[FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy
Jenny Quillien
jquillien at cybermesa.com
Sat Jun 10 22:53:35 EDT 2017
If there is a WedTech on this thread I would also certainly attend. So I
vote that Dave gets busy and leads us toward the light.
Jenny Quillien
On 6/10/2017 8:24 PM, Prof David West wrote:
> Hi Nick, hope you are enjoying the east.
>
> The contrast class for "conceptual metaphor" is "embedded metaphor"
> ala Lakoff, et. al. An example, "the future is in front of us."
> Unless, of course you speak Aymaran in which case "the future is
> behind us."
>
> Steve, I do not regularly attend WedTech, but if this thread becomes a
> featured topic, I certainly would be there.
>
> davew
>
>
>
> On Sat, Jun 10, 2017, at 07:35 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
>>
>> Hi, Dave,
>>
>>
>> Thanks for taking the time to lay this out. I wonder what you call
>> the present status of “natural selection” as a metaphor. In this
>> case, the analogues between the natural situation and the pigeon coop
>> remain strong, but most users of the theory have become ignorant
>> about the salient features of the breeding situation. So the
>> metaphor hasn’t died, exactly; it’s been sucked dry of its meaning by
>> the ignorance of its practitioners.
>>
>>
>> I balk at the idea of a “conceptual metaphor”. It’s one of those
>> terms that smothers its object with love. What is the contrast
>> class? How could a metaphor be other than conceptual? I think the
>> term subtly makes a case for vague metaphors. In my own ‘umble
>> view, metaphors should be as specific as possible. Brain/mind is a
>> case two things that we know almost nothing about are used as
>> metaphors for one another resulting in the vast promulgation of
>> gibberish. Metaphors should sort knowledge into three categories,
>> stuff we know that is consistent with the metaphor, stuff we know
>> that is IN consistent with the metaphor, and stuff we don’t know,
>> which is implied by the metaphor. This last is the heuristic “wet
>> edge” of the metaphor. The vaguer a metaphor, the more difficult it
>> is to distinguish between these three categories, and the less useful
>> the metaphor is. Dawkins “selfish gene” metaphor, with all its phony
>> reductionist panache, would not have survived thirty seconds if
>> anybody had bothered to think carefully about what selfishness is and
>> how it works. See,
>> https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311767990_On_the_use_of_mental_terms_in_behavioral_ecology_and_sociobiologyThTh
>>
>>
>> This is why it is so important to have something quite specific in
>> mind when one talks of layers. Only if you are specific will you
>> know when you are wrong.
>>
>>
>> I once got into a wonderful tangle with some meteorologists
>> concerning “Elevated Mixed Layers” Meteorologists insisted that air
>> masses, of different characteristics, DO NOT MIX. It turns out that
>> we had wildly different models of “mixing”. They were thinking of it
>> as a spontaneous process, as when sugar dissolves into water; I was
>> thinking of it as including active processes, as when one substance
>> is stirred into another. They would say, “Oil and water don’t mix.”
>> I would say, “bloody hell, they do, too, mix. They mix every time I
>> make pancakes.” The argument drove me nuts for several years because
>> any fool, watching hard edged thunderheads rise over the Jemez, can
>> plainly see both that the atmosphere is being stirred AND that the
>> most air in the thunderhead is not readily diffusing into the dryer
>> descending air around it. From my point of view, convection is
>> something the atmosphere does, like mixing; from their point of view,
>> convection is something that is DONE TO the atmosphere, like
>> stirring. You get to that distinction only by thinking of very
>> specific examples of mixing as you deploy the metaphor.
>>
>>
>> Nick
>>
>>
>> Nicholas S. Thompson
>>
>> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>>
>> Clark University
>>
>> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>> <http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
>>
>>
>> *From:*Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Prof
>> David West
>> *Sent:* Saturday, June 10, 2017 11:36 AM
>> *To:* friam at redfish.com
>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy
>>
>>
>> long long ago, my master's thesis in computer science and my phd
>> dissertation in cognitive anthropology dealt extensively with the
>> issue of metaphor and model, specifically in the area of artificial
>> intelligence and cognitive models of "mind." the very first academic
>> papers I published dealt with this issue (They were in AI MAgazine,
>> the 'journal of record' in the field at the time.
>>
>>
>> My own musings were deeply informed by the work of Earl R. MacCormac:
>> /A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor/ and /Metaphor and Myth in Science
>> and Religion./
>>
>>
>> MacCormac argues that metaphor 'evolves' from "epiphor" the first
>> suggestion that something is like something else to either "dead
>> metaphor" or "lexical term" depending on the extent to which
>> referents suggested by the first 'something' are confirmed to
>> correlate to similar referents in the second "something." E.G. an
>> atom is like a solar system suggests that a nucleus is like the sun
>> and electrons are like planets plus orbits are at specific intervals
>> and electrons can be moved from one orbit to another by adding energy
>> (acceleration) just like any other satellite. As referents like this
>> were confirmed the epiphor became a productive metaphor and a model,
>> i.e. the Bohr model. Eventually, our increasing knowledge of atoms
>> and particle/waves made it clear that the model/metaphor was 'wrong'
>> in nearly every respect and the metaphor died. Its use in beginning
>> chemistry suggests that it is still a useful tool for metaphorical
>> thinking; modified to "what might you infer/reason, if you looked at
>> an atom _as if_ it were a tiny solar system."
>>
>>
>> In the case of AI, the joint epiphors — the computer is like a mind,
>> the mind is like a computer — should have rapidly become dead
>> metaphors. Instead they became models "physical symbol system" and
>> most in the community insisted that they were lexical terms (notably
>> Pylyshyn, Newell, and Simon). To explain this, I added the idea of a
>> "paraphor" to MacCormac's evolutionary sequence — a metaphor so
>> ingrained in a paradigm that those thinking with that paradigm cannot
>> perceive the obvious failures of the metaphor.
>>
>>
>> MacCormac's second book argues for the pervasiveness of the use and
>> misuse of metaphor and its relationship to models (mathematical and
>> iillustrative) in both science and religion. The "Scientific Method,"
>> the process of doing science, is itself a metaphor (at best) that
>> should have become a dead metaphor as there is abundant evidence that
>> 'science' is not done 'that way' but only after the fact as if it had
>> been done that way. In an Ouroborosian twist, even MacCormac;s theory
>> of metaphor is itself a metaphor.
>>
>>
>> If this thread attracts interest, I think the work of MacCormac would
>> provide a rich mine of potential ideas and a framework for the
>> discussion. Unfortunately, it mostly seems to be behind pay walls —
>> the books and JSTOR or its ilk.
>>
>>
>> dave west
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Jun 9, 2017, at 03:11 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
>>
>> I meant to spawn a fresh proto-thread here, sorry.
>>
>>
>> Given that we have been splitting hairs on terminology, I
>> wanted to at least OPEN the topic that has been grazed over
>> and over, and that is the distinction between Model,
>> Metaphor, and Analogy.
>>
>>
>> I specifically mean
>>
>>
>> 1. Mathematical Model
>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_model>
>> 2. Conceptual Metaphor
>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor>
>> 3. Formal Analogy <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogy>
>>
>> I don't know if this narrows it down enough to discuss but I
>> think these three terms have been bandied about loosely and
>> widely enough lately to deserve a little more explication?
>>
>> I could rattle on for pages about my own
>> usage/opinions/distinctions but trust that would just pollute
>> a thread before it had a chance to start, if start it can.
>>
>> A brief Google Search gave me THIS reference which looks
>> promising, but as usual, I'm not willing to go past a paywall
>> or beg a colleague/institution for access (I know LANL's
>> reference library will probably get this for me if I go in
>> there!).
>>
>> http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9780631221081_chunk_g97806312210818
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
>
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