[FRIAM] sometimes an onion is just an onion...

[Steven A Smith]

BTW

I am (mostly) of the opinion (school of thought) that follows Lakoff and 
Johnson's premises from "Metaphors we Live by" (1980) where most 
language and thought involves metaphor.  I think Lakoff revisits this 
strongly from another direction with Nunez in "Where Mathematics Comes 
From/the Embodiment of Mind".

Previous to and outside of this school of thought, many/most seem think 
of metaphor as no more than a flowery linguistic construct mostly 
reserved for poetry and other imagistic writing?

Can you (Glen) state your position on the utility or place of metaphor 
in your world-view?  We might (once again) be bashing around in 
different wings of  Borges' "Library of Babel" ( 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel )

- Sieve


On 6/12/17 11:01 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> Glen -
>
> I always appreciate your corrections.  You are naturally the only one 
> who really knows what you meant when you brought it up.  I thought I 
> remembered that you invoked the onion and it's layers to try to 
> explain your distinction between levels and layers and the utility of 
> the same in the discussion of Complexity Science.
>
> I know how to slice onions with a knife, I've even been known to crush 
> small ones like a garlic clove,  and have even run them through a 
> blender for various culinary purposes, but in this discussion, I can't 
> think why we would have been talking about an onion if not as the 
> source domain for a metaphor.   Why were we talking about an onion?  I 
> remember a discursion into or near the embryological implications of 
> how onions form their layers?
>
> - Steve
>
>
>
> On 6/12/17 10:45 AM, glen ☣ wrote:
>> Just to clarify, no, that's not at all what I did.  I did not propose 
>> onion as a source and layer as a target.  That completely misses my 
>> point.  An onion is a thing that can be sliced up, thought about, 
>> analyzed, by various different methods.  No metaphor involved.  This 
>> tendency to see metaphors everywhere is a strange disease we're 
>> inflicted with. 8^)
>>
>>
>> On 06/12/2017 09:39 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
>>> In the example at hand,  Glen invoked "an Onion" as the /source/ 
>>> domain in a metaphor to try to understand the more general and 
>>> abstract target domain of /layer/.  Other /source/ domains 
>>> (deposition layers, skin, geology) were offered as well to offer 
>>> conceptual parallax on this.
>
>
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