Onomataptouie! With all the Corona Virus awareness, I understand more better why spitting was once such a visceral insult (even beyond the mere sliming by a throatful of phlegm). Is phlegm one of the substances that helps trolls stick together?
I really DO appreciate how your style of argument elicits more expansive and deep thinking. It feels a bit like the Socratic on Steroids (or high octane fuel or psychadelics?). But I digress with "metaphors all the way down". My argument *against* reality being structured by metaphors is the same as the map/territory duality, models are wrong, scientific theories are contingent. All of these are "useful" for prediction. I would claim that we DO "just give up and live in our fantasy worlds"... not because they *don't* work, but because they do. Or they do well enough. Pre-copernican, even flat-earth models worked *well enough* until people started to experience (or aspire to) things for which they were not sufficient (sail west to get east). Keplerian mechanics were more predictively *accurate* than Copernican, but the fantasy worlds of the sun traversing the sky or of circular orbits still worked for most purposes but were not necessarily more explanatory. "don't bother my pretty little head with those other models!" But when Newton added his insight, something qualitatively different happened. It was the style of structuring of substances that the Alchemists did (and found useful) that lead to the Periodic Table which was very predictive/useful but only became more explanatory when atomic orbital theory was added. Your own argument about structuring our understanding of atomic structure as if electrons literally orbited a nuclear body, substituting electromagnetic forces for gravitational, now takes up the argument on my behalf <ptouie>. On your larger argument against poetry and visualization, I agree that their best features are NOT in direct communication, but rather in the sharing of nuanced insight. Regarding your original point of "the distinction between reality and our language/understanding", my newest "insight" is how CT allows/helps mathematicians to draw parallels (analogies, mappings) between different mathematical domains entirely based on their structural similarities, and apparently how this has allowed one field's insights to be applied to another. This is directly supportive of how I see metaphor to be useful... it helps us apply existing understandings in one domain to another. - Sneeze On 3/6/20 7:12 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote: > We trolls need to stick together. > > This distinction between reality and our language/understanding is suspect, > to me. This was the basis for Rosen's Life Itself argument, what he called > "natural law". The idea is that either our reasoning systems are enough like > reality to *work*, or they aren't. And if they aren't enough like it, then we > should just give up and stay in our fantasy worlds. > > So, if you wouldn't claim that reality is deeply structured by metaphor, but > our reasoning *is* deeply structured by metaphor, then where do the 2 meet? > Or are you, as Nick repeats like a broken record, some kind of ... dualist! > [ptouie] ... (What's an onomatopoeic word for spitting?) > > On 3/5/20 8:11 PM, Steven A Smith wrote: >> Metaphorist trolling much <grin>? >> [...] >> I would NOT claim that reality is structured by >> metaphors/analogies/ontologies/models/theories, but rather that our >> *language* and formal understanding is structured in that way. ============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
