[FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy
Roger Critchlow
rec at elf.org
Sun Jun 11 14:23:16 EDT 2017
That's funny, none of those definitions mention Levi-Strauss or any other
intellectual.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricolage
The first, “social bricolage,” was introduced by cultural anthropologist Claude
> Lévi-Strauss <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_L%C3%A9vi-Strauss> in
> 1962. Lévi-Strauss was interested in how societies create novel solutions
> by using resources that already exist in the collective social
> consciousness. The second, "creative cognition,” is an intra-psychic
> approach to studying how individuals retrieve and recombine knowledge in
> new ways. Psychological bricolage, therefore, refers to the cognitive
> processes that enable individuals to retrieve and recombine previously
> unrelated knowledge they already possess.[7]
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricolage#cite_note-7>[8]
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricolage#cite_note-8> Psychological
> bricolage is an intra-individual process akin to Karl E. Weick
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_E._Weick>’s notion of bricolage in
> organizations, which is akin to Lévi-Strauss' notion of bricolage in
> societies.[9]
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricolage#cite_note-organizational1-9>
-- rec --
On Sun, Jun 11, 2017 at 1:35 PM, Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net>
wrote:
> R.,
>
>
>
> Thanks for this.
>
>
>
> “bricolage “ is one of those words I thought I knew the meaning of… and
> didn’t. I thought it referred to what you got if you dropped a stack of
> fine china while carrying it to the table before your wife’s dinner party
> for her boss. Bad pun from “breakage” I guess. Here is a really nifty
> source, containing both definitions and etymology:
>
>
>
> http://www.memidex.com/bricolage
>
>
>
> It actually seems to mean “puttering’, at its root. So, a day which you
> spent doing a little of this and a little of that is broccolage. The
> meaning gets extended to objects constructed in the same way as such a
> day…. An object constructed of a little of this and a little of that is
> considered bricolage. Bower birds and packrats’ construtions are
> “bricolage” . Mockingbird songs would be bricolage.
>
>
>
> Now I have to go back and read you post.
>
>
>
> Not stinking hot yet. I think the front is about to come through. Still
> some over-running.
>
>
>
> N
>
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Roger
> Critchlow
> *Sent:* Sunday, June 11, 2017 10:58 AM
>
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy
>
>
>
> The pattern is that people recognize patterns. Patterns of sensory
> experience that get resolved to people, places, things, phenomena.
> Patterns of gesture, utterance, markings on media which get recognized as
> language. Patterns of linguistic expression which contend to be seen as
> models, or metaphors, or analogies, or similes, or congruencies, or
> homologies, or patterns.
>
>
>
> At this point, one might ask: how many layers of pattern recognition are
> there between sensory experience and arguments about models and metaphors?
> But our best artificial examples of pattern recognizers are deep neural
> nets, and they don't care about no stinking layers. A "layer" in a net
> might feed its conclusions to the "next layer", to itself, to its peers, to
> its ancestors, to its descendants, to any of the above with a delay, or all
> of the above. The net architecture is probably written to allow as many of
> these connections as are feasible and to use the back propagation of error
> to prune. And next week's architecture will have more feasible connections
> than last week's.
>
>
>
> So that's a model of why we can get in such a muddle when we talk about
> patterns of patterns, we try to impose patterns of logical consistency,
> coherent architecture, hierarchical structure, modularity, levels of
> organization, and so on, all of which are good patterns, but they are none
> of them the ruling pattern that our pattern recognizers are built on, which
> is all of the above, and some other principles as yet to be recognized, in
> whatever proportions works.
>
>
>
> Pattern recognition is a form of natural selection. The result is
> bricolage rather than direct application of engineering principles. I was
> trying to find the adjectival form for bricolage. Adventitious,
> fortuitous, seredipitous -- but all of these imply a kind of luck, and
> promiscuous implies undiscriminating. I'm looking for the word for
> discriminating in its selection of elements but entirely open to whatever
> solution might be available. Hmm.
>
>
>
> All of this leaves aside the issue of whether the pattern recognized is
> true or false according to the pattern of empirical falsification or the
> pattern of feels right.
>
>
>
> -- rec --
>
>
>
> On Sun, Jun 11, 2017 at 8:57 AM, Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net>
> wrote:
>
> R.
>
>
>
> Y-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-s…………….............?
>
>
>
> And the pattern is…………………?
>
>
>
> N
>
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Roger
> Critchlow
> *Sent:* Sunday, June 11, 2017 7:11 AM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam at redfish.com>
>
>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy
>
>
>
> I think I'm starting to see a pattern here.
>
>
>
> -- rec --
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 11:56 PM, Tom Johnson <tom at jtjohnson.com> wrote:
>
> Dave West writes: "... An example, "the future is in front of us."
>
>
>
> Unless you're a member of some Andean tribe whose name I've forgotten.
> Then the past is in front of use because we know what it is, we can see
> it. And the future is behind us because we know not what it is. (Source:
> a recent SAR lecture that isn't online yet.)
>
>
>
> TJ
>
>
>
> ============================================
> Tom Johnson
> Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA
> 505.577.6482 <(505)%20577-6482>(c)
> 505.473.9646 <(505)%20473-9646>(h)
> Society of Professional Journalists <http://www.spj.org>
> *Check out It's The People's Data
> <https://www.facebook.com/pages/Its-The-Peoples-Data/1599854626919671>*
>
> http://www.jtjohnson.com tom at jtjohnson.com
> ============================================
>
>
>
> On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 8:53 PM, Jenny Quillien <jquillien at cybermesa.com>
> wrote:
>
> 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/
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com
> <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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