Thanks everybody. Lots of value in the responses I have received. I gather that "symmetry" is itself a metaphor, subject both to the joys and pains thereof.
I am not sure I am happy with the idea that metaphor and plain speaking are antagonistic. Besotted with the operationalism that had been laid on me by my mentors at Berkeley, I tried to describe the apparatus in which I "ran" my monkeys in the most plain-spoken way possible. The description was intolerably wrong and unintelligible. Furthermore, I once had a summer gig as a work-for-hire writer of an organic chemistry text for nursing students. I never could find a plain spoken way to describe "above and below the plane of the molecule" without resort to the very terms I was trying to explain, until I thought of restaurant staff stacking six sided tables on top of one another to facilitate cleaning. Only then did the three dimensionality of traditional "ring diagrams" make any sense to me. Don't hold me to any of this. It was 40 years ago. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ -----Original Message----- From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of glen e. p. ropella Sent: Monday, March 09, 2015 4:23 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] [ SPAM ] Re: metaphor and talking across skill levels I feel like I'm stating the obvious.... but ya never know. Symmetry means the application of a measure produces the same result both before and after a transformation. The word "symmetry" is meaningless without reference to a particular transformation and a particular measure. If metaphor is a transformation (mapping) from one thing to another, then it will (or won't) exhibit symmetry under any particular transformation. Symmetry can be softened to similarity (or any number of concepts of equivalence), which (I think) is much more relevant to the traditional use of the word "metaphor". If you do soften it, though, your error accumulates and we probably lose commutativity, associativity, transitivity, etc. (And is a well-behaved metaphor really considered a good metaphor? Or is it merely a tautology? Embrace Error!) I think what makes (some) scientists plain speaking is when they talk about what they actually _did_ rather than what they intended to do, what they wanted to do, what random nonsense was bouncing around in their head when they did what they did, etc. Metaphor seems to play a role in all the latter, but not much in the former. What you actually do is not metaphorical, despite the mental gymnastics you engaged in to arrive at doing what you did. On 03/09/2015 12:52 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: > 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.” On 03/09/2015 12:22 PM, Jochen Fromm wrote: > 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. -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
