TO: Elephant , Andrea and Chris
FROM: Rog
ROGER:
> perhaps all we ever do is think and speak in metaphors.
ELEPHANT:
This is something I seem to change my ideas about from time to time, largely
because no-one can tell me definitively just exactly what metaphor *is*.
Ideas?
ROG:
A couple of months back, I read an Essay by Douglas Hofstadter while eating
alone on the road in a hotel restaurant in New England. In it (the essay,
not the restaurant), Hofstadter put forth the viewpoint that cognition and
language are both primarily composed of analogy or metaphor. His argument
reminded me a lot of Pirsig. But before I go on, let me share his answer on
what metaphor/analogy *are*
He likens both to "taking an intricate dance that can be danced in one and
only one medium, and then, despite the intimacy of the marriage of that dance
to that medium, making a radically new dance that is intimately married to a
radically different medium, and in just the same way as the first dance was
to its medium." And that captures the concept (metaphorically) better than
anything I can say.
But back to his argument, he suggests that as infants, we get perceptions (DQ
in Pirsigese) and "chunk" them into patterns or concepts based upon
similarities or correspondence.. We form mental categories, and then chunk
these categories into bigger and bigger chunks. Each new experience
activates hosts of new and old concepts and patterns. But our old categories
don't match exactly with new perceptions, and some categories get combined in
unique ways. In this way, we go from an infant with pure sensation to an
adult with a strong conceptual patterns. Of course, our language and culture
hand us many of these conceptual packages with ready made labels, and we tend
to share much in common with those of similar backgrounds.
ELEPHANT:
I'm particulaly interested because it seems to me that you can't call most
human language *literal* exactly, given that it's the words as begets the
objects, not the other way around. On the other hand, that doesn't
automatically make such words metaphorical - I mean "metaphorical" might not
be a direct opposite of "literal", there might be some langauge which is
neither a report of a thing in terms of itself, nor a depiction of a thing
in terms of another. Most language in fact. And if it's this third
category of languge (neither metaphoric nor literal) which is really
fundamental (what gets the objects off the ground, so to speak, so that we
can later come along and be 'literal' about them), maybe we want to say that
metaphor *can't* be all pervasive. But then again we don't really know what
metaphor is.... if you say with one camp that it's depicting one thing
through another, then it looks like metaphor cannot go right down to the
root of language - because the root is where you have no thing to describe
anything in terms of. But maybe the initial act of naming, of numbering -
maybe this too is seeing one thing in terms of another - imposing *formal*
being on the *dynamic*..... Or is this something else again from what we
normally call "metaphor" - what say you?
ROG:
I think we are indeed naturals at extracting patterns from the *dynamic*, and
then building bigger and better patterns of similarities and congruencies.
On the other hand, even Hofstadter admits he may be overstating his case.
I will disappear again until the weekend......
Rog
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