Posted by
glen e. p. ropella-2 on
May 10, 2010; 5:38pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/The-coat-hook-of-the-mind-tp5012713p5031918.html
I think you're giving me way too much credit, here. I'm not a deep
thinker in any sense. So, when I say that metaphors are required to be
fuzzy in order to be metaphors, I'm (trying) to say something very
practical.
Metaphors are quick and dirty ways to wonk someone out of a way of
thinking... to change their paradigm. They can be beautiful, as in
poetry, life-changing, as in realizing one is addicted to something,
brilliant, horrifying, etc. But what they cannot be is precise,
because, by definition, they are fuzzy.
You can _begin_ the process of refining a metaphor down to precisely
where it holds and where it fails. That process will be iterative, like
all other (nontrivial) processes. In that process, we'd expect
something like the following:
M_0 = first metaphor assertion (e.g. "time is money")
M_1 = more refined metaphor (e.g. "time and money are equivalent")
M_i, M_(i+1), ... M_n.
My claim is that there is some i such that 0 < i < n where M_i is no
longer a metaphor. When you get around to finally accounting for all
the ways in which, say, time is and is not like money, you no longer
have a _powerful_ or meaningful metaphor. If it takes you 1000 pages of
textbook and 12 lectures to transfer the concept to someone else, then
you're not talking about a metaphor.
Hence, metaphors cannot be made precise, though the "implied" results of
inferring from a metaphor can be made precise.
BTW, I don't feel like I'm harping. If I seem to be, I apologize. I
could just drop the conversation; but so many people have seemed to find
such wondrous subjective satisfaction in elevating metaphor to some
fundamental role in how we navigate our world, I thought I'd try to
understand what all you loons were talking about. ;-)
ERIC P. CHARLES wrote circa 10-05-09 05:31 PM:
> 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."
--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095,
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