Jochen,
Historically, I have had terrible trouble with the way some folks employ “symmetry” on this list. Steve G. and I used to get into tangles about this. I get that crystals have “symmetry”, but beyond that, I am struggling to understand what you mean. Perhaps you might explicate for those of us who have a hard time not thinking of symmetry as just “being the same on the right as on the left, etc.”
I am further made very nervous with any implication that literature “owns” metaphor whereas scientists are given to plain speech. I think this way of think VASTLY under states the role of metaphor in science. Think Natural Selection, for instance. Also, I have often wondered if a metaphor with magnetism lay behind Newton’s thinking on gravity. Lodestones were of great interest to scientists in Court at the time because of their usefulness in navigation, but also as a curiousity. Lakoff and Nunen (?) describe the central role of metaphors in the development of mathematics. Peirce’s emphasis on “sign” places something very like metaphor at the center of all scientific thought.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Jochen Fromm
Sent: Monday, March 09, 2015 1:23 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group; Friam; [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] metaphor and talking across skill levels
Speaking of metaphors: recently I thought that metaphors and poems are a bit like the gems of language. As you know gems are rare and valuable and have often a highly symmetrical structure. The rhymes in poems mirror the symmetries of words, while metaphors and analogies mirror the (timeless) symmetries of ideas.
Take for example the metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY. I think this is one of the metaphors in "Metaphors We Live By" from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. It indicates certain similarities and symmetries in the ideas behind the concepts for "life" and "journey". There is a beginning and an end connected by long winding path, etc. So basically metaphors are all about symmetries which let you describe one idea in terms of another.
-J.
Sent from my Tricorder
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