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

[Steve Smith]

Glen -

I'm sympathetic with your patchouli-scent trigger but trust that you are
being hyperbolic when you suggest we've actually traumatized you off to
therapy with our metaphor-yap.  Irritated/put-off I'm sure, but I doubt
you will be visiting a therapist over this (unless it is a shot of the
hard stuff before/after your craft brew at the end of the day).  With
the shut-down I started learning to sip tequila on ice when the rye
whiskey ran out, between the ritual wards of a Corona or two.

I entered my adulthood during the advent of the development of "newage"
(rhymes with sewage) thinking having to listen to the invocation of what
I felt were "reserved terms"  from physics, including those from
"quantum woo" as you call it.   Laser this, vibration that, crystals and
light and holographic this and that with only the thinnest reference to
what those terms actually were developed to mean.   I have roughly the
opposite problem from you with "metaphor".   In (good) literature and
poetry it is used masterfully and carves out exquisite images that
uplift the human experience (IMO).   The technicalities of conceptual
metaphor use the same mechanisms but follow more strict mechanics and so
remain distant cousins but provide a formal (when used correctly) way of
building up complex concepts from simple ones.   The everyday use of
metaphor, especially in strident argument often fails to represent
either of these much more refined (literary) and rigorous (conceptual)
practices.   So I'm possibly as offended by the loose use of metaphor as
you are (though I've come to terms with it through years of therapy),
but for somewhat different reasons.

Perhaps we can start at the bottom of the "apprehension stack" and
discuss how we build complex language-models of phenomena that are
(usually) too complex or foreign for us to perceive directly (whatever
that really means, though I contend *everyone* has things they feel they
perceive directly without intervening language).   Those of us trained
in mathematics and physical sciences (most/many here?) are comfortable
pretending that the these complexities are built up from things like
mathematical axioms or first principles... because (I contend) that is
how we learn them in school and how post-hoc they were constructed (for
good reason).  If we (have) an intuitive grasp of something (say after
throwing thousands of stones off cliffs and observing their
trajectories), the addition of a formalism for predicting and explaining
them may or may not be necessary or welcome, but in my own case, I was
able to embrace calculus and Newton's equations of motion without
forgetting what I knew (intuitively) about ballistic trajectories of
rocks and sticks and dead cats (no, i've never chucked a dead cat).

I was challenging Frank about "bent" space, because I think many of us
either encounter such ideas for the first time as formalisms built on
top of apt but mildly broken metaphors (thus aether, phlogiston, and
"bent space"), or if we already had some kind of intuitive sense (e.g.
the path taken by a thrown stone) for the phenomena, we may well give it
up in the face of the more formal (and often more accurate for
prediction, and likely more explanatory) model offered by the body of
science that has been aggregated over time by people at least as smart
and observant as we are.

Mary and I have been reading about a family of 10 children of whom 6 of
the 8 boys were diagnosed Schizophrenic (Hidden Valley Road).   The
children spanned the baby boom era (roughly 1945-1965) and grew up
mostly in Colorado Springs.   Mary has a lot of experience working with
the mentally ill, including those diagnosed with Schizophrenia in a
mental health context but outside of clinical settings.  She has studied
the emerging work of the "Hearing Voices Network" which among other
things is trying to de-medicalize/clinicize the very pervasive
experience of those who "hear voices", the most extreme of which are
usually diagnosed as Schizophrenic and who may live their lives in 
distorted manner because of the very fact of "hidden voices" or more
likely because of the things the voices say to them (caricatured by a
devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other).  The "Hearing Voices
Network" is an advocate for people who experience the world this way
strongly enough to be troubled by it in their daily lives, and in
particular advocate for NOT crushing their experience down to normalize
them to the rest of us, while helping them to learn how to cope with the
mismatch of vectors with "polite society".  

I bring this up because my own non-standard/unfamiliar-to-many sensory
experience of the world had me growing up a functional animist in many
ways and feeling a strong empathy/sympathy with others who have to split
their apprehension of the world between "what they know" and "what they
have been taught".   Every "object" in my childhood had something like a
personality (persona?)...  while I *could* apprehend the trees as far as
my eye could see as "a forest" I was generally more aware of those which
were close enough to me to have shaded under, climbed, pulled at their
branches, tasted their needles, gathered their seed-nuts (pinon).   I
*could* apprehend the grass on the hill behind me as a "field" rather
than 100,000 individuals but I *also* ran my hand through their
seedheads and sucked on their stalks and smelled their essence and wove
their fibers as well.   Same with pebbles and stones and boulders and
dirt and sand and gravel.    I don't remember so much learning these
aggregate words for things which I experienced as individuals, but I do
acutely remember my grade-school teachers trying to force onto my
apprehension *their language* for things.  Speaking of aggregates of
'very real things' as if those aggregates were somehow more real than
the things themselves, or more aptly "the only things that matter".  
This would have been my earliest hint that something was amiss... that I
was being "trained" to believe things about the world that I knew to be
otherwise.   Since my father was a forester with a range specialty, he
spoke a lot in terms of forests (timber) and range (grazing) but had
*three* modes of language about such things.  He was pretty intimate
with grasses and browse plants and trees as individuals (but not as
intimate as a child who rolls and climbs in them, though he taught me to
run my hands over bark and through grass-stems and among leaves to feel
the textures and grains and oils) but had a language derived from his
biology and forestry/range science training which consisted of (useful)
scientific abstractions/models, AND he had a language of the commerce of
these things, the number of cattle one could graze in a specific area
based on the specific plants growing there, the soil condition, the
water, the shade, etc. (and similarly the language of timber sales and
scaling of logs, and waste and the quality and value of the lumber
derived).    He shifted smoothly between these modes when speaking to
different audiences.  With us as children, he mostly spoke in the
individual/personal, helping us to learn to identify plants by their
various morphology and growth patterns.   He didn't bother us much with
how much a tree or an acre of land was worth to the extractors, but we
overheard that talk to others.   With his peers (a few USFS
professionals as well as the local Game Warden, the local Soil
Conservation Service representative, the local Bureau of Land Management
representative) he spoke mostly in science, but bled over into commerce
which they spoke mostly to Ranchers and Timbermen and Hunters in.   I
didn't think much about these multiple modes and the pidgen/creoles in
between when his audience might have had their own stake in multiple
language/culture/worlds (some ranchers had formal education in range
management and some timbermen in the biology of trees and ecology of
forests).

From this I learned that the reality of different "things" was ambiguous
and context-dependent.   Sometimes a tree was a thing in and of itself,
other times it was it's collection of affordances, and affordances in
different domains/dimensions.   As I left this grounded plane of earthy
connection to live in large towns, small cities and interact with people
who seemed to have never *climbed a tree" or "rolled in a field of tall
grass" or thrown a stone off a cliff or into a pond (or hardly such) I
realized that their language was almost exclusively in terms of
abstractions they have learned (been taught), not in anything they had
experienced.   Some of these abstractions were acutely useful (in
specific contexts), and were not unlike the *commercial* facet of my
father's profession.   They both provided some kind of conceptual
leverage but also yielded an equal and opposite desensitization to the
grounded reality of the more real "things" which the abstractions were
layered upon.  

As I began to learn formal science, in particular physics (because it
was so "first principles" oriented compared to biology and chemistry for
example) I found it fascinating, but I couldn't ignore the fact that I
*already knew* a great deal about the subject... but I knew it
intuitively and the formalisms were both new and sometimes
confounding.   It wasn't until I hit coriolis forces that my intuition
proved to be mostly vacant.   I had ridden bicycles and intuited
*something* about angular momentum and precession, but coriolis was just
outside my reach...  this is part of the reason I *ache* for Nick every
time he talks/asks about whirlpools and tornados and gets a deluge of
mathematical abstractions from us.  I wish for him to ride a dingy down
into the maw of a maelstrom just once, if only in his dreams.

I will try to shut up on this for a while and trust that if you (Glen)
or anyone else has an alternate perspective on how "apprehension
builds/stacks/aggregates/coalesces/is-structured" that it will come
out.   I know I'm "beating a nearly-dead horse about the head and
shoulders with a wet noodle" (to invoke an arbitrarily arbitrary mixture
of overused metaphorical cliches <just to hear you gag?> )...  but that
doesn't stop the impulse to flog it a few more times from rising every
post here!  

Ramble, Mumble, Bumble, Fumble,

- Steve

> Well, to be clear, I "offered" 100s of thousands of metaphors. THAT is the point of my response to Nick's bias-imputing *choice* to cherry pick only 4 out of those thousands. That's the pattern in pretty much every one of these "metaphors everywhere" tangents we take.
>
> And my more recent comment to Nick applies to this post as well. I'd believe we're engaged in some sort of "role of metaphor in <placeholder>" discussion if and only if the "<placeholder>" were being talked about. But we're not talking about the "<placeholder>". We're not talking about the context (which was "privacy games" writ large -- but I'd be happy to talk about the role of metaphor in *any* particular context as long as the context was actually maintained as a core part of the discussion [†]).
>
> But no. Instead, we're talking completely abstractly about _metaphor_ *regardless* of context. It's a purely hypothetical exercise in ungrounded theory (where I use "theory" quite generously).
>
>
> [†] Steve's recent comments *do* begin to seem interesting with the "sensorial grounding out" and the comments about direct and indirect maps from tacit vs. formal knowledge because he wraps it context (like tennis vs. soccer). Even there, though, I'm not very interested. These useless tangents have convinced me that the overwhelming majority of the uses of the word "metaphor" are markers for sloppy thinking. Y'all have installed a trigger in me that only decades of therapy will remove. >8^D Forever more, when I hear "metaphor", it'll be like quantum woo, every time some patchouli wearing psychonaut says "entanglement", I get a bit nauseous. Now that happens with "metaphor", too.
>
> On 5/28/20 5:56 PM, Eric Charles wrote:
>> I'm not sure Glen's point about "xyz" gets us very far. Sure, you can call anything you want by any label you want. I'm not sure anyone disputes that. But after that there remain three-ish different issues, which I think Nick tends to muddle: 
>>
>> 1) The role of metaphor in communication.
>> 2) The role of metaphor in thought.
>> 3) The role of metaphor in science.
>>
>> Glen's example doesn't get us very far in any of those conversations, because it is an example, and literally any example is self-defeating in these contexts. 
>>
>> The role of metaphor in communication: Glen want's us to understand that there are many situation like the one he described. He doesn't literally use "xyz" in all those cases, but it is like he has done that, in crucial ways. He also isn't always referring to a "green thing in the distance", but, again, it is like he has done that, in crucial ways. In order to effectively communicate his idea, he offered a metaphor... because they   make communication much easier. 
>>
>> The role of metaphor in thought: Does Glen inherently think that way? I think the analysis would be similar. 
>>
>> The role of metaphor in science: I'm not sure where this aspect is in the various conversations at the moment, but a particular strength of Nick's analysis of metaphor illuminating its role in science - both for better and for worse.  Scientific theories are metaphors that are meant to be taken very seriously ("Natural selection", "A snake eating its tail", "Bent space time", "The bystander effect", "Atomism", etc., etc.). We make the metaphor because we see a similarity between two situations, and we intend that metaphor to suggest other similarities that we have not witnessed. Because it is a metaphor, we don't intend an exact match, so there are intended non-similarities as well. The intended similarities are the things to be investigated. Something goes awry if people start investigating the non-similarities. For example, it would be silly if we had demanded Glen produce an example of when he had used "xyz" in the past to refer specifically to a "green thing in the
>> distance". Glen didn't intend that aspect of his metaphor to be held up to such scrutiny (at least I do not think he intended it to be). Good metaphors function in common conversation without the need to hammer out such details explicitly, and typically without any intent to investigate the intended implication. 
>>
>> Did I punch the tar baby enough? Am I hopelessly stuck? Or did I possibly help accomplish anything?
>>
>>
>> P.S. I am very committed to Nick's understanding of how to understand metaphors, but abhor the notion that it is metaphor all the way down. There were once people who had to literally toe a literal line, and now there are people who metaphorically "toe the line", and anything that makes it seem like we will lose that distinction is highly problematic. Don't know if that's relevant, but since I've seen a few people in the thread talk about "Nick/EricC" I thought I'd mention that crucial difference.  
>> P.P.S. And a metaphorically "toe the line" might or might not be distinct from whatever dysfunctional thing is happening when wherein someone is said to "tow the line"... with the latter definitely being relevant to Glen's comments about the arbitrariness it all. Is it still a functional metaphor if someone writes "tow"?!? "Yes" in one sense, but obviously "no" in another.