And invoking the term "twist", he added a bit of Möbius Strip
connotation! It did feel ingenious to me as well.
As an odd aside, I'm designing a "feathered serpent" bas-relief design
for the rocket mass heater I built last year in my sunroom... I hadn't
considered adding the Ourobousian nature to it! The following is not my
design, just one of many illustrative examples of the Tewa version:
Does a feathered serpent need to be more like a tapeworm to go
Ourobourosianally Möbius?
- Sieve
On 6/10/17 1:35 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
I had never heard the word ouroboros
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros> before Dave used it. Thanks
for the term. But even though I had never heard the term, the
ouroboros was the image that came to mind when I first learned recursion!
On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 12:22 PM Steven A Smith <sasm...@swcp.com
<mailto:sasm...@swcp.com>> wrote:
Dave -
Thanks for weighing in here, my own studies have not been so
formal nor probably as deep. I have to admit to not knowing that
cognitive anthropology was a subject, just as Nick introduced me
to evolutionary psychology as it's own field!
I appreciate your introduction of /epiphor/, /paraphor/ and /dead
metaphor/. I began a discursion here (which I fortunately
deleted) which lead me to read some MacCormac and more to the
point Philip Wheelwright on the modern, technical usage of
/epiphor/ and /diaphor/, from the Greek/Aristotelian /epiphoria/
and /diaphoria. /I particularly find your coining of /paraphor/,
as I think this is as common in our modern discourse/thinking as
"confirmation bias".
I also like your point that the "Scientific Method" is more
metaphor than reality, or more to the point, a narrative device to
show how a discovery "might have been made" when more often than
not, it was backed into while bumping around looking for something
entirely different, and often involving a "flash of insight"
before then being laboriously wrung out and demonstrated using the
somewhat more "engineering" oriented methods of the "Scientific
Method" to move from motivated hypothesis to strongly validated
theory.
I don't know if you regularly attend WedTech, but this depth/topic
of discussion might motivate me to make the long trek into town...
- Steve
On 6/10/17 9:36 AM, Prof David West wrote:
long long ago, my master's thesis in computer science and my phd
dissertation in cognitive anthropology dealt extensively with the
issue of metaphor and model, specifically in the area of
artificial intelligence and cognitive models of "mind." the very
first academic papers I published dealt with this issue (They
were in AI MAgazine, the 'journal of record' in the field at the
time.
My own musings were deeply informed by the work of Earl R.
MacCormac: /A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor/ and /Metaphor and
Myth in Science and Religion./
MacCormac argues that metaphor 'evolves' from "epiphor" the first
suggestion that something is like something else to either "dead
metaphor" or "lexical term" depending on the extent to which
referents suggested by the first 'something' are confirmed to
correlate to similar referents in the second "something." E.G. an
atom is like a solar system suggests that a nucleus is like the
sun and electrons are like planets plus orbits are at specific
intervals and electrons can be moved from one orbit to another by
adding energy (acceleration) just like any other satellite. As
referents like this were confirmed the epiphor became a
productive metaphor and a model, i.e. the Bohr model. Eventually,
our increasing knowledge of atoms and particle/waves made it
clear that the model/metaphor was 'wrong' in nearly every respect
and the metaphor died. Its use in beginning chemistry suggests
that it is still a useful tool for metaphorical thinking;
modified to "what might you infer/reason, if you looked at an
atom _as if_ it were a tiny solar system."
In the case of AI, the joint epiphors — the computer is like a
mind, the mind is like a computer — should have rapidly become
dead metaphors. Instead they became models "physical symbol
system" and most in the community insisted that they were lexical
terms (notably Pylyshyn, Newell, and Simon). To explain this, I
added the idea of a "paraphor" to MacCormac's evolutionary
sequence — a metaphor so ingrained in a paradigm that those
thinking with that paradigm cannot perceive the obvious failures
of the metaphor.
MacCormac's second book argues for the pervasiveness of the use
and misuse of metaphor and its relationship to models
(mathematical and iillustrative) in both science and religion.
The "Scientific Method," the process of doing science, is itself
a metaphor (at best) that should have become a dead metaphor as
there is abundant evidence that 'science' is not done 'that way'
but only after the fact as if it had been done that way. In an
Ouroborosian twist, even MacCormac;s theory of metaphor is itself
a metaphor.
If this thread attracts interest, I think the work of MacCormac
would provide a rich mine of potential ideas and a framework for
the discussion. Unfortunately, it mostly seems to be behind pay
walls — the books and JSTOR or its ilk.
dave west
On Fri, Jun 9, 2017, at 03:11 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
I meant to spawn a fresh proto-thread here, sorry.
Given that we have been splitting hairs on terminology, I
wanted to at least OPEN the topic that has been grazed over and
over, and that is the distinction between Model, Metaphor, and
Analogy.
I specifically mean
1. Mathematical Model
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_model>
2. Conceptual Metaphor
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor>
3. Formal Analogy <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogy>
I don't know if this narrows it down enough to discuss but I
think these three terms have been bandied about loosely and
widely enough lately to deserve a little more explication?
I could rattle on for pages about my own
usage/opinions/distinctions but trust that would just pollute a
thread before it had a chance to start, if start it can.
A brief Google Search gave me THIS reference which looks
promising, but as usual, I'm not willing to go past a paywall
or beg a colleague/institution for access (I know LANL's
reference library will probably get this for me if I go in there!).
http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9780631221081_chunk_g97806312210818
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