[FRIAM] tools, trollers, and language

[Nick Thompson]

But Glen, if the onion was not a metaphor, then what was it?  How did it become relevant?  A mongoose and a rutabaga are also things that can be "sliced up, analysed..." etc, but you did not mention those.  You did not offer a rutabaga model of complexity; you offered an onion one.  Is there some OTHER  "process of mind" other than metaphor-making that gets you from complexity to onions?

I am thinking about your worry that we over-deploy the notion of metaphor.  How about the following rule of thumb:  M is a metaphor for T when our understandings of M ae offered as potential understandings of T.  So, a metaphor can always be cashed out as follows:  What does the metaphor-maker understand about M that s/he takes to be relevant to our understanding of T.  

One of the fierce debates that we have had in my group over the years has been over the question of who gets to say what the implications of a metaphor ARE.  "My love is like a red, red rose" could imply that she is frail, ephemeral, sweet smelling, gaudy, thorny, or all of the above.  Who gets to say which of these entailments applies.  For those of us who think that metaphor-making is at the core of scientific thought, the question is an important one.   We all of us agree that a metaphor-maker is entitled to disclaim some of the implications of his/her metaphor; but to what extent is s/he entitled to cherry-pick.  And we all agree that once a metaphor-maker has specified which entailments are essential to his understanding of his metaphor, he is stuck with them.  A proper scientific metaphor must be falsifiable.  

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of glen ?
Sent: Monday, June 12, 2017 12:45 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] tools, trollers, and language

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.

--
☣ glen

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