[FRIAM] Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Frank, Steve, 

 

Aren’t we arguing about whether “Steve Was Wrong” when he understood “strawman” to refer to a “stick figure” or other constructive schema, rather than a guilefully conceived version of an argument designed to show its weaknesses.   Is there any way to show a metaphor is “wrong” other than the exercise of power?  

 

OK, friammers.  All those who think Steve Was Wrong raise your hands.

 

n

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

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

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

 

 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Thursday, May 28, 2020 9:32 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

 

Frank (et al.) -





I have *never* heard or read "strawman" to mean anything other than a specious argument meant to show the absurdity of a position.  A kind of reductio ad absurdum.

 

It is very likely that my experience was with an ideosyncratic adoption within a small circle (LANL High Performance Computing Community circa 1985-1995) and/or perhaps the DOE peers/program-managers we interacted with daily.  It was just part of the air we breathed as we negotiated various projects and programs.  I thought it was both apt, and truly universal.   Maybe explains many misunderstandings I held after I left that domain/era! 

I would claim (and maybe this was your intent) that your (Frank) apprehension contradicts Glen's partially...  as I think HE puts "Strawman" up as something contrived to be weak so as to be easy to knock down and used as a proxy for your adversary's *real* position.   I think my apprehension has your element of reductio ad absurdum in it, in that said "Strawman Argument" is contrived to be so absurd that nobody in the conversation would take as anything *but* a placeholder to form a real construction to replace it with.  Or as I said, having only the barest hint of the shape of the evolving argument to be a bit of an armature for a more proper construction.

In either case, I claim it is no coincidence that the use of "straw" vs "steel" appeals to the metaphorical source domain of "robustness of materials and construction",  if we switched the two terms, we could possibly learn to do the crossover decoding as well as Glen apparently can/does, but whyever would we choose that mapping?   And with that I will suggest to this crowd that many of my propositions here are neither "straw" nor "steel", but rather "silly putty".   Glen may insist that my invoking explicitly a "character of materials and construction" as a source domain is wrong at best and empty at worst, but I think many here can take away a *rich* if not precise apprehension of what we might all mean when we compare, for example arguments "variously of straw, steel, and silly putty".

I am a blatant metaphorist as I've declared many times here, but I agree with the less extreme parts of Glen's observations which is that metaphors get misused/misapplied all the time.   In my absurdist but not empty (IMO) example above, the smell of silly putty (most of us over 50 probably know it well, the way it can be used to lift and transfer newsprint, the way it "snaps" when pulled apart quickly, etc.   may well be *excess meaning*, but the way it can be formed into just about anything, can be done very informally with just the tools at hand (your hands) and if left unbothered will eventually "slump" back into a rough puddle with only the barest memory of the shape imposed on it by the blind puttysmith.

A good example that I *think* spans Glen's position and my own is that of "standard" hue ramps used to encode scientific data...    in the colloquial "heatmap" of popular Viz...  the practice is to treat *red* as hot and *blue* as cold.   It maps onto our everyday experience of the color of flame and the color of ice, or the quality of light in the equatorial regions vs the quality of light in the (ant)arctic regions.   red hot, blue cold.   yet, my synaesthesia example followed the model of blackbody radiation.   Red is lower energy than Blue and most physicists have no problem "seeing" blue as hot and red as cool...  in my *strawman* of Glen's position, any palette would do... "just give me the legend and I'll decode it"...   which (IMO) is why many infographics (for example those found in USAToday) are almost unreadable, albeit "easy on the eyes"...   a nice pastel palette running from a toffee-pink through an adobe brown to a seafoam green might be very pleasant and non-confrontational the eyes, but be *very* hard to make sense of.

The Asian inversion of our Western convention of Red==Stop/Danger/Death and Green==Go/Good/Life is another example of two conflicting but equally internally consistent source domains for a metaphor.

- Steve

 

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