[FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)

[Steven A Smith]

On 3/28/19 1:20 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
>
> Steve, ‘n all,
>
>  
>
> Just to be cranky, I want to remind everybody that ALL language use,
> except perhaps tautological expressions, is metaphorical.
>
I ascribe to this idea as well, following Lakoff and Johnson in their
1980 _Metaphors we Live by_ .
>
>   So then, the question is not, “Is this a metaphor”, but what kind of
> a metaphor is it and is it pernicious.
>
I believe that ultimately conceptual metaphor is no more nor less than
the intuitive application of a model, and as is often mentioned "all
models are wrong, some are useful".    You use the term pernicious which
suggests *harmful*, I presume either intentionally so or more from
sloppiness or ignorance.
>
> My own view is that in any “tense” conversation – one in which the
> parties feel the words really matter – it behooves a metaphor-user to
> define the limits of the metaphor.
>
I agree that "tense" conversations are different than "casual" ones if
that is your distinction.  Unfortunately, outside of Science/Engineering
contexts, I find that "tense" conversations are at their root political
or at least rhetorical.   One or both sides are really *serious* about
being believed.   If not believed in fact ("I believe what you just
said") then in principle ("I believe that you believe what you just said").

I think that political/rhetorical dialog would *benefit*  by careful
disclosure of all metaphors being used, but one mode of such dialog is
for one or both sides to attempt to interject equivocal meanings... to
use a term (or in this case set of terms belonging to a metaphorical
domain) to weave an *apparently* logical argument, which is only
superficially logical but falls apart when the "correct" meaning of the
term(s) are applied.  

> So, for instance, much mischief has arisen in evolutionary biology
> from a failure of theorists to define the limits of their use of such
> metaphors as “natural selection” and “ adaptation”.  When limits are
> defined, the surplus meaning of a metaphor is separated into two
> parts, initially, that which the metaphor-user embraces and that which
> s/he disclaims.  The embraced part goes on to become the positive
> heuristic of the metaphor, the “wet edge” along which science develops.
>
From this line of discussion, I take you to be on the branch of the
fault-tree I implied above as a Scientific dialog where *both* sides of
the discussion are honestly trying to come to mutual understanding and
perhaps advance understanding by combining differing perspectives on the
same phenomena.
>
> The disclaimed part, must be further divided into that which was
> legitimately [logically] disclaimed and that which was disclaimed
> fraudulently.  For instance, when sociobiologists use the notion of
> selfish gene, they may legitimately disclaim the idea that genes
> consciously choose between self-regarding and other-regarding options,
> but they cannot legitimately disclaim the idea that a gene has the
> power to make any choice but the self-regarding one.
>
When Dawkins coined "Selfish Gene",  I felt that the *value* of the
metaphor invoked was in the challenge it presents:
>
>   And that idea is patently false.  Genes do not make choices
>
Patently Genes do not make choices in the sense that we usually mean
"make choices", yet the strong implication is that the phenomena
functions *as if* they do, in "all other ways".   There may be (useful)
hairsplitting between "all other ways" and "many other ways" which is an
important aspect of analogical thinking. 
>
> , they ARE choices and the choice is made at the level of the
> phenotype or at the level of the population, depending on how one
> thinks about the matter.  So the metaphor ‘selfish gene’ is pernicious
> in evolutionary biology, because it creates confusion on the very
> point that it purports to clarify – the level at which differential
> replication operates to generate long term phenotypic change in a
> population.
>
I would challenge this as I think my verbage above outlines.   I do not
believe that the metaphor *purports* to clarify what you say it does. 
It *strives* to provide a cognitive shortcut and to establish a fairly
strong metaphor which deserves careful dissection to understand the
particulars of the *target domain*.   An important question in the
target domain becomes "why does the shortcut of thinking of genes as
selfish actually have some level of accuracy as a description of the
phenomena when in fact the mechanisms involved do not support that
directly?"

For all I know, EB has entirely debunked the concept and there is NO
utility in the idea of a "selfish gene"... 

Bruce Sherwood likes to make the point that the analogy of hydraulic
systems for DC circuits is misleading.   I forget the specifics of where
he shows that the analogy breaks down, but it is well below (or above?)
the level of "normal" DC circuit understanding and manipulation.   For
the kinds of problems I work with using DC circuits, a "battery" is a
"tank of water at some height", the Voltage out of the battery is the
water Pressure, the amount of Current is the Volume of water, a Diode is
a one-way valve,  a resistor is any hydraulic element which conserves
water but reduces pressure through what is nominally friction, etc.   
As you point out, there is plenty of "excess meaning" around hydraulics
as source domain, and "insufficient meaning" around DC circuits as
target domain, and if one is to use the analogy effectively one must
either understand those over/under mappings, or be operating within only
the smaller apt-portion of the domains.   For example, I don't know what
the equivalent of an anti-hammer stub (probably a little like a
capacitor in parallel?) is but that is no longer describing a simple DC
circuit.

A farmer buying his first tractor may try to understand it using the
source domain of "draft animal" and can't go particularly wrong by doing
things like "giving it a rest off and on to let it cool down", "planning
to feed it well before expecting it to work", "putting it away, out of
the elements when not in use", etc.  your "excess meaning" would seem to
be things like the farmer going out and trying to top off the fuel every
day even when he was not using the tractor, or maybe taking it out for a
spin every day to keep it exercised and accustomed to being driven.  
The farmer *might* understand "changing the oil" and "cleaning the
plugs" and "adjusting the points" vaguely like "deworming" and "cleaning
the hooves" but the analogy is pretty wide of the mark beyond the simple
idea that "things need attending to".

>  
>
> PS – Is anybody on this list (among the handful that have gotten this
> far in this post) familiar with the work of Douglas Walton?
>
I just took a look and his work does sound interesting (and relevant).
>
> He seems perhaps to have written a lot about misunderstandings in AI
> systems … i.e., how does Siri know what we mean? 
>
By AI, it seems you mean (the subset of) Natural Language Understanding?

I am also reminded by reading the Wikipedia article on his work that I
haven't responded to Glen's question about the "theorem dependency project".

> I came to this work through my interest in abduction, which may be
> described as the process by which we identify (ascribe meaning to?)
> experiences.  Walton seems to suggest that you-guys are way ahead of
> the rest of us on the process of meaning ascription, and we all should
> go to school with you.  Please tell me where and when you offer the class.
>
I assume the "you-guys" referred to here are the hard core CS/Modeling
folks (e.g. Glen, Marcus, Dave, ...).  I do think that the challenges of
"explaining things to a machine" do require some rigor, as does formal
mathematics and systems like the aforementioned "theorem dependency
project".

- Steve

PS.  It has been noted that my long-winded explanation of my (poorly
adhered to) typographical conventions for around "reserved terms" and
the  like was perhaps defensive.  I didn't mean to sound defensive, I
just wanted to be more precise and complete to (possibly) reduce
misunderstandings.   I don't imagine many read the entireity of my
missives, but as often as not,  when people do read and respond, I sense
that some of my conventions are not recognized.

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