http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/The-coat-hook-of-the-mind-tp5012713p5028327.html
Glen,
Nick had a student who harped on him mercilessly for this
metaphor stuff. As I recall the argument was pretty sophisticated, but
basically boiled down to something like: "Look here, old man. I don't know why
you keep ranting about 'implicature.' I want to talk about the metaphor, just
the metaphor. What is the content of the metaphor?" Then the student just
wanted to talk about the 'true content' and the 'false content', at best adding
a third category for stuff we don't know about yet. The argument was very
convincing, but something bugged me about it. Your argument seems similar.
In the end I suspected, in an unnecessarily high brow manner, than the
student was just too Continental in his thinking, while Nick was (I'm not sure
how much he appreciates it) working in the tradition of American philosophy.
The notion of analyzing a disembodied metaphor - not made by someone, and
somehow contextless - sounds like a fun, erudite game, that everyone should
know from the start won't really go anywhere. In contrast, we may have chance
of getting something concrete out of analyzing a metaphor made by a person in a
context.
Thus, the question is not what the 'metaphor' intends, but
rather what the 'person making the metaphor' intended. The person knew some
aspects of the metaphor to be true a priori; the person knew some aspects of
the metaphor to be false a priori; and the person made the metaphor because
they wanted some aspects to be true that they were unsure about. At least, that
is the case for all metaphors that are useful in prompting further
investigation, i.e. useful for science. (Nick claims.)
Of course, there
are other purposes for which a good metaphor might be useful, such as pure
rhetoric.
I keep remembering a very religious wedding I went to. The
minister kept harping on about how the couple being wed was "the salt of the
earth." She kept trying and trying to make that sound like a good thing,
because the metaphor was made by Jesus, and Jesus surely intended for it to be
positive. In the back of the room, I was highly amused, having just watched a
program on the salting of Carthage. I imagine that in North Africa, at a
certain time, "You are the salt of the earth" could have been a very nasty
insult. My point: Surely when we are trying to determine what a metaphor
"means," we are trying to determine what the person who used the metaphor
"meant."
Anyway, I'll stop, as I'm clearly
rambling,
Eric
On Sun, May 9, 2010 05:09 PM,
"glen e. p. ropella" <[hidden email]>
wrote:
Nicholas Thompson wrote circa 05/07/2010 05:14 PM:
> I think one of the implications of the The Rant I recently posted is that
> metaphors can be made unfuzzy, precise, and exact if we are willing to take
> the time to separate out their implications into those that we already know
> to be false, those we already know to be true, and those that are not yet
> known to be true of false.
That's perfectly reasonable. But if it's only the "implications" of
the
metaphor that can be made precise, then the metaphor itself, regardless
of how important it was in the formation of the result, is NOT what is
precise. The result of the "implication" (inference) is
what is made
precise, not the metaphor.
Hence, if we can regard analogs as resulting from metaphors, then that
falls right in line with my proposition that analogs can be made precise
but metaphors cannot. Metaphors _rely_ on the fuzziness. They are the
"carriers" of the "transfer". If you remove the fuzziness
from them,
they are no longer metaphors.
RE: Jochen's comment, then, I'd say that analogy is the calculus of the
mind. Metaphors are something more fluffy and mental providing the
conceptual motivation for the development of analogs.
--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com
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