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Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

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David Eric Smith

Re: Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

Yes, I second this. The way Glen puts the point is exactly right.

On May 28, 2020, at 11:14 PM, Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

Good, Glen.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Thu, May 28, 2020, 7:50 AM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:
I'll try again to describe why constant talk of metaphors is distracting nonsense, at least for me. When I use a word, that word is a variable bound to some context. We can bind any string of letters to any subset of any context. So, a string like "xyz" can be bound to "that green thing in the distance". Even *after* you and Joe or whoever later come to call "that green thing in the distance" by the string "tank", I can *still* call it an "xyz". I can do this for decades. "xyz" need have no other binding for which to "metaphorize". So, regardless of what *you* think when you read the string "xyz", I'm not using a metaphor when I say "xyz". You may think it's a metaphor until you're blue in the face. But I didn't use a metaphor. >8^D

For me, a "strawman" has always meant that 1 single thing: rhetorical bad faith rewording. I've never used a straw man as a scare crow. I've never used it to train in combat. I've never used it to burn in effigy. I've never used it to mean anything but that one thing. So, therefore, it's not a metaphor. It's a meaningless string of characters bound to that one thing.

Sure, *you* can read whatever I write however you *want* to read what I write. That's the very point of the privacy-despite-the-"holographic"-principle threads. How you read it CAN BE entirely unrelated to how I write it. When you *impute* metaphor status into arbitrary strings you see on your screen, you are *inscribing* your own understanding of the world *onto* the thing you're looking at. You are *not* blank-slate, receiving a message.

Now, if you listened empathetically, you might choose to *ask* the author "Did you mean that as a metaphor?" You could even be a bit rude and continue with "Or are you too stupid to know the history of that string of characters?" This is a common thing. E.g. when someone uses a string of characters they grew up with to innocently refer to, say, a marginalized group, without *knowing* the marginalized group thinks that string of characters is offensive. Like wearing a Washington Red Skins jersey. Or when a 12 year old white kid sings along with some rap lyrics.

You have options when you decode a string. It doesn't always need to be metaphorical. Even if, deep down, you're a complete pedant and you absolutely must point out that everything's always a metaphor, you CAN suppress that need for a little while ... sometimes ... just sometimes ... you have that power.

So, no. Strawman is not a metaphor. If it helps you, I can stop using the string "strawman" and use "xyz" for that fallacy from now on. Please avoid the xyz fallacy.

On 5/27/20 12:03 PM, [hidden email] wrote:
> [...] “Strawman” is a metaphor, right? [...]
>
> The example of “strawman” is a wonderful example of a failure of a metaphor at the first state. We did not all get the same “image” when it was first deployed. That failure is instructive for me because it reminds me that the familiar assertion that M is a metaphor for X is incomplete. Explictly, or implicitly, there must always be a third argument. For 0bservor O, M is a metaphor for X. In other words, we must be humble in our use of metaphors.

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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David Eric Smith

Re: Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

In reply to this post by gepr

The normal word that is used in linguistics is polysemy.

> On May 29, 2020, at 12:48 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Argh! You people! >8^D
>
>
> On 5/28/20 8:32 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>> I would claim (and maybe this was your intent) that your (Frank) apprehension contradicts Glen's partially... as I think HE puts "Strawman" up as something contrived to be weak so as to be easy to knock down and used as a proxy for your adversary's *real* position. I think my apprehension has your element of /reductio ad absurdum/ in it, in that said "Strawman Argument" is contrived to be so absurd that nobody in the conversation would take as anything *but* a placeholder to form a real construction to replace it with. Or as I said, having only the barest hint of the shape of the evolving argument to be a bit of an armature for a more proper construction.
>
> That the class defined defined here has multiple members, that can be mapped one to the other -- i.e. metaphors for each other, does not imply that "metaphor" is a good way to talk about the relationships between those members of that class. Of course! Of course you, SteveS, can define a class that contains both my referent of "strawman" and Frank's referent of "strawman" into the same class. And of course you can then distinguish between the 2 referents. (cf the discussion Jon started re: intensional vs. extensional)
>
> But none of this ability to re-comprehend, rebundle referents *requires* the use of the word "metaphor". That you guys loooovvvvveeeee that string of characters, m e t a p h o r, is just plain weird. Nowhere else do people use that string so often, to mean so much.
>
> I feel like I'm talking to fundamentalist Christians where every other sentence is punctuated with Praise Jesus! Hey Steve! Praise Jesus! Where do you want to eat lunch? That's a metaphor! You're right! And that's a metaphor! Praise Jesus!
>
> We need to create a website, with some mysterious sounding voice actor and some really inspirational (or creepy) images and video clips ... videos that you can't pause or get by until you've watched the whole thing. Then Bam! We sell you a Secrets to the Universe book ... or some magic itch cream. Everything's a metaphor!
>
> Please choose a different word once in awhile... "mapping", "analogy", ... something, anything. Then maybe once in awhile distinguish why you used "mapping" in this case and "metaphor" in that case, "analogy" in this case and "mapping" in that case. Then and only then, will I begin to understand whatever religious concept it is you guys worship.
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
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Eric Charles-2

Re: Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

In reply to this post by David Eric Smith

I'm not sure I follow all the different sticking points this conversation has developed... but I'm gonna risk punch the tar baby anyway...

I'm not sure Glen's point about "xyz" gets us very far. Sure, you can call anything you want by any label you want. I'm not sure anyone disputes that. But after that there remain three-ish different issues, which I think Nick tends to muddle:

1) The role of metaphor in communication.

2) The role of metaphor in thought.

3) The role of metaphor in science.

Glen's example doesn't get us very far in any of those conversations, because it is an example, and literally any example is self-defeating in these contexts.

The role of metaphor in communication: Glen want's us to understand that there are many situation like the one he described. He doesn't literally use "xyz" in all those cases, but it is like he has done that, in crucial ways. He also isn't always referring to a "green thing in the distance", but, again, it is like he has done that, in crucial ways. In order to effectively communicate his idea, he offered a metaphor... because they make communication much easier.

The role of metaphor in thought: Does Glen inherently think that way? I think the analysis would be similar.

The role of metaphor in science: I'm not sure where this aspect is in the various conversations at the moment, but a particular strength of Nick's analysis of metaphor illuminating its role in science - both for better and for worse. Scientific theories are metaphors that are meant to be taken very seriously ("Natural selection", "A snake eating its tail", "Bent space time", "The bystander effect", "Atomism", etc., etc.). We make the metaphor because we see a similarity between two situations, and we intend that metaphor to suggest other similarities that we have not witnessed. Because it is a metaphor, we don't intend an exact match, so there are intended non-similarities as well. The intended similarities are the things to be investigated. Something goes awry if people start investigating the non-similarities. For example, it would be silly if we had demanded Glen produce an example of when he had used "xyz" in the past to refer specifically to a "green thing in the distance". Glen didn't intend that aspect of his metaphor to be held up to such scrutiny (at least I do not think he intended it to be). Good metaphors function in common conversation without the need to hammer out such details explicitly, and typically without any intent to investigate the intended implication.

Did I punch the tar baby enough? Am I hopelessly stuck? Or did I possibly help accomplish anything?

P.S. I am very committed to Nick's understanding of how to understand metaphors, but abhor the notion that it is metaphor all the way down. There were once people who had to literally toe a literal line, and now there are people who metaphorically "toe the line", and anything that makes it seem like we will lose that distinction is highly problematic. Don't know if that's relevant, but since I've seen a few people in the thread talk about "Nick/EricC" I thought I'd mention that crucial difference.

P.P.S. And a metaphorically "toe the line" might or might not be distinct from whatever dysfunctional thing is happening when wherein someone is said to "tow the line"... with the latter definitely being relevant to Glen's comments about the arbitrariness it all. Is it still a functional metaphor if someone writes "tow"?!? "Yes" in one sense, but obviously "no" in another.

-----------

Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist

American University - Adjunct Instructor

[hidden email]

On Thu, May 28, 2020 at 4:53 PM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Yes, I second this. The way Glen puts the point is exactly right.

On May 28, 2020, at 11:14 PM, Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

Good, Glen.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Thu, May 28, 2020, 7:50 AM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:
I'll try again to describe why constant talk of metaphors is distracting nonsense, at least for me. When I use a word, that word is a variable bound to some context. We can bind any string of letters to any subset of any context. So, a string like "xyz" can be bound to "that green thing in the distance". Even *after* you and Joe or whoever later come to call "that green thing in the distance" by the string "tank", I can *still* call it an "xyz". I can do this for decades. "xyz" need have no other binding for which to "metaphorize". So, regardless of what *you* think when you read the string "xyz", I'm not using a metaphor when I say "xyz". You may think it's a metaphor until you're blue in the face. But I didn't use a metaphor. >8^D

For me, a "strawman" has always meant that 1 single thing: rhetorical bad faith rewording. I've never used a straw man as a scare crow. I've never used it to train in combat. I've never used it to burn in effigy. I've never used it to mean anything but that one thing. So, therefore, it's not a metaphor. It's a meaningless string of characters bound to that one thing.

Sure, *you* can read whatever I write however you *want* to read what I write. That's the very point of the privacy-despite-the-"holographic"-principle threads. How you read it CAN BE entirely unrelated to how I write it. When you *impute* metaphor status into arbitrary strings you see on your screen, you are *inscribing* your own understanding of the world *onto* the thing you're looking at. You are *not* blank-slate, receiving a message.

Now, if you listened empathetically, you might choose to *ask* the author "Did you mean that as a metaphor?" You could even be a bit rude and continue with "Or are you too stupid to know the history of that string of characters?" This is a common thing. E.g. when someone uses a string of characters they grew up with to innocently refer to, say, a marginalized group, without *knowing* the marginalized group thinks that string of characters is offensive. Like wearing a Washington Red Skins jersey. Or when a 12 year old white kid sings along with some rap lyrics.

You have options when you decode a string. It doesn't always need to be metaphorical. Even if, deep down, you're a complete pedant and you absolutely must point out that everything's always a metaphor, you CAN suppress that need for a little while ... sometimes ... just sometimes ... you have that power.

So, no. Strawman is not a metaphor. If it helps you, I can stop using the string "strawman" and use "xyz" for that fallacy from now on. Please avoid the xyz fallacy.

On 5/27/20 12:03 PM, [hidden email] wrote:
> [...] “Strawman” is a metaphor, right? [...]
>
> The example of “strawman” is a wonderful example of a failure of a metaphor at the first state. We did not all get the same “image” when it was first deployed. That failure is instructive for me because it reminds me that the familiar assertion that M is a metaphor for X is incomplete. Explictly, or implicitly, there must always be a third argument. For 0bservor O, M is a metaphor for X. In other words, we must be humble in our use of metaphors.

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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Frank Wimberly-2

Re: Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

My first reaction: I don't think "bent space time" is a metaphor. I don't use metaphor in thought because I know exactly what I "mean". I'm not even sure I use language in thought except when I'm planning an email, for instance.

On Thu, May 28, 2020 at 6:57 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm not sure I follow all the different sticking points this conversation has developed... but I'm gonna risk punch the tar baby anyway...

I'm not sure Glen's point about "xyz" gets us very far. Sure, you can call anything you want by any label you want. I'm not sure anyone disputes that. But after that there remain three-ish different issues, which I think Nick tends to muddle:

1) The role of metaphor in communication.
2) The role of metaphor in thought.
3) The role of metaphor in science.

Glen's example doesn't get us very far in any of those conversations, because it is an example, and literally any example is self-defeating in these contexts.

The role of metaphor in communication: Glen want's us to understand that there are many situation like the one he described. He doesn't literally use "xyz" in all those cases, but it is like he has done that, in crucial ways. He also isn't always referring to a "green thing in the distance", but, again, it is like he has done that, in crucial ways. In order to effectively communicate his idea, he offered a metaphor... because they make communication much easier.

The role of metaphor in thought: Does Glen inherently think that way? I think the analysis would be similar.

The role of metaphor in science: I'm not sure where this aspect is in the various conversations at the moment, but a particular strength of Nick's analysis of metaphor illuminating its role in science - both for better and for worse. Scientific theories are metaphors that are meant to be taken very seriously ("Natural selection", "A snake eating its tail", "Bent space time", "The bystander effect", "Atomism", etc., etc.). We make the metaphor because we see a similarity between two situations, and we intend that metaphor to suggest other similarities that we have not witnessed. Because it is a metaphor, we don't intend an exact match, so there are intended non-similarities as well. The intended similarities are the things to be investigated. Something goes awry if people start investigating the non-similarities. For example, it would be silly if we had demanded Glen produce an example of when he had used "xyz" in the past to refer specifically to a "green thing in the distance". Glen didn't intend that aspect of his metaphor to be held up to such scrutiny (at least I do not think he intended it to be). Good metaphors function in common conversation without the need to hammer out such details explicitly, and typically without any intent to investigate the intended implication.

Did I punch the tar baby enough? Am I hopelessly stuck? Or did I possibly help accomplish anything?

P.S. I am very committed to Nick's understanding of how to understand metaphors, but abhor the notion that it is metaphor all the way down. There were once people who had to literally toe a literal line, and now there are people who metaphorically "toe the line", and anything that makes it seem like we will lose that distinction is highly problematic. Don't know if that's relevant, but since I've seen a few people in the thread talk about "Nick/EricC" I thought I'd mention that crucial difference.
P.P.S. And a metaphorically "toe the line" might or might not be distinct from whatever dysfunctional thing is happening when wherein someone is said to "tow the line"... with the latter definitely being relevant to Glen's comments about the arbitrariness it all. Is it still a functional metaphor if someone writes "tow"?!? "Yes" in one sense, but obviously "no" in another.

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor
[hidden email]

On Thu, May 28, 2020 at 4:53 PM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:
Yes, I second this. The way Glen puts the point is exactly right.

On May 28, 2020, at 11:14 PM, Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

Good, Glen.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Thu, May 28, 2020, 7:50 AM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:
I'll try again to describe why constant talk of metaphors is distracting nonsense, at least for me. When I use a word, that word is a variable bound to some context. We can bind any string of letters to any subset of any context. So, a string like "xyz" can be bound to "that green thing in the distance". Even *after* you and Joe or whoever later come to call "that green thing in the distance" by the string "tank", I can *still* call it an "xyz". I can do this for decades. "xyz" need have no other binding for which to "metaphorize". So, regardless of what *you* think when you read the string "xyz", I'm not using a metaphor when I say "xyz". You may think it's a metaphor until you're blue in the face. But I didn't use a metaphor. >8^D

For me, a "strawman" has always meant that 1 single thing: rhetorical bad faith rewording. I've never used a straw man as a scare crow. I've never used it to train in combat. I've never used it to burn in effigy. I've never used it to mean anything but that one thing. So, therefore, it's not a metaphor. It's a meaningless string of characters bound to that one thing.

Sure, *you* can read whatever I write however you *want* to read what I write. That's the very point of the privacy-despite-the-"holographic"-principle threads. How you read it CAN BE entirely unrelated to how I write it. When you *impute* metaphor status into arbitrary strings you see on your screen, you are *inscribing* your own understanding of the world *onto* the thing you're looking at. You are *not* blank-slate, receiving a message.

Now, if you listened empathetically, you might choose to *ask* the author "Did you mean that as a metaphor?" You could even be a bit rude and continue with "Or are you too stupid to know the history of that string of characters?" This is a common thing. E.g. when someone uses a string of characters they grew up with to innocently refer to, say, a marginalized group, without *knowing* the marginalized group thinks that string of characters is offensive. Like wearing a Washington Red Skins jersey. Or when a 12 year old white kid sings along with some rap lyrics.

You have options when you decode a string. It doesn't always need to be metaphorical. Even if, deep down, you're a complete pedant and you absolutely must point out that everything's always a metaphor, you CAN suppress that need for a little while ... sometimes ... just sometimes ... you have that power.

So, no. Strawman is not a metaphor. If it helps you, I can stop using the string "strawman" and use "xyz" for that fallacy from now on. Please avoid the xyz fallacy.

On 5/27/20 12:03 PM, [hidden email] wrote:
> [...] “Strawman” is a metaphor, right? [...]
>
> The example of “strawman” is a wonderful example of a failure of a metaphor at the first state. We did not all get the same “image” when it was first deployed. That failure is instructive for me because it reminds me that the familiar assertion that M is a metaphor for X is incomplete. Explictly, or implicitly, there must always be a third argument. For 0bservor O, M is a metaphor for X. In other words, we must be humble in our use of metaphors.

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918

thompnickson2

Re: Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

In reply to this post by Eric Charles-2

Hi, eric,

Your three “roles” is an interesting distinction. Thanks for that.

As for your “abhorrence”. The idea that ALL thoughts, words, theories, etc. are metaphors is not a hill I am prepared to die on. I acceded to it in the context of an argument that IF all thought is in metaphors, then we get nowhere when we call a thought a metaphor. On the contrary, sez I, calling something a metaphor invokes the very logical analysis that you outline: in which ways is the metaphor similar, in which ways different? I think one can usefully raise the question of whether a given metaphor is “good” or “bad”. From this sort of analysis of metaphors come scientific models. Whether absolutely thought is a metaphor is not a thought I have thought about very much. It’s awfully close to Peirce’s “All thought is in signs” , but I am still trying to understand the relation between signs and metaphors, so that doesn’t get me very far.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Thursday, May 28, 2020 6:56 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

I'm not sure I follow all the different sticking points this conversation has developed... but I'm gonna risk punch the tar baby anyway...

1) The role of metaphor in communication.

2) The role of metaphor in thought.

3) The role of metaphor in science.

Glen's example doesn't get us very far in any of those conversations, because it is an example, and literally any example is self-defeating in these contexts.

The role of metaphor in thought: Does Glen inherently think that way? I think the analysis would be similar.

Did I punch the tar baby enough? Am I hopelessly stuck? Or did I possibly help accomplish anything?

-----------

Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist

American University - Adjunct Instructor

On Thu, May 28, 2020 at 4:53 PM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Yes, I second this. The way Glen puts the point is exactly right.

On May 28, 2020, at 11:14 PM, Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

Good, Glen.
---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Thu, May 28, 2020, 7:50 AM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:
I'll try again to describe why constant talk of metaphors is distracting nonsense, at least for me. When I use a word, that word is a variable bound to some context. We can bind any string of letters to any subset of any context. So, a string like "xyz" can be bound to "that green thing in the distance". Even *after* you and Joe or whoever later come to call "that green thing in the distance" by the string "tank", I can *still* call it an "xyz". I can do this for decades. "xyz" need have no other binding for which to "metaphorize". So, regardless of what *you* think when you read the string "xyz", I'm not using a metaphor when I say "xyz". You may think it's a metaphor until you're blue in the face. But I didn't use a metaphor. >8^D

For me, a "strawman" has always meant that 1 single thing: rhetorical bad faith rewording. I've never used a straw man as a scare crow. I've never used it to train in combat. I've never used it to burn in effigy. I've never used it to mean anything but that one thing. So, therefore, it's not a metaphor. It's a meaningless string of characters bound to that one thing.

Sure, *you* can read whatever I write however you *want* to read what I write. That's the very point of the privacy-despite-the-"holographic"-principle threads. How you read it CAN BE entirely unrelated to how I write it. When you *impute* metaphor status into arbitrary strings you see on your screen, you are *inscribing* your own understanding of the world *onto* the thing you're looking at. You are *not* blank-slate, receiving a message.

Now, if you listened empathetically, you might choose to *ask* the author "Did you mean that as a metaphor?" You could even be a bit rude and continue with "Or are you too stupid to know the history of that string of characters?" This is a common thing. E.g. when someone uses a string of characters they grew up with to innocently refer to, say, a marginalized group, without *knowing* the marginalized group thinks that string of characters is offensive. Like wearing a Washington Red Skins jersey. Or when a 12 year old white kid sings along with some rap lyrics.

You have options when you decode a string. It doesn't always need to be metaphorical. Even if, deep down, you're a complete pedant and you absolutely must point out that everything's always a metaphor, you CAN suppress that need for a little while ... sometimes ... just sometimes ... you have that power.

So, no. Strawman is not a metaphor. If it helps you, I can stop using the string "strawman" and use "xyz" for that fallacy from now on. Please avoid the xyz fallacy.

On 5/27/20 12:03 PM, [hidden email] wrote:
> [...] “Strawman” is a metaphor, right? [...]
>
> The example of “strawman” is a wonderful example of a failure of a metaphor at the first state. We did not all get the same “image” when it was first deployed. That failure is instructive for me because it reminds me that the familiar assertion that M is a metaphor for X is incomplete. Explictly, or implicitly, there must always be a third argument. For 0bservor O, M is a metaphor for X. In other words, we must be humble in our use of metaphors.

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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Steve Smith

Re: Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly-2

Frank -

My first reaction: I don't think "bent space time" is a metaphor. I don't use metaphor in thought because I know exactly what I "mean".

unless space-time is a plastic/elastic solid (solid aether?), I'm not sure what the phrase means if not metaphorically? If I want to talk about space-time in this way more rigorously, I would not "bend" it, I would describe it's geometry as non-euclidean. I would claim that we metaphorically "bend" space-time *relative* to the idealized euclidean space we all (most all?) apprehend somewhat directly (though our visual system apprehends space in perspective geometry where objects are consistently smaller by a factor of 1/r where r is their distance from us). Sound is somewhat more complicated but also has a 1/r component.

I'm not even sure I use language in thought except when I'm planning an email, for instance.

Frank/Eric -

I do agree that the idea of "metaphors all the way down" shift a little across this boundary. A lot of my own "thinking" is not explicitly linguistic, but it *is* imagistic and involves analogs (analogies?), much like an analog computer (of which there are many modes and examples, not all electronic) operates perhaps? I think I related here that I was dreaming in "celestial mechanics" for a while. I don't know enough details about celestial mechanics to believe I was really honestly "calculating" orbits and orbit-changes, etc... in any useful/literal way, I was just "experiencing" what it *might* be like to somewhat directly control thrusters with conserved energy and reaction mass whilst "feeling" energetic isoclines in delta-v/gravity space.

I didn't experience "bent space" so much as the same kind of dissonance I feel when I try to think of great-circle navigation on a map or even more entertaining/complicated, whilst in the context of winds (sailing/flying) and currents/tides. My visual site-lines serve me fairly well, up to the curvature of the earth, which would continue to serve me well in interplanetary scale locomotion/navigation, yet if my propulsion method includes a solar-sail (and/or magnetic induction aspects)

I think that "metaphor" is used more in science to communicate with outsiders and as shorthand (e.g. "bent" spacetime) among insiders. This is where I will defer my language to Glen's appeals to switch to (my idea of what he would ask for) analogy, formal analogy, mathematical models, formal mappings within mathematical formulations. My only shot for metaphor at this level is to refer to Lakoff/Nunez's "Where Mathematics Comes From" which I claim provides a good argument for how even mathematics is technically/fundamentally metaphorical. But rather than insist on that (for no good reason), I am happy to converge on the use of the other (analogy, model, mapping) terms. I think Glen asked me for something like this directly offlist many months ago and I can't remember if I actually said out loud that I was accepting that. (I hope I am characterizing Glen's position and our interaction accurately).

- Steve

Eric Charles wrote:

I'm not sure I follow all the different sticking points this conversation has developed... but I'm gonna risk punch the tar baby anyway...

I'm not sure Glen's point about "xyz" gets us very far. Sure, you can call anything you want by any label you want. I'm not sure anyone disputes that. But after that there remain three-ish different issues, which I think Nick tends to muddle:

1) The role of metaphor in communication.

2) The role of metaphor in thought.

3) The role of metaphor in science.

Did I punch the tar baby enough? Am I hopelessly stuck? Or did I possibly help accomplish anything?

Tar Babies R Us!

I think you accomplished something for me... your 3 domains above are useful to me and I hope my response registered somewhat to them, with Frank's counter/example of "bent space" is helpful to you or others.

I will leave the "toe/tow the line" metaphors alone here. I find the *expanded* etymology of metaphors fascinating, especially when juxtoposed phonographically as is this pair, but do think it is probably a distraction from the point at hand.

- Steve

Frank Wimberly-2

Re: Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

Steve,

After thinking about them I think curved manifolds are real just as right triangles. Perhaps my introspection deludes me.

I think you agree with me about thinking without language. Sometimes. In the morning I don't think, "Now I am going to open this cabinet to get a bowl..."

Frank

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Thu, May 28, 2020, 9:11 PM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank -

My first reaction: I don't think "bent space time" is a metaphor. I don't use metaphor in thought because I know exactly what I "mean".

unless space-time is a plastic/elastic solid (solid aether?), I'm not sure what the phrase means if not metaphorically? If I want to talk about space-time in this way more rigorously, I would not "bend" it, I would describe it's geometry as non-euclidean.   I would claim that we metaphorically "bend" space-time *relative* to the idealized euclidean space we all (most all?) apprehend somewhat directly (though our visual system apprehends space in perspective geometry where objects are consistently smaller by a factor of 1/r where r is their distance from us). Sound is somewhat more complicated but also has a 1/r component.

I'm not even sure I use language in thought except when I'm planning an email, for instance.

Frank/Eric -

I do agree that the idea of "metaphors all the way down" shift a little across this boundary.   A lot of my own "thinking" is not explicitly linguistic, but it *is* imagistic and involves analogs (analogies?), much like an analog computer (of which there are many modes and examples, not all electronic) operates perhaps?    I think I related here that I was dreaming in "celestial mechanics" for a while. I don't know enough details about celestial mechanics to believe I was really honestly "calculating" orbits and orbit-changes, etc... in any useful/literal way, I was just "experiencing" what it *might* be like to somewhat directly control thrusters with conserved energy and reaction mass whilst "feeling" energetic isoclines in delta-v/gravity space.

I didn't experience "bent space" so much as the same kind of dissonance I feel when I try to think of great-circle navigation on a map or even more entertaining/complicated, whilst in the context of winds (sailing/flying) and currents/tides.   My visual site-lines serve me fairly well, up to the curvature of the earth, which would continue to serve me well in interplanetary scale locomotion/navigation, yet if my propulsion method includes a solar-sail (and/or magnetic induction aspects)

I think that "metaphor" is used more in science to communicate with outsiders and as shorthand (e.g. "bent" spacetime) among insiders. This is where I will defer my language to Glen's appeals to switch to (my idea of what he would ask for) analogy, formal analogy, mathematical models, formal mappings within mathematical formulations.   My only shot for metaphor at this level is to refer to Lakoff/Nunez's "Where Mathematics Comes From" which I claim provides a good argument for how even mathematics is technically/fundamentally metaphorical. But rather than insist on that (for no good reason), I am happy to converge on the use of the other (analogy, model, mapping) terms. I think Glen asked me for something like this directly offlist many months ago and I can't remember if I actually said out loud that I was accepting that. (I hope I am characterizing Glen's position and our interaction accurately).

- Steve

Eric Charles wrote:

I'm not sure I follow all the different sticking points this conversation has developed... but I'm gonna risk punch the tar baby anyway...

I'm not sure Glen's point about "xyz" gets us very far. Sure, you can call anything you want by any label you want. I'm not sure anyone disputes that. But after that there remain three-ish different issues, which I think Nick tends to muddle:

1) The role of metaphor in communication.

2) The role of metaphor in thought.

3) The role of metaphor in science.

Did I punch the tar baby enough? Am I hopelessly stuck? Or did I possibly help accomplish anything?

Tar Babies R Us!

I think you accomplished something for me... your 3 domains above are useful to me and I hope my response registered somewhat to them, with Frank's counter/example of "bent space" is helpful to you or others.

I will leave the "toe/tow the line" metaphors alone here. I find the *expanded* etymology of metaphors fascinating, especially when juxtoposed phonographically as is this pair, but do think it is probably a distraction from the point at hand.

- Steve

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Steve Smith

Re: Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

In reply to this post by gepr

Glen -

I would *like* to work on a more formal breakdown of how we "understand
by analogy" and develop "complex mappings" from direct experiences to
abstract conceptions.   When all is said and done with such an exercise,
I think it will do a lot to formalize how metaphor *is used* and how
*good* and *bad* metaphors are constructed. It could *also* provide a
rich language that does not appeal to the catchall, overused, broadly
misapplied term "metaphor".   Praise Jaisusss!

I think we've (I have?) muddied the water by pounding you with metaphors
over the last half-dozen thread incarnations.

I'm looking forward to the possibility that this August Body already has
a good collective apprehension of a proper, more formal language for
describing the way we understand complex/abstract concepts through the
composition of our understanding of simpler and/or more familiar
concepts.

I don't know how long "euclidean space" has been a familiar concept to
humans... it is very likely that people who have not been schooled in
the idea of a rectilinear/cartesian grid for measurement and location
actually perceive space that way (gridded city dwellers and midwest
farm-road-gridded folk probably do as well). It maps well to measured
experiences when applied to cartography...   how many steps from here to
there, or how many cigarettes smoked while at a walking pace on
horseback, or how many paddle strokes in my canoe, or how many knots on
a standard ropeline allowed to drift in the water alongside my moving
ship, all lead to linear measurement.   Theodolites and sextants give us
a measure of angles that we can then calculate distances from (with
trigonometry tables), and if we use straight edges and pens/pencils on
paper, we can make marks to "map out" the space, and if we are not
working at huge scales, euclidean space seems fairly intuitive.
Everyone here likely takes it for granted, whilst sailors (how many do
we have here?) or airplane pilots (one or two?) have the opportunity and
need to think/measure/metrize in radial, spherical (or even
ellipsoidal?) coordinates.     Cartographic projections are used to take
us from the "real world" of great circle routes, with earth-curvature to
our familiar 2D cartesian space easily drawn on paper, each
projection/mapping preserving different interesting/useful properties
(angles, distances, great-circle-as-straight line)... These are all
"simple" geometric mappings.   If we go to perspective projection (which
maps more to how we *see* than how we perambulate/navigate) we still
have a geometric projection, just a slightly more complicated/abstract
(4D?) one.   Platonists mapped the motions of bodies in the sky with
circles and epicycles and Kepler shifted that to ellipses before Newton
posed it as kinematics which reduced to elliptical/hyperbolic/parabolic
orbits for 2-body systems.

I'm just digging a hole here in one tiny bit of the domain(s) of Science
and hope someone else can actually build something with the same tools
better than I am here.

Mumble,

- Steve

On 5/28/20 9:48 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:

> Argh! You people! >8^D
>
>
> On 5/28/20 8:32 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>> I would claim (and maybe this was your intent) that your (Frank) apprehension contradicts Glen's partially... as I think HE puts "Strawman" up as something contrived to be weak so as to be easy to knock down and used as a proxy for your adversary's *real* position. I think my apprehension has your element of /reductio ad absurdum/ in it, in that said "Strawman Argument" is contrived to be so absurd that nobody in the conversation would take as anything *but* a placeholder to form a real construction to replace it with. Or as I said, having only the barest hint of the shape of the evolving argument to be a bit of an armature for a more proper construction.
> That the class defined defined here has multiple members, that can be mapped one to the other -- i.e. metaphors for each other, does not imply that "metaphor" is a good way to talk about the relationships between those members of that class. Of course! Of course you, SteveS, can define a class that contains both my referent of "strawman" and Frank's referent of "strawman" into the same class. And of course you can then distinguish between the 2 referents. (cf the discussion Jon started re: intensional vs. extensional)
>
> But none of this ability to re-comprehend, rebundle referents *requires* the use of the word "metaphor". That you guys loooovvvvveeeee that string of characters, m e t a p h o r, is just plain weird. Nowhere else do people use that string so often, to mean so much.
>
> I feel like I'm talking to fundamentalist Christians where every other sentence is punctuated with Praise Jesus! Hey Steve! Praise Jesus! Where do you want to eat lunch? That's a metaphor! You're right! And that's a metaphor! Praise Jesus!
>
> We need to create a website, with some mysterious sounding voice actor and some really inspirational (or creepy) images and video clips ... videos that you can't pause or get by until you've watched the whole thing. Then Bam! We sell you a Secrets to the Universe book ... or some magic itch cream. Everything's a metaphor!
>
> Please choose a different word once in awhile... "mapping", "analogy", ... something, anything. Then maybe once in awhile distinguish why you used "mapping" in this case and "metaphor" in that case, "analogy" in this case and "mapping" in that case. Then and only then, will I begin to understand whatever religious concept it is you guys worship.
>

thompnickson2

Re: Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly-2

See larding below

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Thursday, May 28, 2020 9:33 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

Steve,

After thinking about them I think curved manifolds are real just as right triangles. Perhaps my introspection deludes me.

[NST===>Good point, because, literally speaking, you have never seen either of them. <===nst]

I think you agree with me about thinking without language. Sometimes. In the morning I don't think, "Now I am going to open this cabinet to get a bowl..."

[NST===>Well, do you think in any form? I just open the cabinet and reach for the bowl. Does all action require? Imply? a thought? <===nst]

Frank

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Thu, May 28, 2020, 9:11 PM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank -

My first reaction: I don't think "bent space time" is a metaphor. I don't use metaphor in thought because I know exactly what I "mean".
unless space-time is a plastic/elastic solid (solid aether?), I'm not sure what the phrase means if not metaphorically? If I want to talk about space-time in this way more rigorously, I would not "bend" it, I would describe it's geometry as non-euclidean.   I would claim that we metaphorically "bend" space-time *relative* to the idealized euclidean space we all (most all?) apprehend somewhat directly (though our visual system apprehends space in perspective geometry where objects are consistently smaller by a factor of 1/r where r is their distance from us). Sound is somewhat more complicated but also has a 1/r component.

I'm not even sure I use language in thought except when I'm planning an email, for instance.
Frank/Eric -
I do agree that the idea of "metaphors all the way down" shift a little across this boundary.   A lot of my own "thinking" is not explicitly linguistic, but it *is* imagistic and involves analogs (analogies?), much like an analog computer (of which there are many modes and examples, not all electronic) operates perhaps?    I think I related here that I was dreaming in "celestial mechanics" for a while. I don't know enough details about celestial mechanics to believe I was really honestly "calculating" orbits and orbit-changes, etc... in any useful/literal way, I was just "experiencing" what it *might* be like to somewhat directly control thrusters with conserved energy and reaction mass whilst "feeling" energetic isoclines in delta-v/gravity space.
I didn't experience "bent space" so much as the same kind of dissonance I feel when I try to think of great-circle navigation on a map or even more entertaining/complicated, whilst in the context of winds (sailing/flying) and currents/tides.   My visual site-lines serve me fairly well, up to the curvature of the earth, which would continue to serve me well in interplanetary scale locomotion/navigation, yet if my propulsion method includes a solar-sail (and/or magnetic induction aspects)
I think that "metaphor" is used more in science to communicate with outsiders and as shorthand (e.g. "bent" spacetime) among insiders. This is where I will defer my language to Glen's appeals to switch to (my idea of what he would ask for) analogy, formal analogy, mathematical models, formal mappings within mathematical formulations.   My only shot for metaphor at this level is to refer to Lakoff/Nunez's "Where Mathematics Comes From" which I claim provides a good argument for how even mathematics is technically/fundamentally metaphorical. But rather than insist on that (for no good reason), I am happy to converge on the use of the other (analogy, model, mapping) terms. I think Glen asked me for something like this directly offlist many months ago and I can't remember if I actually said out loud that I was accepting that. (I hope I am characterizing Glen's position and our interaction accurately).
- Steve
Eric Charles wrote:
I'm not sure I follow all the different sticking points this conversation has developed... but I'm gonna risk punch the tar baby anyway...

I'm not sure Glen's point about "xyz" gets us very far. Sure, you can call anything you want by any label you want. I'm not sure anyone disputes that. But after that there remain three-ish different issues, which I think Nick tends to muddle:

1) The role of metaphor in communication.
2) The role of metaphor in thought.
3) The role of metaphor in science.

Did I punch the tar baby enough? Am I hopelessly stuck? Or did I possibly help accomplish anything?
Tar Babies R Us!
I think you accomplished something for me... your 3 domains above are useful to me and I hope my response registered somewhat to them, with Frank's counter/example of "bent space" is helpful to you or others.
I will leave the "toe/tow the line" metaphors alone here. I find the *expanded* etymology of metaphors fascinating, especially when juxtoposed phonographically as is this pair, but do think it is probably a distraction from the point at hand.
- Steve
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Steve Smith

Re: Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly-2

On 5/28/20 9:32 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Steve,
>
> After thinking about them I think curved manifolds are real just as
> right triangles. Perhaps my introspection deludes me.
I think manifolds "just are", to call them "curved" is to place them in
the reference frame of Euclidean.   To a creature who lives on the
surface of a sphere or a torus, a euclidean straight line or
poly-gon/hedron would be "just wrong". Euclidean straight lines are now
curved and vice-versa. The problem is that *we* are mostly
experienced/habituated to thinking in Euclidean Straight lines (what
light (nearly)travels along at the scale of gravitational flux we live
in). In another post I appeal to global scale navigation for an
alternative, and in my orbital mechanics dreams I claim that I
*experience* a (pseudo) complex manifold *directly* (following the
isoclines of "least action" in Guerin's terminology?) or
conserved/budgeted Delta-V.
> I think you agree with me about thinking without language.
> Sometimes. In the morning I don't think, "Now I am going to open this
> cabinet to get a bowl..."

I think I agree that on a good day this happens (otherwise I'd not have
coffee and my avocado-toasted-bagel until later in the day).

I had a friend/tenant living in my house for couple of years (2016-2018)
who had a brain injury 30 years ago which was treated with a variety of
physical and talk therapy, psychotropics, ECTs, and other "mind bending"
things like EMDR and bilateral-something-or other.   He had a horrible
problem with "sequencing".   Once he DID formulate something in language
he would be stuck with that formulation... and if interrupted while
executing or if someone tried to inject into or reorder his formulation
, he would get stalled and all but have to "start over" and talk himself
through his formulated steps until he got to the point where he had been
derailed. Things he had done habitually in his life (driving, cooking
his favorite chile, etc. were mostly immune to this...)

I will agree that there are many familiar/practiced sequences of
impulses and actions that we atomize to the point that it takes
virtually no conscious attention to execute them. For example, not long
after I learned to type, my ability to translate language into pixels
(ink, ???) is entirely subconscious.   If I *think* too much about what
my fingers are doing, I get fumbly and have to do a lot of backing up
and starting again. My orbital dreams felt like I was training myself
to "gesture in 3D delta-V phase space"... I don't claim that anything
I've done in my dreams is particularly registered to real orbital
mechanics (though it resembles it in some ways as best I can tell), only
that it is (was) becoming subliminal/subconscious/embodied.

I believe you are also a tennis player (you current, me long-since
deprecated skill) so you know the huge "lexicon" of
motions/trajectories/gestures your body knows how to execute in phase
space... from your serve to a "rush to the net" or an "overhead slam" or
a variety of top, side, back-spin ways to stroke the ball.   I can
*still* without a racquet in my hand for decades or a foot on a court
"feel" these things in my body... which allows me to watch Tennis on TV
(mirror neurons) in a way I will (and have) never been able to watch any
other sport... even though I've thrown a few spiral passes, kicked a few
soccer balls, hit a few home runs (or pop flys), and sunk a few
freethrows/3pointers/layups in my life, they never really got fully
encoded the way a decade or more of (weakly) competitive tennis did.

I *think* this is the level of "sensorial grounding out" that
Lakoff/Nunez appeal to at the bottom of their own "metaphors all the way
down" conception.   In deference to my trying to allow some of the
layers to be analogies, models and mappings, I suppose I might say "it
is mappings all the way down" until it hits the hardware (wetware) where
I contend there are still "mappings" but rather different than the ones
we think of in the "mappings" from metaphorical target to source
domains. The grounding under the ground are the kinds of ion-channels
described recently in his Touch/Pressure/Temperature/Proprioception
paper link. I hope Glen will agree with me (not so that I feel I am
*right* only because I *think* this captures/resolves a lot of what we
have argued here and offline?) somewhat on this alternative of "maps"
all the way down?

I think your sense that space-time is "bent" or "curved" is an example
of where the metaphor (mapping) has been atomized.   To your conception
(I suggest) absolute space is Cartesian and the *real* topology of space
is "curved" in that frame of reference.   I say this because I think
until I started working with global-scale navigation and more recently
dreaming in orbital mechanics, I pretty much felt the way you describe
the "shape of space".

I think it is similar to the duality I've described here before between
*believing* or *understanding* or *knowing* that the moon orbits the
earth while the earth-moon system orbits the sun whilst *experiencing*
it as "the sun and moon, each on their own schedule, rise in the east
and set in the west. Every day!". The earth doesn't spin at all (the
sky does!).

Mumble,

- Steve

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Frank Wimberly-2

Re: Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

Steve-

There is a rigorous definition of curvature that doesn't depend on the manifold's being embedded in Euclidean space. Right, Jon?

By the way, I was a private pilot during the 70s. Hywel was a more experienced and more cautious pilot. I think there are others in Friam.

Frank

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
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On Thu, May 28, 2020, 10:17 PM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

On 5/28/20 9:32 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Steve,
>
> After thinking about them I think curved manifolds are real just as
> right triangles. Perhaps my introspection deludes me.
I think manifolds "just are", to call them "curved" is to place them in
the reference frame of Euclidean.   To a creature who lives on the
surface of a sphere or a torus, a euclidean straight line or
poly-gon/hedron would be "just wrong". Euclidean straight lines are now
curved and vice-versa. The problem is that *we* are mostly
experienced/habituated to thinking in Euclidean Straight lines (what
light (nearly)travels along at the scale of gravitational flux we live
in). In another post I appeal to global scale navigation for an
alternative, and in my orbital mechanics dreams I claim that I
*experience* a (pseudo) complex manifold *directly* (following the
isoclines of "least action" in Guerin's terminology?) or
conserved/budgeted Delta-V.
> I think you agree with me about thinking without language.
> Sometimes. In the morning I don't think, "Now I am going to open this
> cabinet to get a bowl..."

I think I agree that on a good day this happens (otherwise I'd not have
coffee and my avocado-toasted-bagel until later in the day).

I had a friend/tenant living in my house for couple of years (2016-2018)
who had a brain injury 30 years ago which was treated with a variety of
physical and talk therapy, psychotropics, ECTs, and other "mind bending"
things like EMDR and bilateral-something-or other.   He had a horrible
problem with "sequencing".   Once he DID formulate something in language
he would be stuck with that formulation... and if interrupted while
executing or if someone tried to inject into or reorder his formulation
, he would get stalled and all but have to "start over" and talk himself
through his formulated steps until he got to the point where he had been
derailed. Things he had done habitually in his life (driving, cooking
his favorite chile, etc. were mostly immune to this...)

I will agree that there are many familiar/practiced sequences of
impulses and actions that we atomize to the point that it takes
virtually no conscious attention to execute them. For example, not long
after I learned to type, my ability to translate language into pixels
(ink, ???) is entirely subconscious.   If I *think* too much about what
my fingers are doing, I get fumbly and have to do a lot of backing up
and starting again. My orbital dreams felt like I was training myself
to "gesture in 3D delta-V phase space"... I don't claim that anything
I've done in my dreams is particularly registered to real orbital
mechanics (though it resembles it in some ways as best I can tell), only
that it is (was) becoming subliminal/subconscious/embodied.

I believe you are also a tennis player (you current, me long-since
deprecated skill) so you know the huge "lexicon" of
motions/trajectories/gestures your body knows how to execute in phase
space... from your serve to a "rush to the net" or an "overhead slam" or
a variety of top, side, back-spin ways to stroke the ball.   I can
*still* without a racquet in my hand for decades or a foot on a court
"feel" these things in my body... which allows me to watch Tennis on TV
(mirror neurons) in a way I will (and have) never been able to watch any
other sport... even though I've thrown a few spiral passes, kicked a few
soccer balls, hit a few home runs (or pop flys), and sunk a few
freethrows/3pointers/layups in my life, they never really got fully
encoded the way a decade or more of (weakly) competitive tennis did.

I *think* this is the level of "sensorial grounding out" that
Lakoff/Nunez appeal to at the bottom of their own "metaphors all the way
down" conception.   In deference to my trying to allow some of the
layers to be analogies, models and mappings, I suppose I might say "it
is mappings all the way down" until it hits the hardware (wetware) where
I contend there are still "mappings" but rather different than the ones
we think of in the "mappings" from metaphorical target to source
domains. The grounding under the ground are the kinds of ion-channels
described recently in his Touch/Pressure/Temperature/Proprioception
paper link. I hope Glen will agree with me (not so that I feel I am
*right* only because I *think* this captures/resolves a lot of what we
have argued here and offline?) somewhat on this alternative of "maps"
all the way down?

I think your sense that space-time is "bent" or "curved" is an example
of where the metaphor (mapping) has been atomized.   To your conception
(I suggest) absolute space is Cartesian and the *real* topology of space
is "curved" in that frame of reference.   I say this because I think
until I started working with global-scale navigation and more recently
dreaming in orbital mechanics, I pretty much felt the way you describe
the "shape of space".

I think it is similar to the duality I've described here before between
*believing* or *understanding* or *knowing* that the moon orbits the
earth while the earth-moon system orbits the sun whilst *experiencing*
it as "the sun and moon, each on their own schedule, rise in the east
and set in the west. Every day!". The earth doesn't spin at all (the
sky does!).

Mumble,

- Steve

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Steve Smith

Re: Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

Frank -
> There is a rigorous definition of curvature that doesn't depend on the
> manifold's being embedded in Euclidean space. Right, Jon?
I'll give you "curved" but not "bent" as something other than metaphor.
> By the way, I was a private pilot during the 70s. Hywel was a more
> experienced and more cautious pilot. I think there are others in Friam.

So plotting a cross-country course would require at least a mechanical
accommodation for the curvature of the earth (not to mention the
distortion of the magnetic field), and/or with enough practice a "feel"
for navigating on the surface of a spheroid (if not ellipsoid)?    I
never got past the mechanical in spite of staring at globes and trying
to "feel" the difference.   My flight paths were never long enough to
matter really, but I *did* sometimes have an intuitive feel for "shape
of space" implied by the winds aloft. But surely not as much as a
hang-glider or sailplane pilot.   Long before I flew in an airplane I
dreamed of soaring like a raven, especially those "surfing" on the
uplift currents flowing over the ridge behind my house.   I would expect
that (high flying) birds and ocean dwellers live in an ever-changing
(based on currents) manifold onto which our euclidean is nearly a
fiction?   Any specifics about that I might feel are surely wrong.

The tennis court did not remain "rectangular" for me for very long after
I began to play as a youth... it quickly took on a "shape" in phase
space, moderately asymmetric due to my right-handed reach and changing
with the style of play of my opponent. My own strategy with a new
player in competition was to try to quickly gain control of the "shape"
of that space, and a match could "turn" on one of us putting an
unexpected "kink" in the other's playable space. This was well before I
had a word for phase space or even a conception of manifolds or
non-euclidean geometries.

I'm belaboring this because I think those experiences
(internalizing/direct-apprehension of the non-euclidean) ARE grounding
out in the direct-experience/sensorium, and do not require (allow for?)
a stacking of linguistic mappings (previously "metaphor"), but the way
such things are normally taught in school ARE stacked on top of the
conventional idiom we have for "the shape of space" (i.e. euclidean) so
we DO use terms (and conceptions) like "bent" space. A whale or highly
intelligent bird might *develop differential/integral calculus" as a
method for managing the abstractions in *their world* that they don't
experience directly (euclidean like straight lines and flat surfaces).

I don't know if this addresses (well) Dave's insistence on "other ways
of knowing", but that is where *I* go when he speaks of that.   Learning
to play tennis well was not a science for me, it was an art and involved
practicing my body and reflexes and strategery into a direct
apprehension of the phase space (post-hoc name for it) I described
above.   I ONLY talk about it in terms of "phase space" because it is a
common mathematical abstraction that we both share, not because I think
or feel IN phase space.   It is just the "dynamic spacetime of tennis
playing"?   I've never talked to other tennis players much, and
certainly not in these terms.   To the rest of you, maybe a tennis court
is a rectangular region within which you must keep the ball to remain in
play and within which there are ballistic trajectories modified by
(mostly) the varying lift/drag on the ball based on it's rate and
direction of spin.   A naive tennis player (including extremely good
ones) surely don't have strong conceptions of the abstractions of
physics, but instead a strong intuitive command of the behaviour of the
coupled system of their body, the racquet, the ball, the air, the
surface of the court, etc.

In all this rambling I'm arguing against myself on the "metaphors all
the way down"... and for "metaphors all the way down until you can A)
use more formal analogy and mathematical mappings if that is your
training, and/or B) until you have internalized those mappings and feel
them intuitively.

- Steve

- Steve

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gepr

Re: Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

In reply to this post by Eric Charles-2

Well, to be clear, I "offered" 100s of thousands of metaphors. THAT is the point of my response to Nick's bias-imputing *choice* to cherry pick only 4 out of those thousands. That's the pattern in pretty much every one of these "metaphors everywhere" tangents we take.

And my more recent comment to Nick applies to this post as well. I'd believe we're engaged in some sort of "role of metaphor in <placeholder>" discussion if and only if the "<placeholder>" were being talked about. But we're not talking about the "<placeholder>". We're not talking about the context (which was "privacy games" writ large -- but I'd be happy to talk about the role of metaphor in *any* particular context as long as the context was actually maintained as a core part of the discussion [†]).

But no. Instead, we're talking completely abstractly about _metaphor_ *regardless* of context. It's a purely hypothetical exercise in ungrounded theory (where I use "theory" quite generously).

[†] Steve's recent comments *do* begin to seem interesting with the "sensorial grounding out" and the comments about direct and indirect maps from tacit vs. formal knowledge because he wraps it context (like tennis vs. soccer). Even there, though, I'm not very interested. These useless tangents have convinced me that the overwhelming majority of the uses of the word "metaphor" are markers for sloppy thinking. Y'all have installed a trigger in me that only decades of therapy will remove. >8^D Forever more, when I hear "metaphor", it'll be like quantum woo, every time some patchouli wearing psychonaut says "entanglement", I get a bit nauseous. Now that happens with "metaphor", too.

On 5/28/20 5:56 PM, Eric Charles wrote:

> I'm not sure Glen's point about "xyz" gets us very far. Sure, you can call anything you want by any label you want. I'm not sure anyone disputes that. But after that there remain three-ish different issues, which I think Nick tends to muddle:
>
> 1) The role of metaphor in communication.
> 2) The role of metaphor in thought.
> 3) The role of metaphor in science.
>
> Glen's example doesn't get us very far in any of those conversations, because it is an example, and literally any example is self-defeating in these contexts.
>
> The role of metaphor in communication: Glen want's us to understand that there are many situation like the one he described. He doesn't literally use "xyz" in all those cases, but it is like he has done that, in crucial ways. He also isn't always referring to a "green thing in the distance", but, again, it is like he has done that, in crucial ways. In order to effectively communicate his idea, he offered a metaphor... because they make communication much easier.
>
> The role of metaphor in thought: Does Glen inherently think that way? I think the analysis would be similar.
>
> The role of metaphor in science: I'm not sure where this aspect is in the various conversations at the moment, but a particular strength of Nick's analysis of metaphor illuminating its role in science - both for better and for worse. Scientific theories are metaphors that are meant to be taken very seriously ("Natural selection", "A snake eating its tail", "Bent space time", "The bystander effect", "Atomism", etc., etc.). We make the metaphor because we see a similarity between two situations, and we intend that metaphor to suggest other similarities that we have not witnessed. Because it is a metaphor, we don't intend an exact match, so there are intended non-similarities as well. The intended similarities are the things to be investigated. Something goes awry if people start investigating the non-similarities. For example, it would be silly if we had demanded Glen produce an example of when he had used "xyz" in the past to refer specifically to a "green thing in the
> distance". Glen didn't intend that aspect of his metaphor to be held up to such scrutiny (at least I do not think he intended it to be). Good metaphors function in common conversation without the need to hammer out such details explicitly, and typically without any intent to investigate the intended implication.
>
> Did I punch the tar baby enough? Am I hopelessly stuck? Or did I possibly help accomplish anything?
>
>
> P.S. I am very committed to Nick's understanding of how to understand metaphors, but abhor the notion that it is metaphor all the way down. There were once people who had to literally toe a literal line, and now there are people who metaphorically "toe the line", and anything that makes it seem like we will lose that distinction is highly problematic. Don't know if that's relevant, but since I've seen a few people in the thread talk about "Nick/EricC" I thought I'd mention that crucial difference.
> P.P.S. And a metaphorically "toe the line" might or might not be distinct from whatever dysfunctional thing is happening when wherein someone is said to "tow the line"... with the latter definitely being relevant to Glen's comments about the arbitrariness it all. Is it still a functional metaphor if someone writes "tow"?!? "Yes" in one sense, but obviously "no" in another.

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

gepr

Re: Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

Yes, I agree. If -- big if -- we can talk about the near bottom maps and begin to plausibly *construct* higher level maps from those *then* the conversation will be interesting. For these maps to be useful, we need some tools for deciding how "thick"/deep they are, how long they live, whether they're structured in hierarchies or dynamic constellations, etc. (Dave's recent posts hint in these directions, but are still lacking the necessary granularity and situation in a particular context.)

E.g. the pressure and temperature sensors do double duty to sense other things like inflammation. That *context* and the way those compose into one map (to temperature) or another (to inflammation) is exactly the kind of context we'd need to make any discussion of "metaphor" anything but a trigger word for nausea.

On 5/28/20 9:16 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
> The grounding under the ground are the kinds of ion-channels
> described recently in his Touch/Pressure/Temperature/Proprioception
> paper link. I hope Glen will agree with me (not so that I feel I am
> *right* only because I *think* this captures/resolves a lot of what we
> have argued here and offline?) somewhat on this alternative of "maps"
> all the way down?

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Steve Smith

Re: Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

In reply to this post by gepr

Glen -

I'm sympathetic with your patchouli-scent trigger but trust that you are
being hyperbolic when you suggest we've actually traumatized you off to
therapy with our metaphor-yap. Irritated/put-off I'm sure, but I doubt
you will be visiting a therapist over this (unless it is a shot of the
hard stuff before/after your craft brew at the end of the day). With
the shut-down I started learning to sip tequila on ice when the rye
whiskey ran out, between the ritual wards of a Corona or two.

I entered my adulthood during the advent of the development of "newage"
(rhymes with sewage) thinking having to listen to the invocation of what
I felt were "reserved terms" from physics, including those from
"quantum woo" as you call it.   Laser this, vibration that, crystals and
light and holographic this and that with only the thinnest reference to
what those terms actually were developed to mean.   I have roughly the
opposite problem from you with "metaphor".   In (good) literature and
poetry it is used masterfully and carves out exquisite images that
uplift the human experience (IMO).   The technicalities of conceptual
metaphor use the same mechanisms but follow more strict mechanics and so
remain distant cousins but provide a formal (when used correctly) way of
building up complex concepts from simple ones.   The everyday use of
metaphor, especially in strident argument often fails to represent
either of these much more refined (literary) and rigorous (conceptual)
practices.   So I'm possibly as offended by the loose use of metaphor as
you are (though I've come to terms with it through years of therapy),
but for somewhat different reasons.

Perhaps we can start at the bottom of the "apprehension stack" and
discuss how we build complex language-models of phenomena that are
(usually) too complex or foreign for us to perceive directly (whatever
that really means, though I contend *everyone* has things they feel they
perceive directly without intervening language).   Those of us trained
in mathematics and physical sciences (most/many here?) are comfortable
pretending that the these complexities are built up from things like
mathematical axioms or first principles... because (I contend) that is
how we learn them in school and how post-hoc they were constructed (for
good reason). If we (have) an intuitive grasp of something (say after
throwing thousands of stones off cliffs and observing their
trajectories), the addition of a formalism for predicting and explaining
them may or may not be necessary or welcome, but in my own case, I was
able to embrace calculus and Newton's equations of motion without
forgetting what I knew (intuitively) about ballistic trajectories of
rocks and sticks and dead cats (no, i've never chucked a dead cat).

I was challenging Frank about "bent" space, because I think many of us
either encounter such ideas for the first time as formalisms built on
top of apt but mildly broken metaphors (thus aether, phlogiston, and
"bent space"), or if we already had some kind of intuitive sense (e.g.
the path taken by a thrown stone) for the phenomena, we may well give it
up in the face of the more formal (and often more accurate for
prediction, and likely more explanatory) model offered by the body of
science that has been aggregated over time by people at least as smart
and observant as we are.

Mary and I have been reading about a family of 10 children of whom 6 of
the 8 boys were diagnosed Schizophrenic (Hidden Valley Road).   The
children spanned the baby boom era (roughly 1945-1965) and grew up
mostly in Colorado Springs.   Mary has a lot of experience working with
the mentally ill, including those diagnosed with Schizophrenia in a
mental health context but outside of clinical settings. She has studied
the emerging work of the "Hearing Voices Network" which among other
things is trying to de-medicalize/clinicize the very pervasive
experience of those who "hear voices", the most extreme of which are
usually diagnosed as Schizophrenic and who may live their lives in
distorted manner because of the very fact of "hidden voices" or more
likely because of the things the voices say to them (caricatured by a
devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other). The "Hearing Voices
Network" is an advocate for people who experience the world this way
strongly enough to be troubled by it in their daily lives, and in
particular advocate for NOT crushing their experience down to normalize
them to the rest of us, while helping them to learn how to cope with the
mismatch of vectors with "polite society".

I bring this up because my own non-standard/unfamiliar-to-many sensory
experience of the world had me growing up a functional animist in many
ways and feeling a strong empathy/sympathy with others who have to split
their apprehension of the world between "what they know" and "what they
have been taught".   Every "object" in my childhood had something like a
personality (persona?)... while I *could* apprehend the trees as far as
my eye could see as "a forest" I was generally more aware of those which
were close enough to me to have shaded under, climbed, pulled at their
branches, tasted their needles, gathered their seed-nuts (pinon).   I
*could* apprehend the grass on the hill behind me as a "field" rather
than 100,000 individuals but I *also* ran my hand through their
seedheads and sucked on their stalks and smelled their essence and wove
their fibers as well.   Same with pebbles and stones and boulders and
dirt and sand and gravel.    I don't remember so much learning these
aggregate words for things which I experienced as individuals, but I do
acutely remember my grade-school teachers trying to force onto my
apprehension *their language* for things. Speaking of aggregates of
'very real things' as if those aggregates were somehow more real than
the things themselves, or more aptly "the only things that matter".
This would have been my earliest hint that something was amiss... that I
was being "trained" to believe things about the world that I knew to be
otherwise.   Since my father was a forester with a range specialty, he
spoke a lot in terms of forests (timber) and range (grazing) but had
*three* modes of language about such things. He was pretty intimate
with grasses and browse plants and trees as individuals (but not as
intimate as a child who rolls and climbs in them, though he taught me to
run my hands over bark and through grass-stems and among leaves to feel
the textures and grains and oils) but had a language derived from his
biology and forestry/range science training which consisted of (useful)
scientific abstractions/models, AND he had a language of the commerce of
these things, the number of cattle one could graze in a specific area
based on the specific plants growing there, the soil condition, the
water, the shade, etc. (and similarly the language of timber sales and
scaling of logs, and waste and the quality and value of the lumber
derived).    He shifted smoothly between these modes when speaking to
different audiences. With us as children, he mostly spoke in the
individual/personal, helping us to learn to identify plants by their
various morphology and growth patterns. He didn't bother us much with
how much a tree or an acre of land was worth to the extractors, but we
overheard that talk to others. With his peers (a few USFS
professionals as well as the local Game Warden, the local Soil
Conservation Service representative, the local Bureau of Land Management
representative) he spoke mostly in science, but bled over into commerce
which they spoke mostly to Ranchers and Timbermen and Hunters in.   I
didn't think much about these multiple modes and the pidgen/creoles in
between when his audience might have had their own stake in multiple
language/culture/worlds (some ranchers had formal education in range
management and some timbermen in the biology of trees and ecology of
forests).

From this I learned that the reality of different "things" was ambiguous
and context-dependent.   Sometimes a tree was a thing in and of itself,
other times it was it's collection of affordances, and affordances in
different domains/dimensions.   As I left this grounded plane of earthy
connection to live in large towns, small cities and interact with people
who seemed to have never *climbed a tree" or "rolled in a field of tall
grass" or thrown a stone off a cliff or into a pond (or hardly such) I
realized that their language was almost exclusively in terms of
abstractions they have learned (been taught), not in anything they had
experienced.   Some of these abstractions were acutely useful (in
specific contexts), and were not unlike the *commercial* facet of my
father's profession.   They both provided some kind of conceptual
leverage but also yielded an equal and opposite desensitization to the
grounded reality of the more real "things" which the abstractions were
layered upon.

As I began to learn formal science, in particular physics (because it
was so "first principles" oriented compared to biology and chemistry for
example) I found it fascinating, but I couldn't ignore the fact that I
*already knew* a great deal about the subject... but I knew it
intuitively and the formalisms were both new and sometimes
confounding.   It wasn't until I hit coriolis forces that my intuition
proved to be mostly vacant.   I had ridden bicycles and intuited
*something* about angular momentum and precession, but coriolis was just
outside my reach... this is part of the reason I *ache* for Nick every
time he talks/asks about whirlpools and tornados and gets a deluge of
mathematical abstractions from us. I wish for him to ride a dingy down
into the maw of a maelstrom just once, if only in his dreams.

I will try to shut up on this for a while and trust that if you (Glen)
or anyone else has an alternate perspective on how "apprehension
builds/stacks/aggregates/coalesces/is-structured" that it will come
out.   I know I'm "beating a nearly-dead horse about the head and
shoulders with a wet noodle" (to invoke an arbitrarily arbitrary mixture
of overused metaphorical cliches <just to hear you gag?> )... but that
doesn't stop the impulse to flog it a few more times from rising every
post here!

Ramble, Mumble, Bumble, Fumble,

- Steve

> Well, to be clear, I "offered" 100s of thousands of metaphors. THAT is the point of my response to Nick's bias-imputing *choice* to cherry pick only 4 out of those thousands. That's the pattern in pretty much every one of these "metaphors everywhere" tangents we take.
>
> And my more recent comment to Nick applies to this post as well. I'd believe we're engaged in some sort of "role of metaphor in <placeholder>" discussion if and only if the "<placeholder>" were being talked about. But we're not talking about the "<placeholder>". We're not talking about the context (which was "privacy games" writ large -- but I'd be happy to talk about the role of metaphor in *any* particular context as long as the context was actually maintained as a core part of the discussion [†]).
>
> But no. Instead, we're talking completely abstractly about _metaphor_ *regardless* of context. It's a purely hypothetical exercise in ungrounded theory (where I use "theory" quite generously).
>
>
> [†] Steve's recent comments *do* begin to seem interesting with the "sensorial grounding out" and the comments about direct and indirect maps from tacit vs. formal knowledge because he wraps it context (like tennis vs. soccer). Even there, though, I'm not very interested. These useless tangents have convinced me that the overwhelming majority of the uses of the word "metaphor" are markers for sloppy thinking. Y'all have installed a trigger in me that only decades of therapy will remove. >8^D Forever more, when I hear "metaphor", it'll be like quantum woo, every time some patchouli wearing psychonaut says "entanglement", I get a bit nauseous. Now that happens with "metaphor", too.
>
> On 5/28/20 5:56 PM, Eric Charles wrote:
>> I'm not sure Glen's point about "xyz" gets us very far. Sure, you can call anything you want by any label you want. I'm not sure anyone disputes that. But after that there remain three-ish different issues, which I think Nick tends to muddle:
>>
>> 1) The role of metaphor in communication.
>> 2) The role of metaphor in thought.
>> 3) The role of metaphor in science.
>>
>> Glen's example doesn't get us very far in any of those conversations, because it is an example, and literally any example is self-defeating in these contexts.
>>
>> The role of metaphor in communication: Glen want's us to understand that there are many situation like the one he described. He doesn't literally use "xyz" in all those cases, but it is like he has done that, in crucial ways. He also isn't always referring to a "green thing in the distance", but, again, it is like he has done that, in crucial ways. In order to effectively communicate his idea, he offered a metaphor... because they make communication much easier.
>>
>> The role of metaphor in thought: Does Glen inherently think that way? I think the analysis would be similar.
>>
>> The role of metaphor in science: I'm not sure where this aspect is in the various conversations at the moment, but a particular strength of Nick's analysis of metaphor illuminating its role in science - both for better and for worse. Scientific theories are metaphors that are meant to be taken very seriously ("Natural selection", "A snake eating its tail", "Bent space time", "The bystander effect", "Atomism", etc., etc.). We make the metaphor because we see a similarity between two situations, and we intend that metaphor to suggest other similarities that we have not witnessed. Because it is a metaphor, we don't intend an exact match, so there are intended non-similarities as well. The intended similarities are the things to be investigated. Something goes awry if people start investigating the non-similarities. For example, it would be silly if we had demanded Glen produce an example of when he had used "xyz" in the past to refer specifically to a "green thing in the
>> distance". Glen didn't intend that aspect of his metaphor to be held up to such scrutiny (at least I do not think he intended it to be). Good metaphors function in common conversation without the need to hammer out such details explicitly, and typically without any intent to investigate the intended implication.
>>
>> Did I punch the tar baby enough? Am I hopelessly stuck? Or did I possibly help accomplish anything?
>>
>>
>> P.S. I am very committed to Nick's understanding of how to understand metaphors, but abhor the notion that it is metaphor all the way down. There were once people who had to literally toe a literal line, and now there are people who metaphorically "toe the line", and anything that makes it seem like we will lose that distinction is highly problematic. Don't know if that's relevant, but since I've seen a few people in the thread talk about "Nick/EricC" I thought I'd mention that crucial difference.
>> P.P.S. And a metaphorically "toe the line" might or might not be distinct from whatever dysfunctional thing is happening when wherein someone is said to "tow the line"... with the latter definitely being relevant to Glen's comments about the arbitrariness it all. Is it still a functional metaphor if someone writes "tow"?!? "Yes" in one sense, but obviously "no" in another.

jon zingale

Re: Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

Frank, Steve,

My favored approach is to say that space is like a manifold.

For me, space is a thing and a manifold is an object. The former

I can experience free from my models of it, I can continue to

learn facts(?) about space not derived by deduction alone

(consider Nick's posts on inductive and abductive reasoning).

I concede here that we talk about an objectified space, but

I am not intending to. I am using the term space as a place-

holder for the thing I am physically moving about in. OTOH

manifolds are fully objectified, they exist by virtue of their

formality. Any meaningful question about a manifold itself

is derived deductively from its construction. Neither in their

own right are metaphors, the metaphor is created when we

treat space as if it were a manifold. Just my two cents.

At the beginning of MacLane's Geometrical Mechanics, (a book

I have held many times, but never found an inexpensive copy

to buy) MacLane opens his lecture's with 'The slogan is: Kinetic

energy is a Riemann metric on configuration space'. What a baller.

Glen,

I love that you mention the <placeholder>, ultimately reducing

the argument to a snowclone. Because the title of the thread

actually implicates a discussion of metaphor, and because I may

have missed your point about xyz, please allow me this question.

Do you feel that snowclones are necessarily templates for making

metaphors, or do you feel that a snowclone is somehow different?

Jon

Steve Smith

Re: Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

Jon -

This is a nicely crisp and dense description which I found myself responding to several times (inline) and having to start over, as multiple readings (and partial responses) did help me unpack it somewhat better I hope. If this response makes it through my internal editor, it is probably still sloppy or incomplete.

Frank, Steve,

My favored approach is to say that space is like a manifold.

For me, space is a thing and a manifold is an object. The former

I can experience free from my models of it, I can continue to

learn facts(?) about space not derived by deduction alone

(consider Nick's posts on inductive and abductive reasoning).

I concede here that we talk about an objectified space, but

I am not intending to. I am using the term space as a place-

holder for the thing I am physically moving about in. OTOH

manifolds are fully objectified, they exist by virtue of their

formality. Any meaningful question about a manifold itself

is derived deductively from its construction. Neither in their

own right are metaphors, the metaphor is created when we

treat space as if it were a manifold. Just my two cents.

Can we agree that the term "manifold" is a signifier for a mathematical object which we have chosen to use as a formalism for describing something we have (presumably) a more intuitive sense of? The space we "move around in" (propriocept?) and "apprehend through action-at-a-distance" (see, hear, grasp, feel-the-heat-from)? The mathematical construct we call a "manifold" is built up from simpler mathematical concepts of "dimension" and "point" and "set" "curve" and "surface" (and n-d analogs). I *think* the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic curvature might be the formalism related to what I am trying to gesture at when I talk about "apprehending" the curvature of a space directly, and why both "bent" and "curved" space are a little dubious to me.

I suppose your terminology of "the metaphor is created when we treat space *as if it were* a manifold* can work for me, though I might instead say that the source domain of the metaphorical description of "bent" or "curved" space IS the formal mathematical construction of "a manifold"? To say "bent" (IMO) requires an additional layer of something like a homogenous substance with plastic (but not elastic?) deformability? Colloquially "bent" is a fair standin for "curved" but I think only intrinsic curvature is really meaningful in this context?

At the beginning of MacLane's Geometrical Mechanics, (a book

I have held many times, but never found an inexpensive copy

to buy) MacLane opens his lecture's with 'The slogan is: Kinetic

energy is a Riemann metric on configuration space'. What a baller.

Which I think is analogous or at least similar to Guerin's "least action paths"? And what I *think* I (imagine that I) experience in my orbital mechanics dreams (albeit without any direct obvious intuitive grounding, just one extrapolated from experiences like aerobatics, acrobatics, high-diving, swimming under-water...

This all reduces to what qualifies for a direct apprehension, a deep grounded intuition, a (legitimate) gut-feeling? I'm beginning to suspect that I might be the only one who has or at least needs that kind of grounding for formalisms?

Glen,

I love that you mention the <placeholder>, ultimately reducing

the argument to a snowclone. Because the title of the thread

actually implicates a discussion of metaphor, and because I may

have missed your point about xyz, please allow me this question.

Do you feel that snowclones are necessarily templates for making

metaphors, or do you feel that a snowclone is somehow different?

Snowclone (new word to me) feels a bit more to me like an "algebra of cliche's"? Which is another hazard of "loose" metaphors... they are prone to becoming canalized as/into cliche's?

- Steve

Frank Wimberly-2

Re: Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

Steve,

FWIW the more basic mathematical concepts that are used to define manifolds are topological space and thus open set, continuity, functions, and R^n (for an n-dimensional manifold). They are usually, but not necessarily, assumed to be Hausdorff and paracompact. Hausdorff means that distinct points are in non-intersecting open sets. For details see Baez, previously cited.

I usually forget the metaphor and think of the abstract definition. Maybe that's why I have trouble with the relationship to applications. Once Hywel and I were reading the definition and I was digging the abstractness. He said, "I see where they're going with this". I asked, "Where?" He said something like, "An electron in an energy state..." When he finished I asked, "What??"

Frank

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Fri, May 29, 2020, 2:47 PM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Jon -

This is a nicely crisp and dense description which I found myself responding to several times (inline) and having to start over, as multiple readings (and partial responses) did help me unpack it somewhat better I hope. If this response makes it through my internal editor, it is probably still sloppy or incomplete.

Frank, Steve,

My favored approach is to say that space is like a manifold.

For me, space is a thing and a manifold is an object. The former

I can experience free from my models of it, I can continue to

learn facts(?) about space not derived by deduction alone

(consider Nick's posts on inductive and abductive reasoning).

I concede here that we talk about an objectified space, but

I am not intending to. I am using the term space as a place-

holder for the thing I am physically moving about in. OTOH

manifolds are fully objectified, they exist by virtue of their

formality. Any meaningful question about a manifold itself

is derived deductively from its construction. Neither in their

own right are metaphors, the metaphor is created when we

treat space as if it were a manifold. Just my two cents.

Can we agree that the term "manifold" is a signifier for a mathematical object which we have chosen to use as a formalism for describing something we have (presumably) a more intuitive sense of?   The space we "move around in" (propriocept?) and "apprehend through action-at-a-distance" (see, hear, grasp, feel-the-heat-from)? The mathematical construct we call a "manifold" is built up from simpler mathematical concepts of "dimension" and "point" and "set" "curve" and "surface" (and n-d analogs).   I *think* the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic curvature might be the formalism related to what I am trying to gesture at when I talk about "apprehending" the curvature of a space directly, and why both "bent" and "curved" space are a little dubious to me.

I suppose your terminology of "the metaphor is created when we treat space *as if it were* a manifold* can work for me, though I might instead say that the source domain of the metaphorical description of "bent" or "curved" space IS the formal mathematical construction of "a manifold"?   To say "bent" (IMO) requires an additional layer of something like a homogenous substance with plastic (but not elastic?) deformability? Colloquially "bent" is a fair standin for "curved" but I think only intrinsic curvature is really meaningful in this context?

At the beginning of MacLane's Geometrical Mechanics, (a book

I have held many times, but never found an inexpensive copy

to buy) MacLane opens his lecture's with 'The slogan is: Kinetic

energy is a Riemann metric on configuration space'. What a baller.

Which I think is analogous or at least similar to Guerin's "least action paths"? And what I *think* I (imagine that I) experience in my orbital mechanics dreams (albeit without any direct obvious intuitive grounding, just one extrapolated from experiences like aerobatics, acrobatics, high-diving, swimming under-water...

This all reduces to what qualifies for a direct apprehension, a deep grounded intuition, a (legitimate) gut-feeling?   I'm beginning to suspect that I might be the only one who has or at least needs that kind of grounding for formalisms?

Glen,

I love that you mention the <placeholder>, ultimately reducing

the argument to a snowclone. Because the title of the thread

actually implicates a discussion of metaphor, and because I may

have missed your point about xyz, please allow me this question.

Do you feel that snowclones are necessarily templates for making

metaphors, or do you feel that a snowclone is somehow different?

Snowclone (new word to me) feels a bit more to me like an "algebra of cliche's"?   Which is another hazard of "loose" metaphors... they are prone to becoming canalized as/into cliche's?

- Steve

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David Eric Smith

Re: Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

In reply to this post by jon zingale

Jon, Glen, All,

I took Glen’s point in his former post to be the one that also seems overwhelmingly obvious to me.

In the rest of the universe outside this thread, we have a relatively rich conceptual landscape for thinking and talking about what it means for words or other units of speech to refer to things. We have a kind of ontology of denotation and connotation of various types, and lots of ways to refer to it and share points of view toward it.

Glen’s revivalist meme, which gave me the rare pleasure of actually physically laughing out loud, captured the way all that expressive richness seems to get dumped for harping and harping (the official instrument of heaven) on one term. Kind of like Murray used to distill his irritation with the evangelicals in the complaint that the universe is rich and the world full of books to convey the richness, but the various fundamentalists want everything else but one book to be thrown out.

It’s hard not to respond to these things with the obvious reductii ad absurdum. I don’t know how Glen manages to keep an even keel and keep responding with analyses. If every symbol is another symbol of another symbol of another…. Then one of two things must be true. Either there is Only One Thing, and all of language ultimately points back to it through a category-theoretic chain of metaphor, or there isn’t anything at all, and talking is just about talking, and never about actually doing anything (the analytical philosopher’s preferred view of the world — sorry; said with reference to a particular person I have in mind, or maybe a couple of them).

I wanted to post that, back in the awful early days of Southwest Airlines (do you remember how they used to ensure every seat full on every plane, allowing them to charge $50 less on a ticket?), I used to blow off steam at the end of a horrendous travel day by complaining that Southwest didn’t operate nonstop flights between any two cities. In the “It’s all Metaphors!” Conversation, the above would not be seen as absurd.

I wanted to post to paraphrase Yogi Berra: Learning something is hard, especially something you don’t already know.

The purpose being to then write that, when I used to teach physics to liberal arts majors (honors students, and very smart and deeply good kids), I tried to make the point by referring to “operational definitions”. Unpacked: I tried to sell them on the idea that the reason we were there together was for them to understand something new. Of course, I have no idea what “understand something new” means, any more than I understand what it means “to think” (to which I will save Nick larding here to say it doesn’t mean anything at all). But I can refer concretely to may activities that I think are part of understanding something.

Experimentation.

Reading measurements.

Learning facts of various kinds.

Lots of off-line reading around the topic, so that the class readings are not a sort of scripture to be memorized, but a thing that one does lots of hermeneutic filling-in to try to get to grips with.

Immersion to develop a kind of familiarity with the patterns seen in some domain of phenomena.

All of those I thought of as “operations”. Then try to sell the students on the claim that the substance of the idea is in the operations that give understanding of it, and after the fact we can tag the idea with whatever word, for ease of association, or compatibility with conventional grammars for its use, or whatever. I took this to be Glen’s point that we could use “xyz” if we have got clear what we are talking about, though of course some terms are more convenient than others, for reasons we all also understand.

But each new operational definition creates a genuinely new thing to be understood, and a new sense that could either be referred to with a new term (entropy, enstrophy, Bacillus subtitlis, ...), or by a new meaning assigned to an existing term by overloading (color, charm, strangeness, evolution, manifold, fiber, filtration, …). Thus “polysemy” does not mean the same thing as “metaphor”.

(Operationalized in only one limited way among many possible ways as https://www.pnas.org/content/113/7/1766)

I wanted to post a story Wendell Berry tells, in affectionate ribbing of rural Kentuckians. They never say a word they haven’t said before. When he and his wife Tanya moved back to Port Arthur, since they had never known someone named Tanya before, they spent the first 20 years of the Berrys’ return addressing her by some collection of other names. (Wendell does not elaborate what exactly changed that.)

I wanted to post an instance of Lashon Hara against my analytical philosopher colleague, which is an act of bad faith. The contest is that some operational understanding gets built up in some domain. The philosopher’s method is then something like this:

1. Don’t learn any of that operational understanding. Sometimes, don’t even realize that it must exist, as the reason certain claims are being made, and consider investigating.

2. Study the surface form of sentences very very very hard, from all angles.

3. Bicker endlessly that the sentences are poorly constructed because they don’t make sense according to some other semantics for the terms that the philosopher happens to know, which are not the domain knowledge that the sentence refers to.

It’s not as bad as my overdrawn cartoon, but the frustration of trying to have a conversation with this person is consistent enough, of that kind, that I try hard to avoid contact so we can stay friendly. And the fact that it comes from lack of having pursued the domain knowledge is one I can back up from instances of pointing to the sources of the domain knowledge and being met with surprise that such existed, upon which the person was happy to drop some of the objections.

But I read Glen as saying that, to be interesting, a conversation about the role of metaphor should be positioned in the rich space of all the other things we also have the ability to say about denotational roles of words. Nick has talked about Pierce and “word as symbol”, but then expressed (in very short form) what I took as a concern that there may be no reason to move beyond being a metaphor-monist.

Clint Eastwood has another useful aphorism: A man’s gotta know his limitations.

Learning anything new is hard and time-consuming, and sometimes beyond one’s capability (actually, almost always). And there are only so many hours in a day. So to admit that one simply isn’t going to try, or isn’t likely to succeed, in understanding something new, carries no dishonor.

Add alongside that the truism that a “language” with infinitely many words-as-monads isn’t learnable or speakable, and maybe that expression is even an oxymoron. So if understanding new things is to be an open-ended enterprise, there will inevitably be overloading of terms, in a way that requires both polysemy and metaphor as important dimensions to be understood in the overloading. I take something like an acknowledgment of this to be behind EricC’s statement that he abhors the “metaphors all the way down” position.

Pete Townshend had a good thought on this point: This is not a social crisis; just another tricky day for you.

In some sense, everybody on the list is already so sophisticated that they all recognize this. Why is it so necessary to pretend one doesn’t, and only rarely let the recognition through in Freudian slips, in order to bleach the discussion of dimensions that are available to it?

God, what a useless waste of time I commit in generating all this crap above.

Eric

On May 30, 2020, at 2:16 AM, Jon Zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank, Steve,

My favored approach is to say that space is like a manifold.
For me, space is a thing and a manifold is an object. The former
I can experience free from my models of it, I can continue to
learn facts(?) about space not derived by deduction alone
(consider Nick's posts on inductive and abductive reasoning).
I concede here that we talk about an objectified space, but
I am not intending to. I am using the term space as a place-
holder for the thing I am physically moving about in. OTOH
manifolds are fully objectified, they exist by virtue of their
formality. Any meaningful question about a manifold itself
is derived deductively from its construction. Neither in their
own right are metaphors, the metaphor is created when we
treat space as if it were a manifold. Just my two cents.

At the beginning of MacLane's Geometrical Mechanics, (a book
I have held many times, but never found an inexpensive copy
to buy) MacLane opens his lecture's with 'The slogan is: Kinetic
energy is a Riemann metric on configuration space'. What a baller.

Glen,

I love that you mention the <placeholder>, ultimately reducing
the argument to a snowclone. Because the title of the thread
actually implicates a discussion of metaphor, and because I may
have missed your point about xyz, please allow me this question.
Do you feel that snowclones are necessarily templates for making
metaphors, or do you feel that a snowclone is somehow different?

Jon

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jon zingale

Re: Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

Steve,

you write:

I might instead say that the source domain of the metaphorical description of "bent" or "curved" space IS the formal mathematical construction of "a manifold"?

What about Eddington's measurement or gravitational lensing? These both

appear situated in a phenomenological domain, and so we seem to have

another candidate domain for talking meaningfully about bent or curved space.

My preference is to grant that the metaphor maker has a domain in mind,

but one that I will only come to understand through investigation†. It is

perfectly acceptable to me that the metaphor maker intends a domain which

includes, but is not limited to, both phenomenological and mathematically

formal domains (say). Still, I suspect I am missing something important in

your emphasis on apprehension. Can you say a bit more about what you mean?

you write:

Which I think is analogous or at least similar to Guerin's "least action paths"?

Yeah, I suspect so too. MacLane's book intentionally focuses on developing

Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics. Mechanics, as far as I am concerned,

is the prototypical home for these ideas.

You write:

feels a bit more to me like an "algebra of cliche's"?

Thanks for that. Upon further reflection, I completely agree with you.

Jon

†) At the unintended risk of moving the conversation into the meta††,

I am including a link here to a page motivating the development of sheaves.

In section 2 the author invents a game where he thinks up a space and the

player can query the author about how other spaces map into it.

†† Meta in that sheaves themselves offer a more flexible paradigm for

reasoning about generalized spaces than we get from manifold theory.

1234