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

[David Eric Smith]

Jon, Glen, All,

I took Glen’s point in his former post to be the one that also seems overwhelmingly obvious to me.

In the rest of the universe outside this thread, we have a relatively rich conceptual landscape for thinking and talking about what it means for words or other units of speech to refer to things.  We have a kind of ontology of denotation and connotation of various types, and lots of ways to refer to it and share points of view toward it.

Glen’s revivalist meme, which gave me the rare pleasure of actually physically laughing out loud, captured the way all that expressive richness seems to get dumped for harping and harping (the official instrument of heaven) on one term.  Kind of like Murray used to distill his irritation with the evangelicals in the complaint that the universe is rich and the world full of books to convey the richness, but the various fundamentalists want everything else but one book to be thrown out.

It’s hard not to respond to these things with the obvious reductii ad absurdum.  I don’t know how Glen manages to keep an even keel and keep responding with analyses.  If every symbol is another symbol of another symbol of another…. Then one of two things must be true.  Either there is Only One Thing, and all of language ultimately points back to it through a category-theoretic chain of metaphor, or there isn’t anything at all, and talking is just about talking, and never about actually doing anything (the analytical philosopher’s preferred view of the world — sorry; said with reference to a particular person I have in mind, or maybe a couple of them).

I wanted to post that, back in the awful early days of Southwest Airlines (do you remember how they used to ensure every seat full on every plane, allowing them to charge $50 less on a ticket?), I used to blow off steam at the end of a horrendous travel day by complaining that Southwest didn’t operate nonstop flights between any two cities.  In the “It’s all Metaphors!” Conversation, the above would not be seen as absurd.

I wanted to post to paraphrase Yogi Berra:  Learning something is hard, especially something you don’t already know.

The purpose being to then write that, when I used to teach physics to liberal arts majors (honors students, and very smart and deeply good kids), I tried to make the point by referring to “operational definitions”.  Unpacked: I tried to sell them on the idea that the reason we were there together was for them to understand something new.  Of course, I have no idea what “understand something new” means, any more than I understand what it means “to think” (to which I will save Nick larding here to say it doesn’t mean anything at all).  But I can refer concretely to may activities that I think are part of understanding something.  
Experimentation.
Reading measurements.
Learning facts of various kinds.
Lots of off-line reading around the topic, so that the class readings are not a sort of scripture to be memorized, but a thing that one does lots of hermeneutic filling-in to try to get to grips with.
Immersion to develop a kind of familiarity with the patterns seen in some domain of phenomena.

All of those I thought of as “operations”.  Then try to sell the students on the claim that the substance of the idea is in the operations that give understanding of it, and after the fact we can tag the idea with whatever word, for ease of association, or compatibility with conventional grammars for its use, or whatever.  I took this to be Glen’s point that we could use “xyz” if we have got clear what we are talking about, though of course some terms are more convenient than others, for reasons we all also understand.

But each new operational definition creates a genuinely new thing to be understood, and a new sense that could either be referred to with a new term (entropy, enstrophy, Bacillus subtitlis, ...),  or by a new meaning assigned to an existing term by overloading (color, charm, strangeness, evolution, manifold, fiber, filtration, …).  Thus “polysemy” does not mean the same thing as “metaphor”.  
(Operationalized in only one limited way among many possible ways as https://www.pnas.org/content/113/7/1766 <https://www.pnas.org/content/113/7/1766>)

I wanted to post a story Wendell Berry tells, in affectionate ribbing of rural Kentuckians.  They never say a word they haven’t said before.  When he and his wife Tanya moved back to Port Arthur, since they had never known someone named Tanya before, they spent the first 20 years of the Berrys’ return addressing her by some collection of other names.  (Wendell does not elaborate what exactly changed that.)

I wanted to post an instance of Lashon Hara against my analytical philosopher colleague, which is an act of bad faith.  The contest is that some operational understanding gets built up in some domain.  The philosopher’s method is then something like this:
1. Don’t learn any of that operational understanding.  Sometimes, don’t even realize that it must exist, as the reason certain claims are being made, and consider investigating.
2. Study the surface form of sentences very very very hard, from all angles.
3. Bicker endlessly that the sentences are poorly constructed because they don’t make sense according to some other semantics for the terms that the philosopher happens to know, which are not the domain knowledge that the sentence refers to.

It’s not as bad as my overdrawn cartoon, but the frustration of trying to have a conversation with this person is consistent enough, of that kind, that I try hard to avoid contact so we can stay friendly.  And the fact that it comes from lack of having pursued the domain knowledge is one I can back up from instances of pointing to the sources of the domain knowledge and being met with surprise that such existed, upon which the person was happy to drop some of the objections.  

But I read Glen as saying that, to be interesting, a conversation about the role of metaphor should be positioned in the rich space of all the other things we also have the ability to say about denotational roles of words.  Nick has talked about Pierce and “word as symbol”, but then expressed (in very short form) what I took as a concern that there may be no reason to move beyond being a metaphor-monist.

Clint Eastwood has another useful aphorism: A man’s gotta know his limitations.

Learning anything new is hard and time-consuming, and sometimes beyond one’s capability (actually, almost always).  And there are only so many hours in a day.  So to admit that one simply isn’t going to try, or isn’t likely to succeed, in understanding something new, carries no dishonor.  

Add alongside that the truism that a “language” with infinitely many words-as-monads isn’t learnable or speakable, and maybe that expression is even an oxymoron.  So if understanding new things is to be an open-ended enterprise, there will inevitably be overloading of terms, in a way that requires both polysemy and metaphor as important dimensions to be understood in the overloading.  I take something like an acknowledgment of this to be behind EricC’s statement that he abhors the “metaphors all the way down” position.

Pete Townshend had a good thought on this point: This is not a social crisis; just another tricky day for you.

In some sense, everybody on the list is already so sophisticated that they all recognize this.  Why is it so necessary to pretend one doesn’t, and only rarely let the recognition through in Freudian slips, in order to bleach the discussion of dimensions that are available to it?


God, what a useless waste of time I commit in generating all this crap above.  

Eric












> On May 30, 2020, at 2:16 AM, Jon Zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Frank, Steve,
> 
> My favored approach is to say that space is like a manifold.
> For me, space is a thing and a manifold is an object. The former
> I can experience free from my models of it, I can continue to
> learn facts(?) about space not derived by deduction alone
> (consider Nick's posts on inductive and abductive reasoning).
> I concede here that we talk about an objectified space, but
> I am not intending to. I am using the term space as a place-
> holder for the thing I am physically moving about in. OTOH
> manifolds are fully objectified, they exist by virtue of their
> formality. Any meaningful question about a manifold itself
> is derived deductively from its construction. Neither in their
> own right are metaphors, the metaphor is created when we
> treat space as if it were a manifold. Just my two cents.
> 
> At the beginning of MacLane's Geometrical Mechanics, (a book
> I have held many times, but never found an inexpensive copy
> to buy) MacLane opens his lecture's with 'The slogan is: Kinetic
> energy is a Riemann metric on configuration space'. What a baller.
> 
> Glen,
> 
> I love that you mention the <placeholder>, ultimately reducing
> the argument to a snowclone. Because the title of the thread
> actually implicates a discussion of metaphor, and because I may
> have missed your point about xyz, please allow me this question.
> Do you feel that snowclones are necessarily templates for making
> metaphors, or do you feel that a snowclone is somehow different?
> 
> Jon
> 
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