[FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

Wed Apr 29 23:19:40 EDT 2020

Hi, Eric, 

I have lost track.  To whom is your comment addressed. 

I think the first was Glen, and I agree, I don’t see how a belief in the centrality of metaphor to thought commits one to a belief in the hardness of, or even the existence of, the hard problem.  

It was me that floated the thought that “all thinking is metaphorical”. (I was trying to draw Dave West in on my side of the argument, at the time.)  I meant only to say that the application of any word (save perhaps grammatical operators or proper names) involves abduction, which I think we both believe, is a very close relative of metaphor.  You and I have struggled over this for years, decades, almost, but I think we believe that abduction is an inference from the properties of an object to the class to which it belongs whereas a metaphor carries the process further in some way I have trouble defining.  For instance, when Darwin said that evolution was caused by selection, it definitely was an abduction of sort.  But as selection was understood at the time, it involved the intentional intervention of a breeder.  So the metaphor not only abduces selection, it seems also rupture the original concept in some say.  

Nick 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2020 7:50 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

"But it strikes me that one cannot simultaneously believe that all thinking is metaphorical and *not* admit to some form of the hard problem." 

Those issues do not seem inherently related to me. Can you elaborate? If so, I might be able to respond better. 

I'm pretty sure I disagree strongly with the claim that "all thinking is metaphorical", unless we mean "thinking" in some very narrow sense such that the claim somehow becomes true by definition. That disagreement probably isn't helping me in getting whatever you are getting at.

-----------

Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist

American University - Adjunct Instructor

On Wed, Apr 29, 2020 at 2:32 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> > wrote:

But how do we process this statement by Nick:

On 4/17/20 4:08 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>  wrote:
> I think an obsessively metaphorical thinker is one who has the arrogance to suppose that s/he has */some/* familiar experience by which s/he can model any experience of another person.  I actually don't believe that that is true, but I think it is true enough that I feel it is my obligation to try.   

He's straight up *saying* that metaphor is used as a way to solve or gloss over the hard problem. Now, I don't particularly care if it's actually Nick we're talking about or some other "obssesively metaphorical thinker". But it strikes me that one cannot simultaneously believe that all thinking is metaphorical and *not* admit to some form of the hard problem.

On 4/29/20 10:11 AM, Eric Charles wrote:
> I think we should take the inadequacy of the wastebasket example as evidence that Nick is being honest about really, really not understanding what the hard problem is.

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ

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