atom as if it were a tiny solar system."

In the case of AI, the joint epiphors — the computer is like a mind, the mind is like a computer — should have rapidly become dead metaphors. Instead they became models "physical symbol system" and most in the community insisted that they were lexical terms (notably Pylyshyn, Newell, and Simon). To explain this, I added the idea of a "paraphor" to MacCormac's evolutionary sequence — a metaphor so ingrained in a paradigm that those thinking with that paradigm cannot perceive the obvious failures of the metaphor.

MacCormac's second book argues for the pervasiveness of the use and misuse of metaphor and its relationship to models (mathematical and iillustrative) in both science and religion. The "Scientific Method," the process of doing science, is itself a metaphor (at best) that should have become a dead metaphor as there is abundant evidence that 'science' is not done 'that way' but only after the fact as if it had been done that way. In an Ouroborosian twist, even MacCormac;s theory of metaphor is itself a metaphor.

If this thread attracts interest, I think the work of MacCormac would provide a rich mine of potential ideas and a framework for the discussion. Unfortunately, it mostly seems to be behind pay walls — the books and JSTOR or its ilk.

dave west

On Fri, Jun 9, 2017, at 03:11 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

I meant to spawn a fresh proto-thread here, sorry.

Given that we have been splitting hairs on terminology, I wanted to at least OPEN the topic that has been grazed over and over, and that is the distinction between Model, Metaphor, and Analogy.  

I specifically mean

1. Mathematical Model
   
2. Conceptual Metaphor
   
3. Formal Analogy
   

I don't know if this narrows it down enough to discuss but I think these three terms have been bandied about loosely and widely enough lately to deserve a little more explication?

I could rattle on for pages about my own usage/opinions/distinctions but trust that would just pollute a thread before it had a chance to start, if start it can.

A brief Google Search gave me THIS reference which looks promising, but as usual, I'm not willing to go past a paywall or beg a colleague/institution for access (I know LANL's reference library will probably get this for me if I go in there!).

http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9780631221081_chunk_g97806312210818

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Steve Smith]

And invoking the term "twist", he added a bit of Möbius Strip connotation!  It did feel ingenious to me as well. 

As an odd aside, I'm designing a "feathered serpent" bas-relief design for the rocket mass heater I built last year in my sunroom...  I hadn't considered adding the Ourobousian nature to it!  The following is not my design, just one of many illustrative examples of the Tewa version:

Does a feathered serpent need to be more like a tapeworm to go Ourobourosianally Möbius?

- Sieve

On 6/10/17 1:35 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:

I had never heard the word ouroboros before Dave used it. Thanks for the term. But even though I had never heard the term, the ouroboros was the image that came to mind when I first learned recursion!

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 12:22 PM Steven A Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dave -

Thanks for weighing in here, my own studies have not been so formal nor probably as deep.   I have to admit to not knowing that cognitive anthropology was a subject, just as Nick introduced me to evolutionary psychology as it's own field!

I appreciate your introduction of epiphor, paraphor and dead metaphor.  I began a discursion here (which I fortunately deleted) which lead me to read some MacCormac and more to the point Philip Wheelwright on the modern, technical usage of epiphor and diaphor, from the Greek/Aristotelian epiphoria and diaphoria.   I particularly find your coining of paraphor, as I think this is as common in our modern discourse/thinking as "confirmation bias".

I also like your point that the "Scientific Method" is more metaphor than reality, or more to the point, a narrative device to show how a discovery "might have been made" when more often than not, it was backed into while bumping around looking for something entirely different, and often involving a "flash of insight" before then being laboriously wrung out and demonstrated using the somewhat more "engineering" oriented methods of the "Scientific Method" to move from motivated hypothesis to strongly validated theory.

I don't know if you regularly attend WedTech, but this depth/topic of discussion might motivate me to make the long trek into town...  

- Steve

On 6/10/17 9:36 AM, Prof David West wrote:

long long ago, my master's thesis in computer science and my phd dissertation in cognitive anthropology dealt extensively with the issue of metaphor and model, specifically in the area of artificial intelligence and cognitive models of "mind." the very first academic papers I published dealt with this issue (They were in AI MAgazine, the 'journal of record' in the field at the time.

My own musings were deeply informed by the work of Earl R. MacCormac: A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor and Metaphor and Myth in Science and Religion.

MacCormac argues that metaphor 'evolves' from "epiphor" the first suggestion that something is like something else to either "dead metaphor" or "lexical term" depending on the extent to which referents suggested by the first 'something'  are confirmed to correlate to similar referents in the second "something." E.G. an atom is like a solar system suggests that a nucleus is like the sun and electrons are like planets plus orbits are at specific intervals and electrons can be moved from one orbit to another by adding energy (acceleration) just like any other satellite. As referents like this were confirmed the epiphor became a productive metaphor and a model, i.e. the Bohr model. Eventually, our increasing knowledge of atoms and particle/waves made it clear that the model/metaphor was 'wrong' in nearly every respect and the metaphor died. Its use in beginning chemistry suggests that it is still a useful tool for metaphorical thinking; modified to "what might you infer/reason, if you looked at an atom as if it were a tiny solar system."

In the case of AI, the joint epiphors — the computer is like a mind, the mind is like a computer — should have rapidly become dead metaphors. Instead they became models "physical symbol system" and most in the community insisted that they were lexical terms (notably Pylyshyn, Newell, and Simon). To explain this, I added the idea of a "paraphor" to MacCormac's evolutionary sequence — a metaphor so ingrained in a paradigm that those thinking with that paradigm cannot perceive the obvious failures of the metaphor.

MacCormac's second book argues for the pervasiveness of the use and misuse of metaphor and its relationship to models (mathematical and iillustrative) in both science and religion. The "Scientific Method," the process of doing science, is itself a metaphor (at best) that should have become a dead metaphor as there is abundant evidence that 'science' is not done 'that way' but only after the fact as if it had been done that way. In an Ouroborosian twist, even MacCormac;s theory of metaphor is itself a metaphor.

If this thread attracts interest, I think the work of MacCormac would provide a rich mine of potential ideas and a framework for the discussion. Unfortunately, it mostly seems to be behind pay walls — the books and JSTOR or its ilk.

dave west

On Fri, Jun 9, 2017, at 03:11 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

I meant to spawn a fresh proto-thread here, sorry.

Given that we have been splitting hairs on terminology, I wanted to at least OPEN the topic that has been grazed over and over, and that is the distinction between Model, Metaphor, and Analogy.  

I specifically mean

1. Mathematical Model
   
2. Conceptual Metaphor
   
3. Formal Analogy
   

I don't know if this narrows it down enough to discuss but I think these three terms have been bandied about loosely and widely enough lately to deserve a little more explication?

I could rattle on for pages about my own usage/opinions/distinctions but trust that would just pollute a thread before it had a chance to start, if start it can.

A brief Google Search gave me THIS reference which looks promising, but as usual, I'm not willing to go past a paywall or beg a colleague/institution for access (I know LANL's reference library will probably get this for me if I go in there!).

http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9780631221081_chunk_g97806312210818

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Nick Thompson]

Wow, Steve.  Wow!  He’s sompin!  n

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Saturday, June 10, 2017 4:29 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy

 

And invoking the term "twist", he added a bit of Möbius Strip connotation!  It did feel ingenious to me as well. 

As an odd aside, I'm designing a "feathered serpent" bas-relief design for the rocket mass heater I built last year in my sunroom...  I hadn't considered adding the Ourobousian nature to it!  The following is not my design, just one of many illustrative examples of the Tewa version:

Does a feathered serpent need to be more like a tapeworm to go Ourobourosianally Möbius?

- Sieve

 

On 6/10/17 1:35 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:

I had never heard the word ouroboros before Dave used it. Thanks for the term. But even though I had never heard the term, the ouroboros was the image that came to mind when I first learned recursion!

 

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 12:22 PM Steven A Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dave -

Thanks for weighing in here, my own studies have not been so formal nor probably as deep.   I have to admit to not knowing that cognitive anthropology was a subject, just as Nick introduced me to evolutionary psychology as it's own field!

I appreciate your introduction of epiphor, paraphor and dead metaphor.  I began a discursion here (which I fortunately deleted) which lead me to read some MacCormac and more to the point Philip Wheelwright on the modern, technical usage of epiphor and diaphor, from the Greek/Aristotelian epiphoria and diaphoria.   I particularly find your coining of paraphor, as I think this is as common in our modern discourse/thinking as "confirmation bias".

I also like your point that the "Scientific Method" is more metaphor than reality, or more to the point, a narrative device to show how a discovery "might have been made" when more often than not, it was backed into while bumping around looking for something entirely different, and often involving a "flash of insight" before then being laboriously wrung out and demonstrated using the somewhat more "engineering" oriented methods of the "Scientific Method" to move from motivated hypothesis to strongly validated theory.

I don't know if you regularly attend WedTech, but this depth/topic of discussion might motivate me to make the long trek into town...  

- Steve

On 6/10/17 9:36 AM, Prof David West wrote:

long long ago, my master's thesis in computer science and my phd dissertation in cognitive anthropology dealt extensively with the issue of metaphor and model, specifically in the area of artificial intelligence and cognitive models of "mind." the very first academic papers I published dealt with this issue (They were in AI MAgazine, the 'journal of record' in the field at the time.

 

My own musings were deeply informed by the work of Earl R. MacCormac: A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor and Metaphor and Myth in Science and Religion.

 

MacCormac argues that metaphor 'evolves' from "epiphor" the first suggestion that something is like something else to either "dead metaphor" or "lexical term" depending on the extent to which referents suggested by the first 'something'  are confirmed to correlate to similar referents in the second "something." E.G. an atom is like a solar system suggests that a nucleus is like the sun and electrons are like planets plus orbits are at specific intervals and electrons can be moved from one orbit to another by adding energy (acceleration) just like any other satellite. As referents like this were confirmed the epiphor became a productive metaphor and a model, i.e. the Bohr model. Eventually, our increasing knowledge of atoms and particle/waves made it clear that the model/metaphor was 'wrong' in nearly every respect and the metaphor died. Its use in beginning chemistry suggests that it is still a useful tool for metaphorical thinking; modified to "what might you infer/reason, if you looked at an atom as if it were a tiny solar system."

 

In the case of AI, the joint epiphors — the computer is like a mind, the mind is like a computer — should have rapidly become dead metaphors. Instead they became models "physical symbol system" and most in the community insisted that they were lexical terms (notably Pylyshyn, Newell, and Simon). To explain this, I added the idea of a "paraphor" to MacCormac's evolutionary sequence — a metaphor so ingrained in a paradigm that those thinking with that paradigm cannot perceive the obvious failures of the metaphor.

 

MacCormac's second book argues for the pervasiveness of the use and misuse of metaphor and its relationship to models (mathematical and iillustrative) in both science and religion. The "Scientific Method," the process of doing science, is itself a metaphor (at best) that should have become a dead metaphor as there is abundant evidence that 'science' is not done 'that way' but only after the fact as if it had been done that way. In an Ouroborosian twist, even MacCormac;s theory of metaphor is itself a metaphor.

 

If this thread attracts interest, I think the work of MacCormac would provide a rich mine of potential ideas and a framework for the discussion. Unfortunately, it mostly seems to be behind pay walls — the books and JSTOR or its ilk.

 

dave west

 

 

 

On Fri, Jun 9, 2017, at 03:11 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

I meant to spawn a fresh proto-thread here, sorry.

 

Given that we have been splitting hairs on terminology, I wanted to at least OPEN the topic that has been grazed over and over, and that is the distinction between Model, Metaphor, and Analogy.  

 

I specifically mean

 

1. Mathematical Model
2. Conceptual Metaphor
3. Formal Analogy

I don't know if this narrows it down enough to discuss but I think these three terms have been bandied about loosely and widely enough lately to deserve a little more explication?

I could rattle on for pages about my own usage/opinions/distinctions but trust that would just pollute a thread before it had a chance to start, if start it can.

A brief Google Search gave me THIS reference which looks promising, but as usual, I'm not willing to go past a paywall or beg a colleague/institution for access (I know LANL's reference library will probably get this for me if I go in there!).

http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9780631221081_chunk_g97806312210818

 

 

 

 

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[Nick Thompson]

Hi, Dave,

 

Thanks for taking the time to lay this out.  I wonder what you call the present status of “natural selection” as a metaphor. In this case, the analogues between the natural situation and the pigeon coop remain strong, but most users of the theory have become ignorant about the salient features of the breeding situation.  So the metaphor hasn’t died, exactly; it’s been sucked dry of its meaning by the ignorance of its practitioners. 

 

I balk at the idea of a “conceptual metaphor”.  It’s one of those terms that smothers its object with love.  What is the contrast class?  How could a metaphor be other than conceptual?  I think the term  subtly makes a case for vague metaphors.  In my own ‘umble view, metaphors should be as specific as possible.  Brain/mind is a case two things that we know almost nothing about are used as metaphors for one another resulting in the vast promulgation of gibberish. Metaphors should sort knowledge into three categories, stuff we know that is consistent with the metaphor, stuff we know that is IN consistent with the metaphor, and stuff we don’t know, which is implied by the metaphor.  This last is the heuristic “wet edge” of the metaphor.  The vaguer a metaphor, the more difficult it is to distinguish between these three categories, and the less useful the metaphor is.  Dawkins “selfish gene” metaphor, with all its phony reductionist panache, would not have survived thirty seconds if anybody had bothered to think carefully about what selfishness is and how it works.  See, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311767990_On_the_use_of_mental_terms_in_behavioral_ecology_and_sociobiologyThTh

 

This is why it is so important to have something quite specific in mind when one talks of layers.   Only if you are specific will you know when you are wrong. 

 

I once got into a wonderful tangle with some meteorologists concerning “Elevated Mixed Layers”  Meteorologists insisted that  air masses, of different characteristics, DO NOT MIX.   It turns out that we had wildly different models of “mixing”.  They were thinking of it as a spontaneous process, as when sugar dissolves into water; I was thinking of it as including active processes, as when one substance is stirred into another.  They would say, “Oil and water don’t mix.”  I would say, “bloody hell, they do, too, mix.  They mix every time I make pancakes.”  The argument drove me nuts for several years because any fool, watching hard edged thunderheads rise over the Jemez, can plainly see both that the atmosphere is being stirred AND that the most air in the thunderhead is not readily diffusing into the dryer descending air around it.  From my point of view, convection is something the atmosphere does, like mixing; from their point of view, convection is something that is DONE TO the atmosphere, like stirring.  You get to that distinction only by thinking of very specific examples of mixing as you deploy the metaphor. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Saturday, June 10, 2017 11:36 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy

 

long long ago, my master's thesis in computer science and my phd dissertation in cognitive anthropology dealt extensively with the issue of metaphor and model, specifically in the area of artificial intelligence and cognitive models of "mind." the very first academic papers I published dealt with this issue (They were in AI MAgazine, the 'journal of record' in the field at the time.

 

My own musings were deeply informed by the work of Earl R. MacCormac: A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor and Metaphor and Myth in Science and Religion.

 

MacCormac argues that metaphor 'evolves' from "epiphor" the first suggestion that something is like something else to either "dead metaphor" or "lexical term" depending on the extent to which referents suggested by the first 'something'  are confirmed to correlate to similar referents in the second "something." E.G. an atom is like a solar system suggests that a nucleus is like the sun and electrons are like planets plus orbits are at specific intervals and electrons can be moved from one orbit to another by adding energy (acceleration) just like any other satellite. As referents like this were confirmed the epiphor became a productive metaphor and a model, i.e. the Bohr model. Eventually, our increasing knowledge of atoms and particle/waves made it clear that the model/metaphor was 'wrong' in nearly every respect and the metaphor died. Its use in beginning chemistry suggests that it is still a useful tool for metaphorical thinking; modified to "what might you infer/reason, if you looked at an atom as if it were a tiny solar system."

 

In the case of AI, the joint epiphors — the computer is like a mind, the mind is like a computer — should have rapidly become dead metaphors. Instead they became models "physical symbol system" and most in the community insisted that they were lexical terms (notably Pylyshyn, Newell, and Simon). To explain this, I added the idea of a "paraphor" to MacCormac's evolutionary sequence — a metaphor so ingrained in a paradigm that those thinking with that paradigm cannot perceive the obvious failures of the metaphor.

 

MacCormac's second book argues for the pervasiveness of the use and misuse of metaphor and its relationship to models (mathematical and iillustrative) in both science and religion. The "Scientific Method," the process of doing science, is itself a metaphor (at best) that should have become a dead metaphor as there is abundant evidence that 'science' is not done 'that way' but only after the fact as if it had been done that way. In an Ouroborosian twist, even MacCormac;s theory of metaphor is itself a metaphor.

 

If this thread attracts interest, I think the work of MacCormac would provide a rich mine of potential ideas and a framework for the discussion. Unfortunately, it mostly seems to be behind pay walls — the books and JSTOR or its ilk.

 

dave west

 

 

 

On Fri, Jun 9, 2017, at 03:11 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

I meant to spawn a fresh proto-thread here, sorry.

 

Given that we have been splitting hairs on terminology, I wanted to at least OPEN the topic that has been grazed over and over, and that is the distinction between Model, Metaphor, and Analogy.  

 

I specifically mean

 

1. Mathematical Model
2. Conceptual Metaphor
3. Formal Analogy

I don't know if this narrows it down enough to discuss but I think these three terms have been bandied about loosely and widely enough lately to deserve a little more explication?

I could rattle on for pages about my own usage/opinions/distinctions but trust that would just pollute a thread before it had a chance to start, if start it can.

A brief Google Search gave me THIS reference which looks promising, but as usual, I'm not willing to go past a paywall or beg a colleague/institution for access (I know LANL's reference library will probably get this for me if I go in there!).

http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9780631221081_chunk_g97806312210818

 

 

 

 

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[Nick Thompson]

Steve,

 

Notice that you use a metaphor, here to account for creative activity in science.

 

, it was backed into while bumping around looking for something entirely different

 

I can imagine you and I sitting down and describing a particular case in which we found something while looking for something else and applying that metaphor to a case of scientific discovery … to good effect.

 

The thing about my man Peirce is that he was interested in describing science as it was actually practiced by people who did it well.  He would say that that sort of serendipity happens only to prepared minds, and he gave those flashes of insight a name, “abduction.”  It’s quite similar in many ways to metaphor making. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Saturday, June 10, 2017 3:22 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy

 

Dave -

Thanks for weighing in here, my own studies have not been so formal nor probably as deep.   I have to admit to not knowing that cognitive anthropology was a subject, just as Nick introduced me to evolutionary psychology as it's own field!

I appreciate your introduction of epiphor, paraphor and dead metaphor.  I began a discursion here (which I fortunately deleted) which lead me to read some MacCormac and more to the point Philip Wheelwright on the modern, technical usage of epiphor and diaphor, from the Greek/Aristotelian epiphoria and diaphoria.   I particularly find your coining of paraphor, as I think this is as common in our modern discourse/thinking as "confirmation bias".

I also like your point that the "Scientific Method" is more metaphor than reality, or more to the point, a narrative device to show how a discovery "might have been made" when more often than not, it was backed into while bumping around looking for something entirely different, and often involving a "flash of insight" before then being laboriously wrung out and demonstrated using the somewhat more "engineering" oriented methods of the "Scientific Method" to move from motivated hypothesis to strongly validated theory.

I don't know if you regularly attend WedTech, but this depth/topic of discussion might motivate me to make the long trek into town...  

- Steve

On 6/10/17 9:36 AM, Prof David West wrote:

long long ago, my master's thesis in computer science and my phd dissertation in cognitive anthropology dealt extensively with the issue of metaphor and model, specifically in the area of artificial intelligence and cognitive models of "mind." the very first academic papers I published dealt with this issue (They were in AI MAgazine, the 'journal of record' in the field at the time.

 

My own musings were deeply informed by the work of Earl R. MacCormac: A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor and Metaphor and Myth in Science and Religion.

 

MacCormac argues that metaphor 'evolves' from "epiphor" the first suggestion that something is like something else to either "dead metaphor" or "lexical term" depending on the extent to which referents suggested by the first 'something'  are confirmed to correlate to similar referents in the second "something." E.G. an atom is like a solar system suggests that a nucleus is like the sun and electrons are like planets plus orbits are at specific intervals and electrons can be moved from one orbit to another by adding energy (acceleration) just like any other satellite. As referents like this were confirmed the epiphor became a productive metaphor and a model, i.e. the Bohr model. Eventually, our increasing knowledge of atoms and particle/waves made it clear that the model/metaphor was 'wrong' in nearly every respect and the metaphor died. Its use in beginning chemistry suggests that it is still a useful tool for metaphorical thinking; modified to "what might you infer/reason, if you looked at an atom as if it were a tiny solar system."

 

In the case of AI, the joint epiphors — the computer is like a mind, the mind is like a computer — should have rapidly become dead metaphors. Instead they became models "physical symbol system" and most in the community insisted that they were lexical terms (notably Pylyshyn, Newell, and Simon). To explain this, I added the idea of a "paraphor" to MacCormac's evolutionary sequence — a metaphor so ingrained in a paradigm that those thinking with that paradigm cannot perceive the obvious failures of the metaphor.

 

MacCormac's second book argues for the pervasiveness of the use and misuse of metaphor and its relationship to models (mathematical and iillustrative) in both science and religion. The "Scientific Method," the process of doing science, is itself a metaphor (at best) that should have become a dead metaphor as there is abundant evidence that 'science' is not done 'that way' but only after the fact as if it had been done that way. In an Ouroborosian twist, even MacCormac;s theory of metaphor is itself a metaphor.

 

If this thread attracts interest, I think the work of MacCormac would provide a rich mine of potential ideas and a framework for the discussion. Unfortunately, it mostly seems to be behind pay walls — the books and JSTOR or its ilk.

 

dave west

 

 

 

On Fri, Jun 9, 2017, at 03:11 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

I meant to spawn a fresh proto-thread here, sorry.

 

Given that we have been splitting hairs on terminology, I wanted to at least OPEN the topic that has been grazed over and over, and that is the distinction between Model, Metaphor, and Analogy.  

 

I specifically mean

 

1. Mathematical Model
2. Conceptual Metaphor
3. Formal Analogy

I don't know if this narrows it down enough to discuss but I think these three terms have been bandied about loosely and widely enough lately to deserve a little more explication?

I could rattle on for pages about my own usage/opinions/distinctions but trust that would just pollute a thread before it had a chance to start, if start it can.

A brief Google Search gave me THIS reference which looks promising, but as usual, I'm not willing to go past a paywall or beg a colleague/institution for access (I know LANL's reference library will probably get this for me if I go in there!).

http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9780631221081_chunk_g97806312210818

 

 

 

 

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Prof David West]

Hi Nick, hope you are enjoying the east.

The contrast class for "conceptual metaphor" is "embedded metaphor" ala Lakoff, et. al. An example, "the future is in front of us." Unless, of course you speak Aymaran in which case "the future is behind us."

Steve, I do not regularly attend WedTech, but if this thread becomes a featured topic, I certainly would be there.

davew

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017, at 07:35 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Hi, Dave,

 

Thanks for taking the time to lay this out.  I wonder what you call the present status of “natural selection” as a metaphor. In this case, the analogues between the natural situation and the pigeon coop remain strong, but most users of the theory have become ignorant about the salient features of the breeding situation.  So the metaphor hasn’t died, exactly; it’s been sucked dry of its meaning by the ignorance of its practitioners. 

 

I balk at the idea of a “conceptual metaphor”.  It’s one of those terms that smothers its object with love.  What is the contrast class?  How could a metaphor be other than conceptual?  I think the term  subtly makes a case for vague metaphors.  In my own ‘umble view, metaphors should be as specific as possible.  Brain/mind is a case two things that we know almost nothing about are used as metaphors for one another resulting in the vast promulgation of gibberish. Metaphors should sort knowledge into three categories, stuff we know that is consistent with the metaphor, stuff we know that is IN consistent with the metaphor, and stuff we don’t know, which is implied by the metaphor.  This last is the heuristic “wet edge” of the metaphor.  The vaguer a metaphor, the more difficult it is to distinguish between these three categories, and the less useful the metaphor is.  Dawkins “selfish gene” metaphor, with all its phony reductionist panache, would not have survived thirty seconds if anybody had bothered to think carefully about what selfishness is and how it works.  See, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311767990_On_the_use_of_mental_terms_in_behavioral_ecology_and_sociobiologyThTh

 

This is why it is so important to have something quite specific in mind when one talks of layers.   Only if you are specific will you know when you are wrong. 

 

I once got into a wonderful tangle with some meteorologists concerning “Elevated Mixed Layers”  Meteorologists insisted that  air masses, of different characteristics, DO NOT MIX.   It turns out that we had wildly different models of “mixing”.  They were thinking of it as a spontaneous process, as when sugar dissolves into water; I was thinking of it as including active processes, as when one substance is stirred into another.  They would say, “Oil and water don’t mix.”  I would say, “bloody hell, they do, too, mix.  They mix every time I make pancakes.”  The argument drove me nuts for several years because any fool, watching hard edged thunderheads rise over the Jemez, can plainly see both that the atmosphere is being stirred AND that the most air in the thunderhead is not readily diffusing into the dryer descending air around it.  From my point of view, convection is something the atmosphere does, like mixing; from their point of view, convection is something that is DONE TO the atmosphere, like stirring.  You get to that distinction only by thinking of very specific examples of mixing as you deploy the metaphor. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Saturday, June 10, 2017 11:36 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy

 

long long ago, my master's thesis in computer science and my phd dissertation in cognitive anthropology dealt extensively with the issue of metaphor and model, specifically in the area of artificial intelligence and cognitive models of "mind." the very first academic papers I published dealt with this issue (They were in AI MAgazine, the 'journal of record' in the field at the time.

 

My own musings were deeply informed by the work of Earl R. MacCormac: A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor and Metaphor and Myth in Science and Religion.

 

MacCormac argues that metaphor 'evolves' from "epiphor" the first suggestion that something is like something else to either "dead metaphor" or "lexical term" depending on the extent to which referents suggested by the first 'something'  are confirmed to correlate to similar referents in the second "something." E.G. an atom is like a solar system suggests that a nucleus is like the sun and electrons are like planets plus orbits are at specific intervals and electrons can be moved from one orbit to another by adding energy (acceleration) just like any other satellite. As referents like this were confirmed the epiphor became a productive metaphor and a model, i.e. the Bohr model. Eventually, our increasing knowledge of atoms and particle/waves made it clear that the model/metaphor was 'wrong' in nearly every respect and the metaphor died. Its use in beginning chemistry suggests that it is still a useful tool for metaphorical thinking; modified to "what might you infer/reason, if you looked at an atom as if it were a tiny solar system."

 

In the case of AI, the joint epiphors — the computer is like a mind, the mind is like a computer — should have rapidly become dead metaphors. Instead they became models "physical symbol system" and most in the community insisted that they were lexical terms (notably Pylyshyn, Newell, and Simon). To explain this, I added the idea of a "paraphor" to MacCormac's evolutionary sequence — a metaphor so ingrained in a paradigm that those thinking with that paradigm cannot perceive the obvious failures of the metaphor.

 

MacCormac's second book argues for the pervasiveness of the use and misuse of metaphor and its relationship to models (mathematical and iillustrative) in both science and religion. The "Scientific Method," the process of doing science, is itself a metaphor (at best) that should have become a dead metaphor as there is abundant evidence that 'science' is not done 'that way' but only after the fact as if it had been done that way. In an Ouroborosian twist, even MacCormac;s theory of metaphor is itself a metaphor.

 

If this thread attracts interest, I think the work of MacCormac would provide a rich mine of potential ideas and a framework for the discussion. Unfortunately, it mostly seems to be behind pay walls — the books and JSTOR or its ilk.

 

dave west

 

 

 

On Fri, Jun 9, 2017, at 03:11 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

I meant to spawn a fresh proto-thread here, sorry.

 

Given that we have been splitting hairs on terminology, I wanted to at least OPEN the topic that has been grazed over and over, and that is the distinction between Model, Metaphor, and Analogy.  

 

I specifically mean

 

1. Mathematical Model
   
2. Conceptual Metaphor
   
3. Formal Analogy
   

I don't know if this narrows it down enough to discuss but I think these three terms have been bandied about loosely and widely enough lately to deserve a little more explication?

I could rattle on for pages about my own usage/opinions/distinctions but trust that would just pollute a thread before it had a chance to start, if start it can.

A brief Google Search gave me THIS reference which looks promising, but as usual, I'm not willing to go past a paywall or beg a colleague/institution for access (I know LANL's reference library will probably get this for me if I go in there!).

http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9780631221081_chunk_g97806312210818

 

 

 

 

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

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============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Jenny Quillien]

If there is a WedTech on this thread I would also certainly attend. So I vote that Dave gets busy and leads us toward the light.

Jenny Quillien

On 6/10/2017 8:24 PM, Prof David West wrote:

Hi Nick, hope you are enjoying the east.

The contrast class for "conceptual metaphor" is "embedded metaphor" ala Lakoff, et. al. An example, "the future is in front of us." Unless, of course you speak Aymaran in which case "the future is behind us."

Steve, I do not regularly attend WedTech, but if this thread becomes a featured topic, I certainly would be there.

davew

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017, at 07:35 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Hi, Dave,

 

Thanks for taking the time to lay this out.  I wonder what you call the present status of “natural selection” as a metaphor. In this case, the analogues between the natural situation and the pigeon coop remain strong, but most users of the theory have become ignorant about the salient features of the breeding situation.  So the metaphor hasn’t died, exactly; it’s been sucked dry of its meaning by the ignorance of its practitioners. 

 

I balk at the idea of a “conceptual metaphor”.  It’s one of those terms that smothers its object with love.  What is the contrast class?  How could a metaphor be other than conceptual?  I think the term  subtly makes a case for vague metaphors.  In my own ‘umble view, metaphors should be as specific as possible.  Brain/mind is a case two things that we know almost nothing about are used as metaphors for one another resulting in the vast promulgation of gibberish. Metaphors should sort knowledge into three categories, stuff we know that is consistent with the metaphor, stuff we know that is IN consistent with the metaphor, and stuff we don’t know, which is implied by the metaphor.  This last is the heuristic “wet edge” of the metaphor.  The vaguer a metaphor, the more difficult it is to distinguish between these three categories, and the less useful the metaphor is.  Dawkins “selfish gene” metaphor, with all its phony reductionist panache, would not have survived thirty seconds if anybody had bothered to think carefully about what selfishness is and how it works.  See, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311767990_On_the_use_of_mental_terms_in_behavioral_ecology_and_sociobiologyThTh

 

This is why it is so important to have something quite specific in mind when one talks of layers.   Only if you are specific will you know when you are wrong. 

 

I once got into a wonderful tangle with some meteorologists concerning “Elevated Mixed Layers”  Meteorologists insisted that  air masses, of different characteristics, DO NOT MIX.   It turns out that we had wildly different models of “mixing”.  They were thinking of it as a spontaneous process, as when sugar dissolves into water; I was thinking of it as including active processes, as when one substance is stirred into another.  They would say, “Oil and water don’t mix.”  I would say, “bloody hell, they do, too, mix.  They mix every time I make pancakes.”  The argument drove me nuts for several years because any fool, watching hard edged thunderheads rise over the Jemez, can plainly see both that the atmosphere is being stirred AND that the most air in the thunderhead is not readily diffusing into the dryer descending air around it.  From my point of view, convection is something the atmosphere does, like mixing; from their point of view, convection is something that is DONE TO the atmosphere, like stirring.  You get to that distinction only by thinking of very specific examples of mixing as you deploy the metaphor. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Saturday, June 10, 2017 11:36 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy

 

long long ago, my master's thesis in computer science and my phd dissertation in cognitive anthropology dealt extensively with the issue of metaphor and model, specifically in the area of artificial intelligence and cognitive models of "mind." the very first academic papers I published dealt with this issue (They were in AI MAgazine, the 'journal of record' in the field at the time.

 

My own musings were deeply informed by the work of Earl R. MacCormac: A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor and Metaphor and Myth in Science and Religion.

 

MacCormac argues that metaphor 'evolves' from "epiphor" the first suggestion that something is like something else to either "dead metaphor" or "lexical term" depending on the extent to which referents suggested by the first 'something'  are confirmed to correlate to similar referents in the second "something." E.G. an atom is like a solar system suggests that a nucleus is like the sun and electrons are like planets plus orbits are at specific intervals and electrons can be moved from one orbit to another by adding energy (acceleration) just like any other satellite. As referents like this were confirmed the epiphor became a productive metaphor and a model, i.e. the Bohr model. Eventually, our increasing knowledge of atoms and particle/waves made it clear that the model/metaphor was 'wrong' in nearly every respect and the metaphor died. Its use in beginning chemistry suggests that it is still a useful tool for metaphorical thinking; modified to "what might you infer/reason, if you looked at an atom as if it were a tiny solar system."

 

In the case of AI, the joint epiphors — the computer is like a mind, the mind is like a computer — should have rapidly become dead metaphors. Instead they became models "physical symbol system" and most in the community insisted that they were lexical terms (notably Pylyshyn, Newell, and Simon). To explain this, I added the idea of a "paraphor" to MacCormac's evolutionary sequence — a metaphor so ingrained in a paradigm that those thinking with that paradigm cannot perceive the obvious failures of the metaphor.

 

MacCormac's second book argues for the pervasiveness of the use and misuse of metaphor and its relationship to models (mathematical and iillustrative) in both science and religion. The "Scientific Method," the process of doing science, is itself a metaphor (at best) that should have become a dead metaphor as there is abundant evidence that 'science' is not done 'that way' but only after the fact as if it had been done that way. In an Ouroborosian twist, even MacCormac;s theory of metaphor is itself a metaphor.

 

If this thread attracts interest, I think the work of MacCormac would provide a rich mine of potential ideas and a framework for the discussion. Unfortunately, it mostly seems to be behind pay walls — the books and JSTOR or its ilk.

 

dave west

 

 

 

On Fri, Jun 9, 2017, at 03:11 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

I meant to spawn a fresh proto-thread here, sorry.

 

Given that we have been splitting hairs on terminology, I wanted to at least OPEN the topic that has been grazed over and over, and that is the distinction between Model, Metaphor, and Analogy.  

 

I specifically mean

 

1. Mathematical Model
   
2. Conceptual Metaphor
   
3. Formal Analogy
   

I don't know if this narrows it down enough to discuss but I think these three terms have been bandied about loosely and widely enough lately to deserve a little more explication?

I could rattle on for pages about my own usage/opinions/distinctions but trust that would just pollute a thread before it had a chance to start, if start it can.

A brief Google Search gave me THIS reference which looks promising, but as usual, I'm not willing to go past a paywall or beg a colleague/institution for access (I know LANL's reference library will probably get this for me if I go in there!).

http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9780631221081_chunk_g97806312210818

 

 

 

 

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Tom Johnson]

Dave West writes: "... An example, "the future is in front of us." 

Unless you're a member of some Andean tribe whose name I've forgotten.  Then the past is in front of use because we know what it is, we can see it.  And the future is behind us because we know not what it is.  (Source: a recent SAR lecture that isn't online yet.)

TJ

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 8:53 PM, Jenny Quillien <[hidden email]> wrote:

If there is a WedTech on this thread I would also certainly attend. So I vote that Dave gets busy and leads us toward the light.

Jenny Quillien

On 6/10/2017 8:24 PM, Prof David West wrote:

Hi Nick, hope you are enjoying the east.

The contrast class for "conceptual metaphor" is "embedded metaphor" ala Lakoff, et. al. An example, "the future is in front of us." Unless, of course you speak Aymaran in which case "the future is behind us."

Steve, I do not regularly attend WedTech, but if this thread becomes a featured topic, I certainly would be there.

davew

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017, at 07:35 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Hi, Dave,

 

Thanks for taking the time to lay this out.  I wonder what you call the present status of “natural selection” as a metaphor. In this case, the analogues between the natural situation and the pigeon coop remain strong, but most users of the theory have become ignorant about the salient features of the breeding situation.  So the metaphor hasn’t died, exactly; it’s been sucked dry of its meaning by the ignorance of its practitioners. 

 

I balk at the idea of a “conceptual metaphor”.  It’s one of those terms that smothers its object with love.  What is the contrast class?  How could a metaphor be other than conceptual?  I think the term  subtly makes a case for vague metaphors.  In my own ‘umble view, metaphors should be as specific as possible.  Brain/mind is a case two things that we know almost nothing about are used as metaphors for one another resulting in the vast promulgation of gibberish. Metaphors should sort knowledge into three categories, stuff we know that is consistent with the metaphor, stuff we know that is IN consistent with the metaphor, and stuff we don’t know, which is implied by the metaphor.  This last is the heuristic “wet edge” of the metaphor.  The vaguer a metaphor, the more difficult it is to distinguish between these three categories, and the less useful the metaphor is.  Dawkins “selfish gene” metaphor, with all its phony reductionist panache, would not have survived thirty seconds if anybody had bothered to think carefully about what selfishness is and how it works.  See, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311767990_On_the_use_of_mental_terms_in_behavioral_ecology_and_sociobiologyThTh

 

This is why it is so important to have something quite specific in mind when one talks of layers.   Only if you are specific will you know when you are wrong. 

 

I once got into a wonderful tangle with some meteorologists concerning “Elevated Mixed Layers”  Meteorologists insisted that  air masses, of different characteristics, DO NOT MIX.   It turns out that we had wildly different models of “mixing”.  They were thinking of it as a spontaneous process, as when sugar dissolves into water; I was thinking of it as including active processes, as when one substance is stirred into another.  They would say, “Oil and water don’t mix.”  I would say, “bloody hell, they do, too, mix.  They mix every time I make pancakes.”  The argument drove me nuts for several years because any fool, watching hard edged thunderheads rise over the Jemez, can plainly see both that the atmosphere is being stirred AND that the most air in the thunderhead is not readily diffusing into the dryer descending air around it.  From my point of view, convection is something the atmosphere does, like mixing; from their point of view, convection is something that is DONE TO the atmosphere, like stirring.  You get to that distinction only by thinking of very specific examples of mixing as you deploy the metaphor. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Saturday, June 10, 2017 11:36 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy

 

long long ago, my master's thesis in computer science and my phd dissertation in cognitive anthropology dealt extensively with the issue of metaphor and model, specifically in the area of artificial intelligence and cognitive models of "mind." the very first academic papers I published dealt with this issue (They were in AI MAgazine, the 'journal of record' in the field at the time.

 

My own musings were deeply informed by the work of Earl R. MacCormac: A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor and Metaphor and Myth in Science and Religion.

 

MacCormac argues that metaphor 'evolves' from "epiphor" the first suggestion that something is like something else to either "dead metaphor" or "lexical term" depending on the extent to which referents suggested by the first 'something'  are confirmed to correlate to similar referents in the second "something." E.G. an atom is like a solar system suggests that a nucleus is like the sun and electrons are like planets plus orbits are at specific intervals and electrons can be moved from one orbit to another by adding energy (acceleration) just like any other satellite. As referents like this were confirmed the epiphor became a productive metaphor and a model, i.e. the Bohr model. Eventually, our increasing knowledge of atoms and particle/waves made it clear that the model/metaphor was 'wrong' in nearly every respect and the metaphor died. Its use in beginning chemistry suggests that it is still a useful tool for metaphorical thinking; modified to "what might you infer/reason, if you looked at an atom as if it were a tiny solar system."

 

In the case of AI, the joint epiphors — the computer is like a mind, the mind is like a computer — should have rapidly become dead metaphors. Instead they became models "physical symbol system" and most in the community insisted that they were lexical terms (notably Pylyshyn, Newell, and Simon). To explain this, I added the idea of a "paraphor" to MacCormac's evolutionary sequence — a metaphor so ingrained in a paradigm that those thinking with that paradigm cannot perceive the obvious failures of the metaphor.

 

MacCormac's second book argues for the pervasiveness of the use and misuse of metaphor and its relationship to models (mathematical and iillustrative) in both science and religion. The "Scientific Method," the process of doing science, is itself a metaphor (at best) that should have become a dead metaphor as there is abundant evidence that 'science' is not done 'that way' but only after the fact as if it had been done that way. In an Ouroborosian twist, even MacCormac;s theory of metaphor is itself a metaphor.

 

If this thread attracts interest, I think the work of MacCormac would provide a rich mine of potential ideas and a framework for the discussion. Unfortunately, it mostly seems to be behind pay walls — the books and JSTOR or its ilk.

 

dave west

 

 

 

On Fri, Jun 9, 2017, at 03:11 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

I meant to spawn a fresh proto-thread here, sorry.

 

Given that we have been splitting hairs on terminology, I wanted to at least OPEN the topic that has been grazed over and over, and that is the distinction between Model, Metaphor, and Analogy.  

 

I specifically mean

 

1. Mathematical Model
   
2. Conceptual Metaphor
   
3. Formal Analogy
   

I don't know if this narrows it down enough to discuss but I think these three terms have been bandied about loosely and widely enough lately to deserve a little more explication?

I could rattle on for pages about my own usage/opinions/distinctions but trust that would just pollute a thread before it had a chance to start, if start it can.

A brief Google Search gave me THIS reference which looks promising, but as usual, I'm not willing to go past a paywall or beg a colleague/institution for access (I know LANL's reference library will probably get this for me if I go in there!).

http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9780631221081_chunk_g97806312210818

 

 

 

 

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

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============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Roger Critchlow-2]

I think I'm starting to see a pattern here.

-- rec --

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 11:56 PM, Tom Johnson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dave West writes: "... An example, "the future is in front of us." 

Unless you're a member of some Andean tribe whose name I've forgotten.  Then the past is in front of use because we know what it is, we can see it.  And the future is behind us because we know not what it is.  (Source: a recent SAR lecture that isn't online yet.)

TJ

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 8:53 PM, Jenny Quillien <[hidden email]> wrote:

If there is a WedTech on this thread I would also certainly attend. So I vote that Dave gets busy and leads us toward the light.

Jenny Quillien

On 6/10/2017 8:24 PM, Prof David West wrote:

Hi Nick, hope you are enjoying the east.

The contrast class for "conceptual metaphor" is "embedded metaphor" ala Lakoff, et. al. An example, "the future is in front of us." Unless, of course you speak Aymaran in which case "the future is behind us."

Steve, I do not regularly attend WedTech, but if this thread becomes a featured topic, I certainly would be there.

davew

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017, at 07:35 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Hi, Dave,

 

Thanks for taking the time to lay this out.  I wonder what you call the present status of “natural selection” as a metaphor. In this case, the analogues between the natural situation and the pigeon coop remain strong, but most users of the theory have become ignorant about the salient features of the breeding situation.  So the metaphor hasn’t died, exactly; it’s been sucked dry of its meaning by the ignorance of its practitioners. 

 

I balk at the idea of a “conceptual metaphor”.  It’s one of those terms that smothers its object with love.  What is the contrast class?  How could a metaphor be other than conceptual?  I think the term  subtly makes a case for vague metaphors.  In my own ‘umble view, metaphors should be as specific as possible.  Brain/mind is a case two things that we know almost nothing about are used as metaphors for one another resulting in the vast promulgation of gibberish. Metaphors should sort knowledge into three categories, stuff we know that is consistent with the metaphor, stuff we know that is IN consistent with the metaphor, and stuff we don’t know, which is implied by the metaphor.  This last is the heuristic “wet edge” of the metaphor.  The vaguer a metaphor, the more difficult it is to distinguish between these three categories, and the less useful the metaphor is.  Dawkins “selfish gene” metaphor, with all its phony reductionist panache, would not have survived thirty seconds if anybody had bothered to think carefully about what selfishness is and how it works.  See, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311767990_On_the_use_of_mental_terms_in_behavioral_ecology_and_sociobiologyThTh

 

This is why it is so important to have something quite specific in mind when one talks of layers.   Only if you are specific will you know when you are wrong. 

 

I once got into a wonderful tangle with some meteorologists concerning “Elevated Mixed Layers”  Meteorologists insisted that  air masses, of different characteristics, DO NOT MIX.   It turns out that we had wildly different models of “mixing”.  They were thinking of it as a spontaneous process, as when sugar dissolves into water; I was thinking of it as including active processes, as when one substance is stirred into another.  They would say, “Oil and water don’t mix.”  I would say, “bloody hell, they do, too, mix.  They mix every time I make pancakes.”  The argument drove me nuts for several years because any fool, watching hard edged thunderheads rise over the Jemez, can plainly see both that the atmosphere is being stirred AND that the most air in the thunderhead is not readily diffusing into the dryer descending air around it.  From my point of view, convection is something the atmosphere does, like mixing; from their point of view, convection is something that is DONE TO the atmosphere, like stirring.  You get to that distinction only by thinking of very specific examples of mixing as you deploy the metaphor. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Saturday, June 10, 2017 11:36 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy

 

long long ago, my master's thesis in computer science and my phd dissertation in cognitive anthropology dealt extensively with the issue of metaphor and model, specifically in the area of artificial intelligence and cognitive models of "mind." the very first academic papers I published dealt with this issue (They were in AI MAgazine, the 'journal of record' in the field at the time.

 

My own musings were deeply informed by the work of Earl R. MacCormac: A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor and Metaphor and Myth in Science and Religion.

 

MacCormac argues that metaphor 'evolves' from "epiphor" the first suggestion that something is like something else to either "dead metaphor" or "lexical term" depending on the extent to which referents suggested by the first 'something'  are confirmed to correlate to similar referents in the second "something." E.G. an atom is like a solar system suggests that a nucleus is like the sun and electrons are like planets plus orbits are at specific intervals and electrons can be moved from one orbit to another by adding energy (acceleration) just like any other satellite. As referents like this were confirmed the epiphor became a productive metaphor and a model, i.e. the Bohr model. Eventually, our increasing knowledge of atoms and particle/waves made it clear that the model/metaphor was 'wrong' in nearly every respect and the metaphor died. Its use in beginning chemistry suggests that it is still a useful tool for metaphorical thinking; modified to "what might you infer/reason, if you looked at an atom as if it were a tiny solar system."

 

In the case of AI, the joint epiphors — the computer is like a mind, the mind is like a computer — should have rapidly become dead metaphors. Instead they became models "physical symbol system" and most in the community insisted that they were lexical terms (notably Pylyshyn, Newell, and Simon). To explain this, I added the idea of a "paraphor" to MacCormac's evolutionary sequence — a metaphor so ingrained in a paradigm that those thinking with that paradigm cannot perceive the obvious failures of the metaphor.

 

MacCormac's second book argues for the pervasiveness of the use and misuse of metaphor and its relationship to models (mathematical and iillustrative) in both science and religion. The "Scientific Method," the process of doing science, is itself a metaphor (at best) that should have become a dead metaphor as there is abundant evidence that 'science' is not done 'that way' but only after the fact as if it had been done that way. In an Ouroborosian twist, even MacCormac;s theory of metaphor is itself a metaphor.

 

If this thread attracts interest, I think the work of MacCormac would provide a rich mine of potential ideas and a framework for the discussion. Unfortunately, it mostly seems to be behind pay walls — the books and JSTOR or its ilk.

 

dave west

 

 

 

On Fri, Jun 9, 2017, at 03:11 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

I meant to spawn a fresh proto-thread here, sorry.

 

Given that we have been splitting hairs on terminology, I wanted to at least OPEN the topic that has been grazed over and over, and that is the distinction between Model, Metaphor, and Analogy.  

 

I specifically mean

 

1. Mathematical Model
   
2. Conceptual Metaphor
   
3. Formal Analogy
   

I don't know if this narrows it down enough to discuss but I think these three terms have been bandied about loosely and widely enough lately to deserve a little more explication?

I could rattle on for pages about my own usage/opinions/distinctions but trust that would just pollute a thread before it had a chance to start, if start it can.

A brief Google Search gave me THIS reference which looks promising, but as usual, I'm not willing to go past a paywall or beg a colleague/institution for access (I know LANL's reference library will probably get this for me if I go in there!).

http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9780631221081_chunk_g97806312210818

 

 

 

 

============================================================

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

============================================================

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

============================================================

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Nick Thompson]

R.

 

Y-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-s…………….............?

 

And the pattern is…………………?

 

N

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Sunday, June 11, 2017 7:11 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy

 

I think I'm starting to see a pattern here.

 

-- rec --

 

 

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 11:56 PM, Tom Johnson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dave West writes: "... An example, "the future is in front of us." 

 

Unless you're a member of some Andean tribe whose name I've forgotten.  Then the past is in front of use because we know what it is, we can see it.  And the future is behind us because we know not what it is.  (Source: a recent SAR lecture that isn't online yet.)

 

TJ

============================================
Tom Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism   --     Santa Fe, NM USA
<a href="tel:(505)%20577-6482" target="_blank">505.577.6482(c)                                    <a href="tel:(505)%20473-9646" target="_blank">505.473.9646(h)
Society of Professional Journalists 
Check out It's The People's Data

http://www.jtjohnson.com                   [hidden email]
============================================

 

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 8:53 PM, Jenny Quillien <[hidden email]> wrote:

If there is a WedTech on this thread I would also certainly attend. So I vote that Dave gets busy and leads us toward the light.

Jenny Quillien

 

On 6/10/2017 8:24 PM, Prof David West wrote:

Hi Nick, hope you are enjoying the east.

 

The contrast class for "conceptual metaphor" is "embedded metaphor" ala Lakoff, et. al. An example, "the future is in front of us." Unless, of course you speak Aymaran in which case "the future is behind us."

 

Steve, I do not regularly attend WedTech, but if this thread becomes a featured topic, I certainly would be there.

 

davew

 

 

 

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017, at 07:35 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Hi, Dave,

 

Thanks for taking the time to lay this out.  I wonder what you call the present status of “natural selection” as a metaphor. In this case, the analogues between the natural situation and the pigeon coop remain strong, but most users of the theory have become ignorant about the salient features of the breeding situation.  So the metaphor hasn’t died, exactly; it’s been sucked dry of its meaning by the ignorance of its practitioners. 

 

I balk at the idea of a “conceptual metaphor”.  It’s one of those terms that smothers its object with love.  What is the contrast class?  How could a metaphor be other than conceptual?  I think the term  subtly makes a case for vague metaphors.  In my own ‘umble view, metaphors should be as specific as possible.  Brain/mind is a case two things that we know almost nothing about are used as metaphors for one another resulting in the vast promulgation of gibberish. Metaphors should sort knowledge into three categories, stuff we know that is consistent with the metaphor, stuff we know that is IN consistent with the metaphor, and stuff we don’t know, which is implied by the metaphor.  This last is the heuristic “wet edge” of the metaphor.  The vaguer a metaphor, the more difficult it is to distinguish between these three categories, and the less useful the metaphor is.  Dawkins “selfish gene” metaphor, with all its phony reductionist panache, would not have survived thirty seconds if anybody had bothered to think carefully about what selfishness is and how it works.  See, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311767990_On_the_use_of_mental_terms_in_behavioral_ecology_and_sociobiologyThTh

 

This is why it is so important to have something quite specific in mind when one talks of layers.   Only if you are specific will you know when you are wrong. 

 

I once got into a wonderful tangle with some meteorologists concerning “Elevated Mixed Layers”  Meteorologists insisted that  air masses, of different characteristics, DO NOT MIX.   It turns out that we had wildly different models of “mixing”.  They were thinking of it as a spontaneous process, as when sugar dissolves into water; I was thinking of it as including active processes, as when one substance is stirred into another.  They would say, “Oil and water don’t mix.”  I would say, “bloody hell, they do, too, mix.  They mix every time I make pancakes.”  The argument drove me nuts for several years because any fool, watching hard edged thunderheads rise over the Jemez, can plainly see both that the atmosphere is being stirred AND that the most air in the thunderhead is not readily diffusing into the dryer descending air around it.  From my point of view, convection is something the atmosphere does, like mixing; from their point of view, convection is something that is DONE TO the atmosphere, like stirring.  You get to that distinction only by thinking of very specific examples of mixing as you deploy the metaphor. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Saturday, June 10, 2017 11:36 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy

 

long long ago, my master's thesis in computer science and my phd dissertation in cognitive anthropology dealt extensively with the issue of metaphor and model, specifically in the area of artificial intelligence and cognitive models of "mind." the very first academic papers I published dealt with this issue (They were in AI MAgazine, the 'journal of record' in the field at the time.

 

My own musings were deeply informed by the work of Earl R. MacCormac: A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor and Metaphor and Myth in Science and Religion.

 

MacCormac argues that metaphor 'evolves' from "epiphor" the first suggestion that something is like something else to either "dead metaphor" or "lexical term" depending on the extent to which referents suggested by the first 'something'  are confirmed to correlate to similar referents in the second "something." E.G. an atom is like a solar system suggests that a nucleus is like the sun and electrons are like planets plus orbits are at specific intervals and electrons can be moved from one orbit to another by adding energy (acceleration) just like any other satellite. As referents like this were confirmed the epiphor became a productive metaphor and a model, i.e. the Bohr model. Eventually, our increasing knowledge of atoms and particle/waves made it clear that the model/metaphor was 'wrong' in nearly every respect and the metaphor died. Its use in beginning chemistry suggests that it is still a useful tool for metaphorical thinking; modified to "what might you infer/reason, if you looked at an atom as if it were a tiny solar system."

 

In the case of AI, the joint epiphors — the computer is like a mind, the mind is like a computer — should have rapidly become dead metaphors. Instead they became models "physical symbol system" and most in the community insisted that they were lexical terms (notably Pylyshyn, Newell, and Simon). To explain this, I added the idea of a "paraphor" to MacCormac's evolutionary sequence — a metaphor so ingrained in a paradigm that those thinking with that paradigm cannot perceive the obvious failures of the metaphor.

 

MacCormac's second book argues for the pervasiveness of the use and misuse of metaphor and its relationship to models (mathematical and iillustrative) in both science and religion. The "Scientific Method," the process of doing science, is itself a metaphor (at best) that should have become a dead metaphor as there is abundant evidence that 'science' is not done 'that way' but only after the fact as if it had been done that way. In an Ouroborosian twist, even MacCormac;s theory of metaphor is itself a metaphor.

 

If this thread attracts interest, I think the work of MacCormac would provide a rich mine of potential ideas and a framework for the discussion. Unfortunately, it mostly seems to be behind pay walls — the books and JSTOR or its ilk.

 

dave west

 

 

 

On Fri, Jun 9, 2017, at 03:11 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

I meant to spawn a fresh proto-thread here, sorry.

 

Given that we have been splitting hairs on terminology, I wanted to at least OPEN the topic that has been grazed over and over, and that is the distinction between Model, Metaphor, and Analogy.  

 

I specifically mean

 

1. Mathematical Model
2. Conceptual Metaphor
3. Formal Analogy

I don't know if this narrows it down enough to discuss but I think these three terms have been bandied about loosely and widely enough lately to deserve a little more explication?

I could rattle on for pages about my own usage/opinions/distinctions but trust that would just pollute a thread before it had a chance to start, if start it can.

A brief Google Search gave me THIS reference which looks promising, but as usual, I'm not willing to go past a paywall or beg a colleague/institution for access (I know LANL's reference library will probably get this for me if I go in there!).

http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9780631221081_chunk_g97806312210818

 

 

 

 

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[Prof David West]

The Andean tribe is the Aymara - hence my example.

BTW "the future is in front of us" is an embedded metaphor ala Lakoff  because it relates the fact our bodies move in the same direction our eyes point; but the Aymaran "future is behind us because we see it not" is actually more of a conceptual metaphor - juxtaposing two concepts —  the 'unknown' with 'unseen'

davew

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017, at 09:56 PM, Tom Johnson wrote:

Dave West writes: "... An example, "the future is in front of us." 

Unless you're a member of some Andean tribe whose name I've forgotten.  Then the past is in front of use because we know what it is, we can see it.  And the future is behind us because we know not what it is.  (Source: a recent SAR lecture that isn't online yet.)

TJ

============================================

Tom Johnson

Institute for Analytic Journalism   --     Santa Fe, NM USA

505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)

Society of Professional Journalists 

Check out It's The People's Data

http://www.jtjohnson.com                   [hidden email]

============================================

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 8:53 PM, Jenny Quillien <[hidden email]> wrote:

If there is a WedTech on this thread I would also certainly attend. So I vote that Dave gets busy and leads us toward the light.

Jenny Quillien

On 6/10/2017 8:24 PM, Prof David West wrote:

Hi Nick, hope you are enjoying the east.

The contrast class for "conceptual metaphor" is "embedded metaphor" ala Lakoff, et. al. An example, "the future is in front of us." Unless, of course you speak Aymaran in which case "the future is behind us."

Steve, I do not regularly attend WedTech, but if this thread becomes a featured topic, I certainly would be there.

davew

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017, at 07:35 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Hi, Dave,

 

Thanks for taking the time to lay this out.  I wonder what you call the present status of “natural selection” as a metaphor. In this case, the analogues between the natural situation and the pigeon coop remain strong, but most users of the theory have become ignorant about the salient features of the breeding situation.  So the metaphor hasn’t died, exactly; it’s been sucked dry of its meaning by the ignorance of its practitioners. 

 

I balk at the idea of a “conceptual metaphor”.  It’s one of those terms that smothers its object with love.  What is the contrast class?  How could a metaphor be other than conceptual?  I think the term  subtly makes a case for vague metaphors.  In my own ‘umble view, metaphors should be as specific as possible.  Brain/mind is a case two things that we know almost nothing about are used as metaphors for one another resulting in the vast promulgation of gibberish. Metaphors should sort knowledge into three categories, stuff we know that is consistent with the metaphor, stuff we know that is IN consistent with the metaphor, and stuff we don’t know, which is implied by the metaphor.  This last is the heuristic “wet edge” of the metaphor.  The vaguer a metaphor, the more difficult it is to distinguish between these three categories, and the less useful the metaphor is.  Dawkins “selfish gene” metaphor, with all its phony reductionist panache, would not have survived thirty seconds if anybody had bothered to think carefully about what selfishness is and how it works.  See, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311767990_On_the_use_of_mental_terms_in_behavioral_ecology_and_sociobiologyThTh

 

This is why it is so important to have something quite specific in mind when one talks of layers.   Only if you are specific will you know when you are wrong. 

 

I once got into a wonderful tangle with some meteorologists concerning “Elevated Mixed Layers”  Meteorologists insisted that  air masses, of different characteristics, DO NOT MIX.   It turns out that we had wildly different models of “mixing”.  They were thinking of it as a spontaneous process, as when sugar dissolves into water; I was thinking of it as including active processes, as when one substance is stirred into another.  They would say, “Oil and water don’t mix.”  I would say, “bloody hell, they do, too, mix.  They mix every time I make pancakes.”  The argument drove me nuts for several years because any fool, watching hard edged thunderheads rise over the Jemez, can plainly see both that the atmosphere is being stirred AND that the most air in the thunderhead is not readily diffusing into the dryer descending air around it.  From my point of view, convection is something the atmosphere does, like mixing; from their point of view, convection is something that is DONE TO the atmosphere, like stirring.  You get to that distinction only by thinking of very specific examples of mixing as you deploy the metaphor. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Saturday, June 10, 2017 11:36 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy

 

long long ago, my master's thesis in computer science and my phd dissertation in cognitive anthropology dealt extensively with the issue of metaphor and model, specifically in the area of artificial intelligence and cognitive models of "mind." the very first academic papers I published dealt with this issue (They were in AI MAgazine, the 'journal of record' in the field at the time.

 

My own musings were deeply informed by the work of Earl R. MacCormac: A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor and Metaphor and Myth in Science and Religion.

 

MacCormac argues that metaphor 'evolves' from "epiphor" the first suggestion that something is like something else to either "dead metaphor" or "lexical term" depending on the extent to which referents suggested by the first 'something'  are confirmed to correlate to similar referents in the second "something." E.G. an atom is like a solar system suggests that a nucleus is like the sun and electrons are like planets plus orbits are at specific intervals and electrons can be moved from one orbit to another by adding energy (acceleration) just like any other satellite. As referents like this were confirmed the epiphor became a productive metaphor and a model, i.e. the Bohr model. Eventually, our increasing knowledge of atoms and particle/waves made it clear that the model/metaphor was 'wrong' in nearly every respect and the metaphor died. Its use in beginning chemistry suggests that it is still a useful tool for metaphorical thinking; modified to "what might you infer/reason, if you looked at an atom as if it were a tiny solar system."

 

In the case of AI, the joint epiphors — the computer is like a mind, the mind is like a computer — should have rapidly become dead metaphors. Instead they became models "physical symbol system" and most in the community insisted that they were lexical terms (notably Pylyshyn, Newell, and Simon). To explain this, I added the idea of a "paraphor" to MacCormac's evolutionary sequence — a metaphor so ingrained in a paradigm that those thinking with that paradigm cannot perceive the obvious failures of the metaphor.

 

MacCormac's second book argues for the pervasiveness of the use and misuse of metaphor and its relationship to models (mathematical and iillustrative) in both science and religion. The "Scientific Method," the process of doing science, is itself a metaphor (at best) that should have become a dead metaphor as there is abundant evidence that 'science' is not done 'that way' but only after the fact as if it had been done that way. In an Ouroborosian twist, even MacCormac;s theory of metaphor is itself a metaphor.

 

If this thread attracts interest, I think the work of MacCormac would provide a rich mine of potential ideas and a framework for the discussion. Unfortunately, it mostly seems to be behind pay walls — the books and JSTOR or its ilk.

 

dave west

 

 

 

On Fri, Jun 9, 2017, at 03:11 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

I meant to spawn a fresh proto-thread here, sorry.

 

Given that we have been splitting hairs on terminology, I wanted to at least OPEN the topic that has been grazed over and over, and that is the distinction between Model, Metaphor, and Analogy.  

 

I specifically mean

 

1. Mathematical Model
   
2. Conceptual Metaphor
   
3. Formal Analogy
   

I don't know if this narrows it down enough to discuss but I think these three terms have been bandied about loosely and widely enough lately to deserve a little more explication?

I could rattle on for pages about my own usage/opinions/distinctions but trust that would just pollute a thread before it had a chance to start, if start it can.

A brief Google Search gave me THIS reference which looks promising, but as usual, I'm not willing to go past a paywall or beg a colleague/institution for access (I know LANL's reference library will probably get this for me if I go in there!).

http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9780631221081_chunk_g97806312210818

 

 

 

 

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[Roger Critchlow-2]

The pattern is that people recognize patterns.  Patterns of sensory experience that get resolved to people, places, things, phenomena.  Patterns of gesture, utterance, markings on media which get recognized as language.  Patterns of linguistic expression which contend to be seen as models, or metaphors, or analogies, or similes, or congruencies, or homologies, or patterns.

At this point, one might ask: how many layers of pattern recognition are there between sensory experience and arguments about models and metaphors?  But our best artificial examples of pattern recognizers are deep neural nets, and they don't care about no stinking layers.  A  "layer" in a net might feed its conclusions to the "next layer", to itself, to its peers, to its ancestors, to its descendants, to any of the above with a delay, or all of the above.  The net architecture is probably written to allow as many of these connections as are feasible and to use the back propagation of error to prune.  And next week's architecture will have more feasible connections than last week's.

So that's a model of why we can get in such a muddle when we talk about patterns of patterns, we try to impose patterns of logical consistency, coherent architecture, hierarchical structure, modularity, levels of organization, and so on, all of which are good patterns, but they are none of them the ruling pattern that our pattern recognizers are built on, which is all of the above, and some other principles as yet to be recognized, in whatever proportions works.  

Pattern recognition is a form of natural selection.  The result is bricolage rather than direct application of engineering principles.  I was trying to find the adjectival form for bricolage.  Adventitious, fortuitous, seredipitous -- but all of these imply a kind of luck, and promiscuous implies undiscriminating.  I'm looking for the word for discriminating in its selection of elements but entirely open to whatever solution might be available.  Hmm.

All of this leaves aside the issue of whether the pattern recognized is true or false according to the pattern of empirical falsification or the pattern of feels right.

-- rec --

On Sun, Jun 11, 2017 at 8:57 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

R.

 

Y-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-s…………….............?

 

And the pattern is…………………?

 

N

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Sunday, June 11, 2017 7:11 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy

 

I think I'm starting to see a pattern here.

 

-- rec --

 

 

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 11:56 PM, Tom Johnson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dave West writes: "... An example, "the future is in front of us." 

 

Unless you're a member of some Andean tribe whose name I've forgotten.  Then the past is in front of use because we know what it is, we can see it.  And the future is behind us because we know not what it is.  (Source: a recent SAR lecture that isn't online yet.)

 

TJ

============================================
Tom Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism   --     Santa Fe, NM USA
<a href="tel:(505)%20577-6482" target="_blank">505.577.6482(c)                                    <a href="tel:(505)%20473-9646" target="_blank">505.473.9646(h)
Society of Professional Journalists 
Check out It's The People's Data

http://www.jtjohnson.com                   [hidden email]
============================================

 

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 8:53 PM, Jenny Quillien <[hidden email]> wrote:

If there is a WedTech on this thread I would also certainly attend. So I vote that Dave gets busy and leads us toward the light.

Jenny Quillien

 

On 6/10/2017 8:24 PM, Prof David West wrote:

Hi Nick, hope you are enjoying the east.

 

The contrast class for "conceptual metaphor" is "embedded metaphor" ala Lakoff, et. al. An example, "the future is in front of us." Unless, of course you speak Aymaran in which case "the future is behind us."

 

Steve, I do not regularly attend WedTech, but if this thread becomes a featured topic, I certainly would be there.

 

davew

 

 

 

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017, at 07:35 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Hi, Dave,

 

Thanks for taking the time to lay this out.  I wonder what you call the present status of “natural selection” as a metaphor. In this case, the analogues between the natural situation and the pigeon coop remain strong, but most users of the theory have become ignorant about the salient features of the breeding situation.  So the metaphor hasn’t died, exactly; it’s been sucked dry of its meaning by the ignorance of its practitioners. 

 

I balk at the idea of a “conceptual metaphor”.  It’s one of those terms that smothers its object with love.  What is the contrast class?  How could a metaphor be other than conceptual?  I think the term  subtly makes a case for vague metaphors.  In my own ‘umble view, metaphors should be as specific as possible.  Brain/mind is a case two things that we know almost nothing about are used as metaphors for one another resulting in the vast promulgation of gibberish. Metaphors should sort knowledge into three categories, stuff we know that is consistent with the metaphor, stuff we know that is IN consistent with the metaphor, and stuff we don’t know, which is implied by the metaphor.  This last is the heuristic “wet edge” of the metaphor.  The vaguer a metaphor, the more difficult it is to distinguish between these three categories, and the less useful the metaphor is.  Dawkins “selfish gene” metaphor, with all its phony reductionist panache, would not have survived thirty seconds if anybody had bothered to think carefully about what selfishness is and how it works.  See, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311767990_On_the_use_of_mental_terms_in_behavioral_ecology_and_sociobiologyThTh

 

This is why it is so important to have something quite specific in mind when one talks of layers.   Only if you are specific will you know when you are wrong. 

 

I once got into a wonderful tangle with some meteorologists concerning “Elevated Mixed Layers”  Meteorologists insisted that  air masses, of different characteristics, DO NOT MIX.   It turns out that we had wildly different models of “mixing”.  They were thinking of it as a spontaneous process, as when sugar dissolves into water; I was thinking of it as including active processes, as when one substance is stirred into another.  They would say, “Oil and water don’t mix.”  I would say, “bloody hell, they do, too, mix.  They mix every time I make pancakes.”  The argument drove me nuts for several years because any fool, watching hard edged thunderheads rise over the Jemez, can plainly see both that the atmosphere is being stirred AND that the most air in the thunderhead is not readily diffusing into the dryer descending air around it.  From my point of view, convection is something the atmosphere does, like mixing; from their point of view, convection is something that is DONE TO the atmosphere, like stirring.  You get to that distinction only by thinking of very specific examples of mixing as you deploy the metaphor. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Saturday, June 10, 2017 11:36 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy

 

long long ago, my master's thesis in computer science and my phd dissertation in cognitive anthropology dealt extensively with the issue of metaphor and model, specifically in the area of artificial intelligence and cognitive models of "mind." the very first academic papers I published dealt with this issue (They were in AI MAgazine, the 'journal of record' in the field at the time.

 

My own musings were deeply informed by the work of Earl R. MacCormac: A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor and Metaphor and Myth in Science and Religion.

 

MacCormac argues that metaphor 'evolves' from "epiphor" the first suggestion that something is like something else to either "dead metaphor" or "lexical term" depending on the extent to which referents suggested by the first 'something'  are confirmed to correlate to similar referents in the second "something." E.G. an atom is like a solar system suggests that a nucleus is like the sun and electrons are like planets plus orbits are at specific intervals and electrons can be moved from one orbit to another by adding energy (acceleration) just like any other satellite. As referents like this were confirmed the epiphor became a productive metaphor and a model, i.e. the Bohr model. Eventually, our increasing knowledge of atoms and particle/waves made it clear that the model/metaphor was 'wrong' in nearly every respect and the metaphor died. Its use in beginning chemistry suggests that it is still a useful tool for metaphorical thinking; modified to "what might you infer/reason, if you looked at an atom as if it were a tiny solar system."

 

In the case of AI, the joint epiphors — the computer is like a mind, the mind is like a computer — should have rapidly become dead metaphors. Instead they became models "physical symbol system" and most in the community insisted that they were lexical terms (notably Pylyshyn, Newell, and Simon). To explain this, I added the idea of a "paraphor" to MacCormac's evolutionary sequence — a metaphor so ingrained in a paradigm that those thinking with that paradigm cannot perceive the obvious failures of the metaphor.

 

MacCormac's second book argues for the pervasiveness of the use and misuse of metaphor and its relationship to models (mathematical and iillustrative) in both science and religion. The "Scientific Method," the process of doing science, is itself a metaphor (at best) that should have become a dead metaphor as there is abundant evidence that 'science' is not done 'that way' but only after the fact as if it had been done that way. In an Ouroborosian twist, even MacCormac;s theory of metaphor is itself a metaphor.

 

If this thread attracts interest, I think the work of MacCormac would provide a rich mine of potential ideas and a framework for the discussion. Unfortunately, it mostly seems to be behind pay walls — the books and JSTOR or its ilk.

 

dave west

 

 

 

On Fri, Jun 9, 2017, at 03:11 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

I meant to spawn a fresh proto-thread here, sorry.

 

Given that we have been splitting hairs on terminology, I wanted to at least OPEN the topic that has been grazed over and over, and that is the distinction between Model, Metaphor, and Analogy.  

 

I specifically mean

 

1. Mathematical Model
2. Conceptual Metaphor
3. Formal Analogy

I don't know if this narrows it down enough to discuss but I think these three terms have been bandied about loosely and widely enough lately to deserve a little more explication?

I could rattle on for pages about my own usage/opinions/distinctions but trust that would just pollute a thread before it had a chance to start, if start it can.

A brief Google Search gave me THIS reference which looks promising, but as usual, I'm not willing to go past a paywall or beg a colleague/institution for access (I know LANL's reference library will probably get this for me if I go in there!).

http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9780631221081_chunk_g97806312210818

 

 

 

 

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[Steve Smith]

Roger -

I think your invocation of neural nets as a model of how complex pattern matching/associations get built/learned by humans is motivated, if not as a deep explanation of how our mind/brian works, but how it *might*.   The work at LANL on the petavision project which primarily was modeling the visual cortex touched on this some...  

As for "layers", I suspect two things might be true:  physical instantiations of these complex pattern matching systems (e.g. the human perceptual system) might have some layers imposed by the hardware.   There is *some* processing at the retinal level, probably little to none in the optic nerve, a good deal more in the visual cortex and then "yet more" in the cerebral cortex.   This class of decomposition of the problem seems highly motivated and likely.   I think your point, however, is more once the cerebral cortex and langauage centers get involved? 

I think it is fascinating to notice what you point out, that the patterns we coin/invoke to try to understand better do not match the patterns our pattern-recognizers were "built on".   It seems like a top-down/bottom-up duality.   But can we dismiss that we *don't* have pattern recognizers which are atuned to thes pattern types you reference (logic, coherence, hierarchy, modularity, homology, etc.?).  I suppose I can believe that at the wetware level we *might not* but at the associative memory we surely seem to?   I think this is why we *impose* the illusion of hierarchy even when there is little/none?  There is some kind of template/prototypical pattern somewhere driving that, no?   Just as the anecdotal experiments with children who grew up in cities vs in natural surroundings having different structure detectors (straight lines and rectangular regions vs curved lines and myriad freeform shape recognizers)

I agree with your point about bricolage vs engineering and in sympathy with you, went looking for the adjectival and as you may have turned to the French whence bricolage comes...  but my French is abysmal and could not wade deep enough.  Along the way I was surprised that modern F/E translation dictionaries all use DIY as the definition... I find that sadly low-dimensional...   I thought immediately of another borrow word from the French: "bric a brac" which added a nice bit of parallax to it.

Just to feed the fires of an in-person dialog on this topic, I think there is a good reason that both Jenny Q and Dave W threw down, and that would be (I am guessing) their deep interest in Alexander's Pattern Languages.   I do think of their specific collection of patterns in Architecture in "A Pattern Language" to be somewhat a collection of  "bric a brac" in the best way.   I'm a big fan of starting with the most intuitive and ad hoc and only applying formalisms and structure as it is recognized rather than imposing it from the top.

- Steve

PS>  Do you EVER visit SFe?  I haven't cracked a single book I bought when you were leaving... I have friends and colleagues dying and downsizing so fast that my own damn library is growing faster than I can even shelve properly.   Bastards!

On 6/11/17 8:57 AM, Roger Critchlow wrote:

The pattern is that people recognize patterns.  Patterns of sensory experience that get resolved to people, places, things, phenomena.  Patterns of gesture, utterance, markings on media which get recognized as language.  Patterns of linguistic expression which contend to be seen as models, or metaphors, or analogies, or similes, or congruencies, or homologies, or patterns.

At this point, one might ask: how many layers of pattern recognition are there between sensory experience and arguments about models and metaphors?  But our best artificial examples of pattern recognizers are deep neural nets, and they don't care about no stinking layers.  A  "layer" in a net might feed its conclusions to the "next layer", to itself, to its peers, to its ancestors, to its descendants, to any of the above with a delay, or all of the above.  The net architecture is probably written to allow as many of these connections as are feasible and to use the back propagation of error to prune.  And next week's architecture will have more feasible connections than last week's.

So that's a model of why we can get in such a muddle when we talk about patterns of patterns, we try to impose patterns of logical consistency, coherent architecture, hierarchical structure, modularity, levels of organization, and so on, all of which are good patterns, but they are none of them the ruling pattern that our pattern recognizers are built on, which is all of the above, and some other principles as yet to be recognized, in whatever proportions works.  

Pattern recognition is a form of natural selection.  The result is bricolage rather than direct application of engineering principles.  I was trying to find the adjectival form for bricolage.  Adventitious, fortuitous, seredipitous -- but all of these imply a kind of luck, and promiscuous implies undiscriminating.  I'm looking for the word for discriminating in its selection of elements but entirely open to whatever solution might be available.  Hmm.

All of this leaves aside the issue of whether the pattern recognized is true or false according to the pattern of empirical falsification or the pattern of feels right.

-- rec --

On Sun, Jun 11, 2017 at 8:57 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

R.

 

Y-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-s…………….............?

 

And the pattern is…………………?

 

N

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Sunday, June 11, 2017 7:11 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy

 

I think I'm starting to see a pattern here.

 

-- rec --

 

 

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 11:56 PM, Tom Johnson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dave West writes: "... An example, "the future is in front of us." 

 

Unless you're a member of some Andean tribe whose name I've forgotten.  Then the past is in front of use because we know what it is, we can see it.  And the future is behind us because we know not what it is.  (Source: a recent SAR lecture that isn't online yet.)

 

TJ

============================================
Tom Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism   --     Santa Fe, NM USA
<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="tel:%28505%29%20577-6482" target="_blank">505.577.6482(c)                                    <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="tel:%28505%29%20473-9646" target="_blank">505.473.9646(h)
Society of Professional Journalists 
Check out It's The People's Data

http://www.jtjohnson.com                   [hidden email]
============================================

 

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 8:53 PM, Jenny Quillien <[hidden email]> wrote:

If there is a WedTech on this thread I would also certainly attend. So I vote that Dave gets busy and leads us toward the light.

Jenny Quillien

 

On 6/10/2017 8:24 PM, Prof David West wrote:

Hi Nick, hope you are enjoying the east.

 

The contrast class for "conceptual metaphor" is "embedded metaphor" ala Lakoff, et. al. An example, "the future is in front of us." Unless, of course you speak Aymaran in which case "the future is behind us."

 

Steve, I do not regularly attend WedTech, but if this thread becomes a featured topic, I certainly would be there.

 

davew

 

 

 

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017, at 07:35 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Hi, Dave,

 

Thanks for taking the time to lay this out.  I wonder what you call the present status of “natural selection” as a metaphor. In this case, the analogues between the natural situation and the pigeon coop remain strong, but most users of the theory have become ignorant about the salient features of the breeding situation.  So the metaphor hasn’t died, exactly; it’s been sucked dry of its meaning by the ignorance of its practitioners. 

 

I balk at the idea of a “conceptual metaphor”.  It’s one of those terms that smothers its object with love.  What is the contrast class?  How could a metaphor be other than conceptual?  I think the term  subtly makes a case for vague metaphors.  In my own ‘umble view, metaphors should be as specific as possible.  Brain/mind is a case two things that we know almost nothing about are used as metaphors for one another resulting in the vast promulgation of gibberish. Metaphors should sort knowledge into three categories, stuff we know that is consistent with the metaphor, stuff we know that is IN consistent with the metaphor, and stuff we don’t know, which is implied by the metaphor.  This last is the heuristic “wet edge” of the metaphor.  The vaguer a metaphor, the more difficult it is to distinguish between these three categories, and the less useful the metaphor is.  Dawkins “selfish gene” metaphor, with all its phony reductionist panache, would not have survived thirty seconds if anybody had bothered to think carefully about what selfishness is and how it works.  See, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311767990_On_the_use_of_mental_terms_in_behavioral_ecology_and_sociobiologyThTh

 

This is why it is so important to have something quite specific in mind when one talks of layers.   Only if you are specific will you know when you are wrong. 

 

I once got into a wonderful tangle with some meteorologists concerning “Elevated Mixed Layers”  Meteorologists insisted that  air masses, of different characteristics, DO NOT MIX.   It turns out that we had wildly different models of “mixing”.  They were thinking of it as a spontaneous process, as when sugar dissolves into water; I was thinking of it as including active processes, as when one substance is stirred into another.  They would say, “Oil and water don’t mix.”  I would say, “bloody hell, they do, too, mix.  They mix every time I make pancakes.”  The argument drove me nuts for several years because any fool, watching hard edged thunderheads rise over the Jemez, can plainly see both that the atmosphere is being stirred AND that the most air in the thunderhead is not readily diffusing into the dryer descending air around it.  From my point of view, convection is something the atmosphere does, like mixing; from their point of view, convection is something that is DONE TO the atmosphere, like stirring.  You get to that distinction only by thinking of very specific examples of mixing as you deploy the metaphor. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Saturday, June 10, 2017 11:36 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy

 

long long ago, my master's thesis in computer science and my phd dissertation in cognitive anthropology dealt extensively with the issue of metaphor and model, specifically in the area of artificial intelligence and cognitive models of "mind." the very first academic papers I published dealt with this issue (They were in AI MAgazine, the 'journal of record' in the field at the time.

 

My own musings were deeply informed by the work of Earl R. MacCormac: A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor and Metaphor and Myth in Science and Religion.

 

MacCormac argues that metaphor 'evolves' from "epiphor" the first suggestion that something is like something else to either "dead metaphor" or "lexical term" depending on the extent to which referents suggested by the first 'something'  are confirmed to correlate to similar referents in the second "something." E.G. an atom is like a solar system suggests that a nucleus is like the sun and electrons are like planets plus orbits are at specific intervals and electrons can be moved from one orbit to another by adding energy (acceleration) just like any other satellite. As referents like this were confirmed the epiphor became a productive metaphor and a model, i.e. the Bohr model. Eventually, our increasing knowledge of atoms and particle/waves made it clear that the model/metaphor was 'wrong' in nearly every respect and the metaphor died. Its use in beginning chemistry suggests that it is still a useful tool for metaphorical thinking; modified to "what might you infer/reason, if you looked at an atom as if it were a tiny solar system."

 

In the case of AI, the joint epiphors — the computer is like a mind, the mind is like a computer — should have rapidly become dead metaphors. Instead they became models "physical symbol system" and most in the community insisted that they were lexical terms (notably Pylyshyn, Newell, and Simon). To explain this, I added the idea of a "paraphor" to MacCormac's evolutionary sequence — a metaphor so ingrained in a paradigm that those thinking with that paradigm cannot perceive the obvious failures of the metaphor.

 

MacCormac's second book argues for the pervasiveness of the use and misuse of metaphor and its relationship to models (mathematical and iillustrative) in both science and religion. The "Scientific Method," the process of doing science, is itself a metaphor (at best) that should have become a dead metaphor as there is abundant evidence that 'science' is not done 'that way' but only after the fact as if it had been done that way. In an Ouroborosian twist, even MacCormac;s theory of metaphor is itself a metaphor.

 

If this thread attracts interest, I think the work of MacCormac would provide a rich mine of potential ideas and a framework for the discussion. Unfortunately, it mostly seems to be behind pay walls — the books and JSTOR or its ilk.

 

dave west

 

 

 

On Fri, Jun 9, 2017, at 03:11 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

I meant to spawn a fresh proto-thread here, sorry.

 

Given that we have been splitting hairs on terminology, I wanted to at least OPEN the topic that has been grazed over and over, and that is the distinction between Model, Metaphor, and Analogy.  

 

I specifically mean

 

1. Mathematical Model
2. Conceptual Metaphor
3. Formal Analogy

I don't know if this narrows it down enough to discuss but I think these three terms have been bandied about loosely and widely enough lately to deserve a little more explication?

I could rattle on for pages about my own usage/opinions/distinctions but trust that would just pollute a thread before it had a chance to start, if start it can.

A brief Google Search gave me THIS reference which looks promising, but as usual, I'm not willing to go past a paywall or beg a colleague/institution for access (I know LANL's reference library will probably get this for me if I go in there!).

http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9780631221081_chunk_g97806312210818

 

 

 

 

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============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

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[Nick Thompson]

R.,

 

Thanks for this.

 

“bricolage “ is one of those words I thought I knew the meaning of… and didn’t.  I thought it referred to what you got if you dropped a stack of fine china while carrying it to the table before your wife’s dinner party for her boss.  Bad pun from “breakage” I guess.  Here is a really nifty source, containing both definitions and etymology:

 

http://www.memidex.com/bricolage

 

It actually seems to mean “puttering’, at its root.  So, a day which you spent doing a little of this and a little of that is broccolage.  The meaning gets extended to objects constructed in the same way as such a day…. An object constructed of a little of this and a little of that is considered bricolage.  Bower birds and packrats’ construtions are “bricolage”  .  Mockingbird songs would be bricolage.

 

Now I have to go back and read you post.

 

Not stinking hot yet.  I think the front is about to come through.  Still some over-running. 

 

N

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Sunday, June 11, 2017 10:58 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy

 

The pattern is that people recognize patterns.  Patterns of sensory experience that get resolved to people, places, things, phenomena.  Patterns of gesture, utterance, markings on media which get recognized as language.  Patterns of linguistic expression which contend to be seen as models, or metaphors, or analogies, or similes, or congruencies, or homologies, or patterns.

 

At this point, one might ask: how many layers of pattern recognition are there between sensory experience and arguments about models and metaphors?  But our best artificial examples of pattern recognizers are deep neural nets, and they don't care about no stinking layers.  A  "layer" in a net might feed its conclusions to the "next layer", to itself, to its peers, to its ancestors, to its descendants, to any of the above with a delay, or all of the above.  The net architecture is probably written to allow as many of these connections as are feasible and to use the back propagation of error to prune.  And next week's architecture will have more feasible connections than last week's.

 

So that's a model of why we can get in such a muddle when we talk about patterns of patterns, we try to impose patterns of logical consistency, coherent architecture, hierarchical structure, modularity, levels of organization, and so on, all of which are good patterns, but they are none of them the ruling pattern that our pattern recognizers are built on, which is all of the above, and some other principles as yet to be recognized, in whatever proportions works.  

 

Pattern recognition is a form of natural selection.  The result is bricolage rather than direct application of engineering principles.  I was trying to find the adjectival form for bricolage.  Adventitious, fortuitous, seredipitous -- but all of these imply a kind of luck, and promiscuous implies undiscriminating.  I'm looking for the word for discriminating in its selection of elements but entirely open to whatever solution might be available.  Hmm.

 

All of this leaves aside the issue of whether the pattern recognized is true or false according to the pattern of empirical falsification or the pattern of feels right.

 

-- rec --

 

On Sun, Jun 11, 2017 at 8:57 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

R.

 

Y-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-s…………….............?

 

And the pattern is…………………?

 

N

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Sunday, June 11, 2017 7:11 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy

 

I think I'm starting to see a pattern here.

 

-- rec --

 

 

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 11:56 PM, Tom Johnson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dave West writes: "... An example, "the future is in front of us." 

 

Unless you're a member of some Andean tribe whose name I've forgotten.  Then the past is in front of use because we know what it is, we can see it.  And the future is behind us because we know not what it is.  (Source: a recent SAR lecture that isn't online yet.)

 

TJ

============================================
Tom Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism   --     Santa Fe, NM USA
<a href="tel:(505)%20577-6482" target="_blank">505.577.6482(c)                                    <a href="tel:(505)%20473-9646" target="_blank">505.473.9646(h)
Society of Professional Journalists 
Check out It's The People's Data

http://www.jtjohnson.com                   [hidden email]
============================================

 

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 8:53 PM, Jenny Quillien <[hidden email]> wrote:

If there is a WedTech on this thread I would also certainly attend. So I vote that Dave gets busy and leads us toward the light.

Jenny Quillien

 

On 6/10/2017 8:24 PM, Prof David West wrote:

Hi Nick, hope you are enjoying the east.

 

The contrast class for "conceptual metaphor" is "embedded metaphor" ala Lakoff, et. al. An example, "the future is in front of us." Unless, of course you speak Aymaran in which case "the future is behind us."

 

Steve, I do not regularly attend WedTech, but if this thread becomes a featured topic, I certainly would be there.

 

davew

 

 

 

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017, at 07:35 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Hi, Dave,

 

Thanks for taking the time to lay this out.  I wonder what you call the present status of “natural selection” as a metaphor. In this case, the analogues between the natural situation and the pigeon coop remain strong, but most users of the theory have become ignorant about the salient features of the breeding situation.  So the metaphor hasn’t died, exactly; it’s been sucked dry of its meaning by the ignorance of its practitioners. 

 

I balk at the idea of a “conceptual metaphor”.  It’s one of those terms that smothers its object with love.  What is the contrast class?  How could a metaphor be other than conceptual?  I think the term  subtly makes a case for vague metaphors.  In my own ‘umble view, metaphors should be as specific as possible.  Brain/mind is a case two things that we know almost nothing about are used as metaphors for one another resulting in the vast promulgation of gibberish. Metaphors should sort knowledge into three categories, stuff we know that is consistent with the metaphor, stuff we know that is IN consistent with the metaphor, and stuff we don’t know, which is implied by the metaphor.  This last is the heuristic “wet edge” of the metaphor.  The vaguer a metaphor, the more difficult it is to distinguish between these three categories, and the less useful the metaphor is.  Dawkins “selfish gene” metaphor, with all its phony reductionist panache, would not have survived thirty seconds if anybody had bothered to think carefully about what selfishness is and how it works.  See, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311767990_On_the_use_of_mental_terms_in_behavioral_ecology_and_sociobiologyThTh

 

This is why it is so important to have something quite specific in mind when one talks of layers.   Only if you are specific will you know when you are wrong. 

 

I once got into a wonderful tangle with some meteorologists concerning “Elevated Mixed Layers”  Meteorologists insisted that  air masses, of different characteristics, DO NOT MIX.   It turns out that we had wildly different models of “mixing”.  They were thinking of it as a spontaneous process, as when sugar dissolves into water; I was thinking of it as including active processes, as when one substance is stirred into another.  They would say, “Oil and water don’t mix.”  I would say, “bloody hell, they do, too, mix.  They mix every time I make pancakes.”  The argument drove me nuts for several years because any fool, watching hard edged thunderheads rise over the Jemez, can plainly see both that the atmosphere is being stirred AND that the most air in the thunderhead is not readily diffusing into the dryer descending air around it.  From my point of view, convection is something the atmosphere does, like mixing; from their point of view, convection is something that is DONE TO the atmosphere, like stirring.  You get to that distinction only by thinking of very specific examples of mixing as you deploy the metaphor. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Saturday, June 10, 2017 11:36 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy

 

long long ago, my master's thesis in computer science and my phd dissertation in cognitive anthropology dealt extensively with the issue of metaphor and model, specifically in the area of artificial intelligence and cognitive models of "mind." the very first academic papers I published dealt with this issue (They were in AI MAgazine, the 'journal of record' in the field at the time.

 

My own musings were deeply informed by the work of Earl R. MacCormac: A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor and Metaphor and Myth in Science and Religion.

 

MacCormac argues that metaphor 'evolves' from "epiphor" the first suggestion that something is like something else to either "dead metaphor" or "lexical term" depending on the extent to which referents suggested by the first 'something'  are confirmed to correlate to similar referents in the second "something." E.G. an atom is like a solar system suggests that a nucleus is like the sun and electrons are like planets plus orbits are at specific intervals and electrons can be moved from one orbit to another by adding energy (acceleration) just like any other satellite. As referents like this were confirmed the epiphor became a productive metaphor and a model, i.e. the Bohr model. Eventually, our increasing knowledge of atoms and particle/waves made it clear that the model/metaphor was 'wrong' in nearly every respect and the metaphor died. Its use in beginning chemistry suggests that it is still a useful tool for metaphorical thinking; modified to "what might you infer/reason, if you looked at an atom as if it were a tiny solar system."

 

In the case of AI, the joint epiphors — the computer is like a mind, the mind is like a computer — should have rapidly become dead metaphors. Instead they became models "physical symbol system" and most in the community insisted that they were lexical terms (notably Pylyshyn, Newell, and Simon). To explain this, I added the idea of a "paraphor" to MacCormac's evolutionary sequence — a metaphor so ingrained in a paradigm that those thinking with that paradigm cannot perceive the obvious failures of the metaphor.

 

MacCormac's second book argues for the pervasiveness of the use and misuse of metaphor and its relationship to models (mathematical and iillustrative) in both science and religion. The "Scientific Method," the process of doing science, is itself a metaphor (at best) that should have become a dead metaphor as there is abundant evidence that 'science' is not done 'that way' but only after the fact as if it had been done that way. In an Ouroborosian twist, even MacCormac;s theory of metaphor is itself a metaphor.

 

If this thread attracts interest, I think the work of MacCormac would provide a rich mine of potential ideas and a framework for the discussion. Unfortunately, it mostly seems to be behind pay walls — the books and JSTOR or its ilk.

 

dave west

 

 

 

On Fri, Jun 9, 2017, at 03:11 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

I meant to spawn a fresh proto-thread here, sorry.

 

Given that we have been splitting hairs on terminology, I wanted to at least OPEN the topic that has been grazed over and over, and that is the distinction between Model, Metaphor, and Analogy.  

 

I specifically mean

 

1. Mathematical Model
2. Conceptual Metaphor
3. Formal Analogy

I don't know if this narrows it down enough to discuss but I think these three terms have been bandied about loosely and widely enough lately to deserve a little more explication?

I could rattle on for pages about my own usage/opinions/distinctions but trust that would just pollute a thread before it had a chance to start, if start it can.

A brief Google Search gave me THIS reference which looks promising, but as usual, I'm not willing to go past a paywall or beg a colleague/institution for access (I know LANL's reference library will probably get this for me if I go in there!).

http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9780631221081_chunk_g97806312210818

 

 

 

 

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

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[Roger Critchlow-2]

On Sun, Jun 11, 2017 at 11:43 AM, Steven A Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

PS>  Do you EVER visit SFe?  I haven't cracked a single book I bought when you were leaving... I have friends and colleagues dying and downsizing so fast that my own damn library is growing faster than I can even shelve properly.   Bastards!

Heh, need google book scanner machine for father's day, hurry!  

I thought of one of the books that I parted from when I was writing this, but I can't remember its title or author.  I just scanned through the 992 results of searching "learning" at mitpress.mit.edu and didn't find it, 

I haven't visited Santa Fe since I left.  Making a second trip to Washington state in a few weeks.  

-- rec --

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

Via Cape Horn or the Panama Canal?

On Jun 11, 2017 11:36 AM, "Roger Critchlow" <[hidden email]> wrote:

On Sun, Jun 11, 2017 at 11:43 AM, Steven A Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

PS>  Do you EVER visit SFe?  I haven't cracked a single book I bought when you were leaving... I have friends and colleagues dying and downsizing so fast that my own damn library is growing faster than I can even shelve properly.   Bastards!

Heh, need google book scanner machine for father's day, hurry!  

I thought of one of the books that I parted from when I was writing this, but I can't remember its title or author.  I just scanned through the 992 results of searching "learning" at mitpress.mit.edu and didn't find it, 

I haven't visited Santa Fe since I left.  Making a second trip to Washington state in a few weeks.  

-- rec --

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[Roger Critchlow-2]

That's funny, none of those definitions mention Levi-Strauss or any other intellectual.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricolage

The first, “social bricolage,” was introduced by cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1962. Lévi-Strauss was interested in how societies create novel solutions by using resources that already exist in the collective social consciousness. The second, "creative cognition,” is an intra-psychic approach to studying how individuals retrieve and recombine knowledge in new ways. Psychological bricolage, therefore, refers to the cognitive processes that enable individuals to retrieve and recombine previously unrelated knowledge they already possess.^[7][8] Psychological bricolage is an intra-individual process akin to Karl E. Weick’s notion of bricolage in organizations, which is akin to Lévi-Strauss' notion of bricolage in societies.^[9]

-- rec --

On Sun, Jun 11, 2017 at 1:35 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

R.,

 

Thanks for this.

 

“bricolage “ is one of those words I thought I knew the meaning of… and didn’t.  I thought it referred to what you got if you dropped a stack of fine china while carrying it to the table before your wife’s dinner party for her boss.  Bad pun from “breakage” I guess.  Here is a really nifty source, containing both definitions and etymology:

 

http://www.memidex.com/bricolage

 

It actually seems to mean “puttering’, at its root.  So, a day which you spent doing a little of this and a little of that is broccolage.  The meaning gets extended to objects constructed in the same way as such a day…. An object constructed of a little of this and a little of that is considered bricolage.  Bower birds and packrats’ construtions are “bricolage”  .  Mockingbird songs would be bricolage.

 

Now I have to go back and read you post.

 

Not stinking hot yet.  I think the front is about to come through.  Still some over-running. 

 

N

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Sunday, June 11, 2017 10:58 AM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy

 

The pattern is that people recognize patterns.  Patterns of sensory experience that get resolved to people, places, things, phenomena.  Patterns of gesture, utterance, markings on media which get recognized as language.  Patterns of linguistic expression which contend to be seen as models, or metaphors, or analogies, or similes, or congruencies, or homologies, or patterns.

 

At this point, one might ask: how many layers of pattern recognition are there between sensory experience and arguments about models and metaphors?  But our best artificial examples of pattern recognizers are deep neural nets, and they don't care about no stinking layers.  A  "layer" in a net might feed its conclusions to the "next layer", to itself, to its peers, to its ancestors, to its descendants, to any of the above with a delay, or all of the above.  The net architecture is probably written to allow as many of these connections as are feasible and to use the back propagation of error to prune.  And next week's architecture will have more feasible connections than last week's.

 

So that's a model of why we can get in such a muddle when we talk about patterns of patterns, we try to impose patterns of logical consistency, coherent architecture, hierarchical structure, modularity, levels of organization, and so on, all of which are good patterns, but they are none of them the ruling pattern that our pattern recognizers are built on, which is all of the above, and some other principles as yet to be recognized, in whatever proportions works.  

 

Pattern recognition is a form of natural selection.  The result is bricolage rather than direct application of engineering principles.  I was trying to find the adjectival form for bricolage.  Adventitious, fortuitous, seredipitous -- but all of these imply a kind of luck, and promiscuous implies undiscriminating.  I'm looking for the word for discriminating in its selection of elements but entirely open to whatever solution might be available.  Hmm.

 

All of this leaves aside the issue of whether the pattern recognized is true or false according to the pattern of empirical falsification or the pattern of feels right.

 

-- rec --

 

On Sun, Jun 11, 2017 at 8:57 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

R.

 

Y-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-s…………….............?

 

And the pattern is…………………?

 

N

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Sunday, June 11, 2017 7:11 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy

 

I think I'm starting to see a pattern here.

 

-- rec --

 

 

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 11:56 PM, Tom Johnson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dave West writes: "... An example, "the future is in front of us." 

 

Unless you're a member of some Andean tribe whose name I've forgotten.  Then the past is in front of use because we know what it is, we can see it.  And the future is behind us because we know not what it is.  (Source: a recent SAR lecture that isn't online yet.)

 

TJ

============================================
Tom Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism   --     Santa Fe, NM USA
<a href="tel:(505)%20577-6482" target="_blank">505.577.6482(c)                                    <a href="tel:(505)%20473-9646" target="_blank">505.473.9646(h)
Society of Professional Journalists 
Check out It's The People's Data

http://www.jtjohnson.com                   [hidden email]
============================================

 

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 8:53 PM, Jenny Quillien <[hidden email]> wrote:

If there is a WedTech on this thread I would also certainly attend. So I vote that Dave gets busy and leads us toward the light.

Jenny Quillien

 

On 6/10/2017 8:24 PM, Prof David West wrote:

Hi Nick, hope you are enjoying the east.

 

The contrast class for "conceptual metaphor" is "embedded metaphor" ala Lakoff, et. al. An example, "the future is in front of us." Unless, of course you speak Aymaran in which case "the future is behind us."

 

Steve, I do not regularly attend WedTech, but if this thread becomes a featured topic, I certainly would be there.

 

davew

 

 

 

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017, at 07:35 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Hi, Dave,

 

Thanks for taking the time to lay this out.  I wonder what you call the present status of “natural selection” as a metaphor. In this case, the analogues between the natural situation and the pigeon coop remain strong, but most users of the theory have become ignorant about the salient features of the breeding situation.  So the metaphor hasn’t died, exactly; it’s been sucked dry of its meaning by the ignorance of its practitioners. 

 

I balk at the idea of a “conceptual metaphor”.  It’s one of those terms that smothers its object with love.  What is the contrast class?  How could a metaphor be other than conceptual?  I think the term  subtly makes a case for vague metaphors.  In my own ‘umble view, metaphors should be as specific as possible.  Brain/mind is a case two things that we know almost nothing about are used as metaphors for one another resulting in the vast promulgation of gibberish. Metaphors should sort knowledge into three categories, stuff we know that is consistent with the metaphor, stuff we know that is IN consistent with the metaphor, and stuff we don’t know, which is implied by the metaphor.  This last is the heuristic “wet edge” of the metaphor.  The vaguer a metaphor, the more difficult it is to distinguish between these three categories, and the less useful the metaphor is.  Dawkins “selfish gene” metaphor, with all its phony reductionist panache, would not have survived thirty seconds if anybody had bothered to think carefully about what selfishness is and how it works.  See, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311767990_On_the_use_of_mental_terms_in_behavioral_ecology_and_sociobiologyThTh

 

This is why it is so important to have something quite specific in mind when one talks of layers.   Only if you are specific will you know when you are wrong. 

 

I once got into a wonderful tangle with some meteorologists concerning “Elevated Mixed Layers”  Meteorologists insisted that  air masses, of different characteristics, DO NOT MIX.   It turns out that we had wildly different models of “mixing”.  They were thinking of it as a spontaneous process, as when sugar dissolves into water; I was thinking of it as including active processes, as when one substance is stirred into another.  They would say, “Oil and water don’t mix.”  I would say, “bloody hell, they do, too, mix.  They mix every time I make pancakes.”  The argument drove me nuts for several years because any fool, watching hard edged thunderheads rise over the Jemez, can plainly see both that the atmosphere is being stirred AND that the most air in the thunderhead is not readily diffusing into the dryer descending air around it.  From my point of view, convection is something the atmosphere does, like mixing; from their point of view, convection is something that is DONE TO the atmosphere, like stirring.  You get to that distinction only by thinking of very specific examples of mixing as you deploy the metaphor. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Saturday, June 10, 2017 11:36 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy

 

long long ago, my master's thesis in computer science and my phd dissertation in cognitive anthropology dealt extensively with the issue of metaphor and model, specifically in the area of artificial intelligence and cognitive models of "mind." the very first academic papers I published dealt with this issue (They were in AI MAgazine, the 'journal of record' in the field at the time.

 

My own musings were deeply informed by the work of Earl R. MacCormac: A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor and Metaphor and Myth in Science and Religion.

 

MacCormac argues that metaphor 'evolves' from "epiphor" the first suggestion that something is like something else to either "dead metaphor" or "lexical term" depending on the extent to which referents suggested by the first 'something'  are confirmed to correlate to similar referents in the second "something." E.G. an atom is like a solar system suggests that a nucleus is like the sun and electrons are like planets plus orbits are at specific intervals and electrons can be moved from one orbit to another by adding energy (acceleration) just like any other satellite. As referents like this were confirmed the epiphor became a productive metaphor and a model, i.e. the Bohr model. Eventually, our increasing knowledge of atoms and particle/waves made it clear that the model/metaphor was 'wrong' in nearly every respect and the metaphor died. Its use in beginning chemistry suggests that it is still a useful tool for metaphorical thinking; modified to "what might you infer/reason, if you looked at an atom as if it were a tiny solar system."

 

In the case of AI, the joint epiphors — the computer is like a mind, the mind is like a computer — should have rapidly become dead metaphors. Instead they became models "physical symbol system" and most in the community insisted that they were lexical terms (notably Pylyshyn, Newell, and Simon). To explain this, I added the idea of a "paraphor" to MacCormac's evolutionary sequence — a metaphor so ingrained in a paradigm that those thinking with that paradigm cannot perceive the obvious failures of the metaphor.

 

MacCormac's second book argues for the pervasiveness of the use and misuse of metaphor and its relationship to models (mathematical and iillustrative) in both science and religion. The "Scientific Method," the process of doing science, is itself a metaphor (at best) that should have become a dead metaphor as there is abundant evidence that 'science' is not done 'that way' but only after the fact as if it had been done that way. In an Ouroborosian twist, even MacCormac;s theory of metaphor is itself a metaphor.

 

If this thread attracts interest, I think the work of MacCormac would provide a rich mine of potential ideas and a framework for the discussion. Unfortunately, it mostly seems to be behind pay walls — the books and JSTOR or its ilk.

 

dave west

 

 

 

On Fri, Jun 9, 2017, at 03:11 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

I meant to spawn a fresh proto-thread here, sorry.

 

Given that we have been splitting hairs on terminology, I wanted to at least OPEN the topic that has been grazed over and over, and that is the distinction between Model, Metaphor, and Analogy.  

 

I specifically mean

 

1. Mathematical Model
2. Conceptual Metaphor
3. Formal Analogy

I don't know if this narrows it down enough to discuss but I think these three terms have been bandied about loosely and widely enough lately to deserve a little more explication?

I could rattle on for pages about my own usage/opinions/distinctions but trust that would just pollute a thread before it had a chance to start, if start it can.

A brief Google Search gave me THIS reference which looks promising, but as usual, I'm not willing to go past a paywall or beg a colleague/institution for access (I know LANL's reference library will probably get this for me if I go in there!).

http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9780631221081_chunk_g97806312210818

 

 

 

 

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[Roger Critchlow-2]

Alaska Air this time, Jet Blue last time, both involving red-eye legs, I gotta cut that out.

-- rec --

On Sun, Jun 11, 2017 at 2:20 PM, Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

Via Cape Horn or the Panama Canal?

On Jun 11, 2017 11:36 AM, "Roger Critchlow" <[hidden email]> wrote:

On Sun, Jun 11, 2017 at 11:43 AM, Steven A Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

PS>  Do you EVER visit SFe?  I haven't cracked a single book I bought when you were leaving... I have friends and colleagues dying and downsizing so fast that my own damn library is growing faster than I can even shelve properly.   Bastards!

Heh, need google book scanner machine for father's day, hurry!  

I thought of one of the books that I parted from when I was writing this, but I can't remember its title or author.  I just scanned through the 992 results of searching "learning" at mitpress.mit.edu and didn't find it, 

I haven't visited Santa Fe since I left.  Making a second trip to Washington state in a few weeks.  

-- rec --

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[Steve Smith]

It is almost time (in geologic as well as seasonal scales) to take the polar route!   Count the bears along the way? 

Or maybe the Drumpf can be talked into cutting a wide canal from the great lakes at the 49th parallel to keep those "unsavory furriners out of our Great 'Murrica Agin!"

I think it might be as easy to build a moat as a wall of the magnitude he want(ed)s across the southern border? 

And then Roger could SAIL to WA (hard to tack in a canal and that tunnel under the Canadian Rockies would be pretty much wind-free I think?).

On 6/11/17 12:20 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:

Via Cape Horn or the Panama Canal?

On Jun 11, 2017 11:36 AM, "Roger Critchlow" <[hidden email]> wrote:

On Sun, Jun 11, 2017 at 11:43 AM, Steven A Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

PS>  Do you EVER visit SFe?  I haven't cracked a single book I bought when you were leaving... I have friends and colleagues dying and downsizing so fast that my own damn library is growing faster than I can even shelve properly.   Bastards!

Heh, need google book scanner machine for father's day, hurry!  

I thought of one of the books that I parted from when I was writing this, but I can't remember its title or author.  I just scanned through the 992 results of searching "learning" at mitpress.mit.edu and didn't find it, 

I haven't visited Santa Fe since I left.  Making a second trip to Washington state in a few weeks.  

-- rec --

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