On Sat, Mar 21, 2026 at 10:49 AM Steve Smith <[email protected]> wrote:
> I've spent my self-conscious life/energy trying to understand whence comes
> "understanding", and fortunately the bulk of my life (*what happens
> whilst making other plans*) has been un-selfconscious, with a lot of
> breathing, walking, wood-splitting, tree-climbing, hell-raising, etc along
> the way.
>
> "understanding" as a placeholder for other related terms like "insight"
> and "apprehension" implies (for me) an act of model-fitting (primarily) and
> by extension, model-extension? If/when there are "leaps" ("revolutions")
> of intuition (personal)/ scientific paradigms (collective), I presume
> there is some kind of "pull back" to a meta-understanding of one's personal
> (or collective) model of modeling. It is fascinating to me that we (can
> and) do this at all.
>
> As LLM's expose *(behaviour* which appear to some degree,
> indistinguishable from incredible model-fitting and meta-model fitting unto
> model extension/revision, we have a new line of parallax.
>
> My love of metaphor is probably little more than my appreciation of
> stereoscopic vision (or more aptly, motion parallax?). Having a plethora
> of POVs to look at phenomena through, a plethora of meta-models to munge
> into (maybe more?)apt models to choose from can be very powerful (or at
> least obsessive/addictive?)
>
> I suspect that most use of metaphor in science is post-hoc, it gets added
> (e.g. ES' -Verschränkung/ entanglement, interlinking, entwining,
> interlacing) after a more A)intuitive to those steeped in the topics and B)
> formalized in mathematical models with an eye to communicating said
> models/intuition to the un(der0initiated. glen has occasionally
> challenged with something like: "why use 'metaphor' when you really just
> mean 'model'?" and I do in fact concede that most use of metaphor is
> acutely figurative/convenient/superficial and as it gets more and more
> formal/grounded it approaches a formal model.
>
> Without significant machinery for manipulating metaphorical models
> formally, it is perhaps an art to manage metaphors honestly. The likes of
> Lakoff, et al... would seem to be good at it (up to a point) and there are
> in fact huge (by number not percent) communities of people who study the
> use and application of (conceptual/blending) metaphor formally. I ache
> for (yet) more formal tools to normalize all of this. As Marcus
> references - hypergraphs/graph-matching is a domain which has melted
> somewhat under computational power (O(N^2)).
>
> I'm going to go back to talcing the surfaces of my lenses so I can inspect
> them under a (lensed) microscope now... there is nothing more interesting
> to a navel than it's own navel.
> On 3/21/26 6:21 am, Santafe wrote:
>
> It has seemed to me that there is a bit of a parallel to the thing Nick
> does that I mostly post objections to (and that I read Glen as objecting
> to, though I should only speak for myself), and the thing Kuhn does that I
> object to in reading him.
>
> So I’ll talk about Kuhn (TK):
>
> In Structure of Scientific Revolutions, TK plays sociologist, and comments
> on power structures, economies of scale, thoughtlessness, exploitation at
> the expense of exploration until one’s back is completely against a wall,
> and other such sociological phenomena. No argument from me, against all
> that's happening. Also in Venture Capital, consumer behavior, finance,
> religion, political movements, cults, instigation and prosecution of wars,
> etc. Indeed, were I to describe it in _any_ area of the interplay of
> individual and group cognition, I could take up TK’s characterization and
> not change much (sometimes nothing at all) except the name of the subject
> matter.
>
> But along the way in that sociology, TK treats the role of scientific
> empiricism as if it were somehow just given, and one can refer to it as an
> adjudicator (a kind of toss-off), without any attention to whether it
> actually is given, whether it is hard, or whether the indefiniteness of
> that problem of _reasoning_ and _analysis_ plays any role in when people
> think they can exploit versus when they decide as clans that they are
> forced to explore (so, I am granting much of the rest of the structure of
> TK’s sociological picture, and not pursuing the many places I think he errs
> in imposing it). TK’s passing-over-in-silence of this dimension is more
> striking, since the previous generation or two of philosophers of science
> had mainly wanted to worry about that question, and had clearly run aground
> on giving a good analysis of it, though they made many practically sensible
> and apt observations in the general direction.
>
> To me, if there is anything that makes describing the pursuit of
> scientific understanding a topic to write about under its own name, as
> opposed to writing a completely generic treatment that might have a title
> like Mass Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, or perhaps bookended by
> something titled The Wisdom of Crowds, the nature of the reasoning problem
> of what constitutes empiricism would be at the center of putting “science”
> in the title of that monograph.
>
> To come back to the Nick/Glen exchange, I don’t mind that lens grinders
> look at lenses, while hopefully they also sometimes look through them to
> decide what good criteria are for grinding strategies. (Indeed, I don’t
> think anybody in the list would argue against the need for both). It’s
> also perfectly fine to write very general treatises on human behavior. So,
> TK’s book could have been entitled People are Often Lazy in Ways that Make
> Them Effectively Stupid, and That Can Lead to Cycles, and I could then have
> reviewed the book as a useful if not terribly surprising sociological
> analysis. I tend to take those things as established for so long by now.
> that repeating them isn’t so engaging, and I itch to move on toward
> differences in the substrate, where maybe we can say new things that
> weren’t said before.
>
>
> It is tempting to laugh at the way Nick deliberately refuses to take
> Glen’s meaning; where when Glen argues that one should look through the
> lens in the sense of meaning-making, Nick claims innocently to understand
> that as looking through the lens at (invented?) Freudian-style emotional
> motives. There will never be a thrust that gets through that parry, we
> have watched it for decades. All good fun.
>
>
> I do want to distill and call out from the thread what seem to me to be
> several clean formulations of questions that interest me, and that seem
> still very open:
>
> From SteveS:
>
> Scientific language is a *lossy compression layer over a high-dimensional
> formal plenum*, not a generative metaphor system.
>
> (I would modify that it has elements of both — as I know Steve already
> intends — and that their co-traveling is one of the interesting aspects)
>
> and then:
>
> *What might we know anecdotally of the contexts where generative metaphors
> are used in recognizing new models for observed phenomena? *
> From DaveW:
>
> ... the proper, even essential and inevitable, use of metaphor is as and
> "exploratory tool (epistemic scaffold).
>
> (that whole note actually).
>
> Hard to offer good content in reply to these, because that would require
> an actual insight, as does all work that might become satisfying. I like
> the well-articulated problem, though.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
> On Mar 20, 2026, at 14:51, glen <[email protected]>
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> This seems like a fantastic attempt! It's still layered with sophistry.
> You're saying I've stripped you of the capacity or interest. Yet that's
> clearly not true. You're reifying a thought experiment, a counterfactual.
> That's fine.
>
> The attempt to look at the world naively is a good one, though, even if
> what you're looking at is the *presentation* of my meaning ("anger",
> "contempt", "rage", troll metaphor, etc.). It's good to strip away layers
> of the narrative like that to see if you can view something naively,
> "objectively". But it's still an analysis of the presentation, not the
> target of the arrangement of lenses and mirrors I tried to assemble.
>
> IDK. I've done all I can, I think. My intent was to circumscribe and
> directly target why Schmulik would/will eventually ghost you: because you
> look at his metaphor instead of through it.
>
> I'd like to leave off congratulating you on the attempt in the hopes that
> you'll do it again later, in some other context, but without adding the
> pedantic counterfactual. Just for grins, I'll add that a medium dose of
> psychedelics, in the proper set & setting of course, can help doff one's
> debilitating obsessions. And I recommend shrooms. You can buy the spores on
> the internet. They're legal pretty much anywhere. And grow them in your
> closet. Doing so adds a little connection to nature and the plant to help
> layer the trip. Cleanse your doors of perception! 8^D
>
>
> On 3/20/26 11:21 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
>
> Ok, Glen, You win. You have stripped from me any capacity or interest in
> how metaphors mean, the limits of what they do and don't convey. I am in
> that state. Now, without reference or exploration of any metaphor, please
> help me understand what you meant by the following passage:
> */But if you actually want to *understand* what some other agent is trying
> to say, you read *through* their text. You use it as a lens. If, every time
> you picked up your eyeglasses, you only looked *at* the lenses, those
> glasses would be useless as a tool. Every time you meet a missive focusing
> on the metaphors used, you are explicitly/purposefully misunderstanding the
> author. If metaphors are a tool, you're ignoring their tool-ness. You
> promote the means/tool to an end. [⛧] /*
> It's funny, because before you stripped me of my ability to think about
> metaphors, I thought I understood you precisely. You want me to take life
> just as it presents itself. Ok. I can do that, sort of. It's what I do
> most of the time. As we both know, there is nothing simple about how the
> world presents itself. There is always a past and a future and the naive
> present is always an amalgam of the two. We live neither in nor for the
> moment. But I will hum along. What do I see in this case? Well, first I
> naively see anger and contempt. I could try to mitigate that experience,
> by examining the text, but no, I am not permitted to do that in this world
> of naive perception. What I see, is a man incoherent with ... rage? What
> I see is a creature lurking in the dark moist crevaces under a bridge
> shouting, "Who's that treading over my bridge?" Thats what I naively see.
> But none of that is helpful to me in trying to reap the benefit of your
> prodigious mind. So I try to NOT take what I see naively to be all that is
> there to be seen. I say to myself, this is a man who has given me some
> really great working metaphors. This is a man whose thought is respected
> widely by people whose thought I respect. Before he stripped my of my
> analytical powers, I was led to try and squeeze every bit of juice out of
> the dry- skinned fruit he grumpily proffered. Now, I just see an angry man
> living in an incoherent world.
> Please, please Glen give me back my powers of analysis so I can see you as
> I used to see you.
> N
> On Fri, Mare 20, 2026 at 7:28 AM glen <[email protected]
> <mailto:[email protected]> <[email protected]>> wrote:
> Fools have more to say, and more impact, than, for example, nit-picking
> grammar nazis.
> Anyway, here is the counterargument, AGAIN! OK. I grant you all 5 of
> your points. As a fan of postmodernist approaches, the examination of every
> layer of every narrative in the stack *can* be worthwhile and interesting,
> especially for academics. I'm glad you are also a postmodernist.
> But if you actually want to *understand* what some other agent is
> trying to say, you read *through* their text. You use it as a lens. If,
> every time you picked up your eyeglasses, you only looked *at* the lenses,
> those glasses would be useless as a tool. Every time you meet a missive
> focusing on the metaphors used, you are explicitly/purposefully
> misunderstanding the author. If metaphors are a tool, you're ignoring their
> tool-ness. You promote the means/tool to an end. [⛧]
> People use their deeply embedded metaphors to communicate. If all you
> can do is yap about their metaphors, you are blocking their ability to
> communicate and your ability to understand what they mean.
> I'll turn your moral back around on you. You can choose to ignore my
> counter argument, yet again. Or you can tell me why it's more important to
> look at the lens than through the lens. [⛤]
> [⛧] A good analogy, here, is that of paraphilia <
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphilia
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphilia>
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphilia>>. You have a fetish. Rather
> than a metaphor *enhancing* your ability to see the world, you've
> fetishized them. You think the metaphor *is* the world. Like a fetishist,
> you're aroused by the tool, not the objective.
> [⛤] I can shunt a counter-counter argument in advance. In a mostly
> rhetorical world, if you merely look *through* the metaphor, you're at risk
> of being a victim of purposefully designed narratives, intended to exploit
> or mislead you. Therefore, a critical thinker must *also* look at the
> lenses, not merely through them. But this argument fails because if you
> can't even look through the lens in the first place, then you can never
> critically analyze how it [mis]directs your gaze. So the *first* and
> primary skill is to be able to look *through* metaphors. Looking at them is
> a secondary skill. And, like the grammar nazis, a fetish for the form
> preemptively excludes an understanding of the function.
> On 3/19/26 1:10 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
> > 1. Metaphors are everywhere. We can disclaim them all we like, but
> they are deeply embedded in the way in which we proceed from thought to
> thought. They lurk in how professionals talk to one another and also in
> the manner in which professionals talk to the public.
> > 2. There is a lot of evidence these days that scientists have "lost"
> the public. This is a very dangerous situation. My suspicion is that this
> has to do with the metaphors we use when we talk to the public about what
> we do.
> > 3. We all seem to agree that there is truth and falsehood disguised
> in every metaphor.
> > 4. Given the ambiguity of metaphors, I am interested in a method for
> understanding their role in thought and communication, particularly in
> understanding the manner in which truth and falsehood is deployed in them.
> How are we to distinguish between a better and a worse metaphor if all
> contain elements of falsehood. What am I to take from your metaphor? What
> are you to take from mine?
> > 5. Given the entanglement of truth and falsehood in metaphor, it's
> worth exploring distinctions between what implications a speaker intends by
> a metaphor, what the coherence of the metaphor can logically sustain by way
> of implication, and what implications hearers take from the metaphor.
> --
>
>
>
> --
> ¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
> ὅτε oi μὲν ἄλλοι κύνες τοὺς ἐχϑροὺς δάκνουσιν, ἐγὰ δὲ τοὺς φίλους, ἵνα
> σώσω.
>
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--
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology
Clark University
[email protected]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson
https://substack.com/@monist
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