Posted by
glen e. p. ropella-2 on
May 06, 2010; 4:22pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/The-coat-hook-of-the-mind-tp5012713p5015123.html
Steve Smith wrote circa 10-05-06 08:30 AM:
> I'm curious about how this group comes down on the topic of the utility of
> metaphor in general. I find that most people are fairly strongly polarized on
> the topic and most have not given more than casual thought to it.
In my naive perspective, I think of metaphor as a kind of linguistic
trickiness, not necessarily purely rhetorical in the sense that the
trickster wants to persuade, but more of a magus or "teacher" trying to
get someone to open their mind a little bit more.
> Since there are many modelers here, I would promote the idea that the use of
> metaphor in everyday language is an informal act of building and using models.
> Models built using familiar concepts and their inter-relations to understand
> less-familiar domains. And of course it would be natural to ask if it is
> "turtles/models all the way down" and *that* is a truly interesting question.
> Where *do* models, analogies, metaphors ground out? In direct experience? In
> atomic elements of intuitive understanding?
To me, metaphor is distinct from analogy in the sense that metaphor is a
language game... a game of swapping the _names_ of things to manipulate
thoughts (your own or others). And in that sense, it's an
epistemological tool. Analogy, on the other hand, is more real, more
ontological. Analogy is the result of a real similarity between two
things, not just a language game.
I enjoy examining the etymology of words in situations like this.
Metaphor parses out as something like "the carrier for a transfer". The
word-swappage is a medium through which we modify thought. Analog
parses out as "a comparison of proportions". Analogies arise from a
kind of validation process: measure thing #1, measure thing #2, compare
the measurements, if they're similar, they're analogous (under that
measure).
Hence, analogy is fundamentally related to concrete, physical modeling
(which is etymologically related to "measure") whereas metaphor is more
related to the mind and how we think. Metaphors can be fantastical and
imaginary whereas analogies have to be more concretely grounded to some
repeatable method of measurement.
--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095,
http://agent-based-modeling.com============================================================
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