I *thought* I didn't have anything to add. 8^D But there may be something useful in this ambiguity
I feel. It seems to me we're still talking about the fact that some expression (theory, model,
metaphor, "law", formalism, whatever) is ontologically/causally effective. E.g. before
calculus/analysis, reality was flatter. Analysis actually altered at least *our* way of being, if
not all the plants and animals in the biosphere and maybe the solar system with all the space
trash. Analysis is a "real" thing.
The ambiguity i'm feeling in this discussion is whether or not it was there all along or whether
our repetitive use of the expression reified it. Sure, it's yet another discovered vs constructed
thing. But when EricC suggests disagreements of, say, "metaphor" vs. "model"
are mere vocabulary, it seems to wash away causal mechanisms like, say, arabic vs roman numerals
... or the variety of differential notation(s).
Regardless, if you think our language is describing preexisting structure, then bad
vocabulary leads to bad description. If you think our language is constructing the world,
then bad language constructs bad worlds. To write that off with "just
vocabulary" misses the mark by a wide margin. The language/words are more real than
the ideas behind them. To be concrete, stop arguing about what we think and start arguing
about what we *say*.
On 3/27/26 4:33 AM, Santafe wrote:
This is a great note, in the sense of being helpful from endless going around
in circles, and written to get somewhere. I am always grateful when EricC
visits from the Oort cloud and enables a conversation to go into some direction
again.
I want, though (of course) to object to something. And a paragraph below
enables me to see the way I want to do it. EC already understands the source
of the objection, and I will include the final paragraph where it is flagged,
though I want to beware oversimplifying to the point of having strawmen (which
I don’t think is being done here). But first; the objection:
On Mar 26, 2026, at 16:25, Eric Charles <[email protected]> wrote:
There are at least three interesting things going on in the metaphor
discussion. The least interesting aspect of it is squabbling over what does or
does not count as a metaphor (vice simile, model, analogy, etc.). Not that that
isn't a perfectly good discussion, it just that it's *just* a vocabulary
discussion, not an ideas discussion.
1) What is an explicit metaphor, and to what extent do the constant implicit metaphors that permeate our language resemble them? Nick has a particular way of thinking about metaphors, based on the intent of the person invoking the metaphor. Metaphors always assert that two things are alike, not that they are identical, so that implies that all metaphors are imperfect, and that that is intentional, and does not invalidate a metaphor. Metaphors can thus be divided into intended implications and not-intended implication, etc., etc. .... and Nick is fairly obsessed with these, especially in scientific contexts where people seem to be using the metaphors in different ways and that leads to a deep underlying confusion in a seemingly functional field, e.g., Darwinian evolution by means of "natural" selection....
This is the poster child for a thing that to me is the ultimate non-issue, and
has been shown to be the non-issue it is for many decades now.
Look up George Price:
sciencedirect.com
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S002251938570149X>
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S002251938570149X>
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S002251938570149X>
https://gwern.net/doc/genetics/selection/natural/1995-price.pdf
<https://gwern.net/doc/genetics/selection/natural/1995-price.pdf>
Price lays out, to a perfectly acceptable degree, an operational description.
Of sets of things, of partitioning, of some’s being retained and others’ being
eliminated, from the ongoing history of sets that are the targets of
description. It’s a phenomenon that takes place in nature, in all sorts of
forms. We need some lexeme to refer to it. What is a good one? Selection
seems about as apt as anything in English. Quite beside the fact that Darwin
wrote about animal breeding, this will still be perhaps the most apt word I
have available. Not merely “sorting”, because I need also the consequence of
the sort that a retention/elimination step ensues. Human intentionality is not
imputed to the phenomenon itself at all, though there can be a subset of cases
where it enters as part of the chain of causation.
When anybody resurrects this zombie of claiming that some terrible metaphor of human breeding-selection is indelible in the cognition of people thinking about evolution that leads them into confusion, my experience of the conversation is much like the experiences I have had with the Implicit Bias crowd. It doesn’t take much time around many of them, before I am pretty firmly convinced that what they want is to condemn basically everybody (but, one by one, whomever they are talking to). (The nicest image that comes to mind is Aunt Ada’s “I saw something nasty in the woodshed” from Cold Comfort Farm, with about as much content.) The motivation is the whole, and any conversation will take whatever sophistic form gives the performance of fulfilling the motivation. To be clear about what really is going on, and to think well about it and improve the way we handle such problems in living, is incidental to why they do what they do. A kind of trojan horse of a kind we so often
see: the existence of a legitimate justice aim becomes a vehicle for people who want to play domination games and to bully. They don’t erase the legitimate justice aim, but by having little serious interest in it (or a secondary and self-serving one, at best), they move it out of scope for any interaction you can have with them. At which point I don’t feel like feeding the trolls. Talk to me about really understanding and really helping, and stop the performing and pretending, or leave me alone.
I do think one has to have some interest in knowing what people are doing, in
context of the commitment to get thoughts clear and to solve some problems for
which the solution has criteria, to keep such intuitions from turning into
strawmen.
The paragraph I promised to acknowledge, which I think also sees all this, was
this one:
I suspect that much of the frustration of Nick v others on this list is the
instance of those others that any implications of the flavor text can be
ignored once the mechanism has been mathematized, vs Nick's instance that if
the flavor text is still being used it is almost certainly doing some
metaphor-like work in the background of whoever is using, or hearing, the term
(because otherwise, why not ditch it entirely).
Eric(S)
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