Re: Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

Posted by Frank Wimberly-2 on May 28, 2020; 2:56pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Metaphor-POSSIBLE-DISTRACTON-FROM-privacy-games-tp7596439p7596508.html

I have *never* heard or read "strawman" to mean anything other than a specious argument meant to show the absurdity of a position.  A kind of reductio ad absurdum.

On Thu, May 28, 2020, 8:16 AM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

I agree with you, and I am Nick's ally in the "everything is metaphor" camp. But the apparent contradiction is resolved by recognizing the role and life cycle of metaphor.

Metaphor is useful only in the circumstance of encountering an "unknown thing" or attempting to express a "new" idea/concept. X is like Y — X being an unknown and Y a known — offers a tool/technique for coming to understand X.

If the application of that technique fails to generate meaningful results, the metaphor becomes 'dead' and is abandoned.

If application is completely successful the metaphor becomes a lexical term, just another word.

Once upon a time "strawman" was a metaphor. Actually, since the lexical term evidently has two meanings, it was two metaphors to two different people in two different contexts.

But that was then and this is now and "strawman" is no longer a metaphor, it is exactly what you state: a string bound to a thing, in this case, a concept.

We metaphorists need to be much more careful about casting our aspersions.

davew


On Thu, May 28, 2020, at 7:50 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ 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. 
>
>
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> ☣ uǝlƃ
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