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" <[email protected]> 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 > > >============================================================ >FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv >Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College >lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org > > > Eric Charles Professional Student and Assistant Professor of Psychology Penn State University Altoona, PA 16601
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