<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;">Here I do want to answer a specific thing Nick said, because I think I can say something constructive in response to it, which I haven\u2019t seen said in this way in any of the earlier posts.<br id="lineBreakAtBeginningOfMessage"><div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div>On Mar 28, 2026, at 1:10, Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2@gmail.com> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div><div dir="ltr"><div>Dear EricS, </div><div><br></div><div>Next point: I wrote. </div><div><br></div><div>
<blockquote type="cite" style="margin-left:80px"><div><div><div><b><i><span style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif">It follows that every sighting of a thing previously not encountered has to be a metaphor.</span> </i></b></div><div><b><i><br></i></b></div></div></div></blockquote><div><div><div>And then you responded:</div></div></div><div style="margin-left:40px"><b><i><br></i></b></div><div style="margin-left:40px"><b>This
is the point I telegraphed above: Nick\u2019s usage of \u201cmetaphor\u201d is so wide
that he is willing to make a logical-ish claim that \u201cIt follows that\u2026.\u201d
In my usage, no such \u201cit follows\u201d can be asserted.</b></div><div style="margin-left:40px"><b><br></b></div>I think my definition of (scientific) metaphor is actually narrower than is common, given that I insist on a formality of analysis. But speaking of logic, I wonder if you would agree with the statement that every perception is an abduction. That is, to see something (in the broadest sense of seeing) we have to assign it to a category. Categories by their nature are arrangements of prior experience. We could then go on to wrangle over whether all abductions are metaphors, if we cared to, but I doubt we would. </div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>There is a thing I _have_ said that I think is in this direction, though I want to be held accountable only for the way I actually _did/do_ say it. I have, in several posts over the years, argued for the world-view that we are finite and even rather small things (I almost always write \u201cpace DaveW\u201d when I say that; that\u2019s how you can remember you have heard me say it before), in a world that is enough bigger than us that we may as well regard it as indefinitely bigger. In that sense, for sure, we must \u201cclassify\u201d \u2014 by which I have a kind of image-analogy to finite state machines receiving symbol strings in mind, which I know to be an image-analogy \u2014 large collections of situations-in-the-world under the (effectively) same states-of-ourselves. Usually these conversations concern how we use those states to position ourselves for what happens next, so I am willing to call this set-wise lumping an act of \u201cinduction\u201d. I usually wouldn\u2019t mind \u201cabduction\u201d as well. Since (following, I guess, Hume\u2019s well-known formulation?), there is no \u201csolution to the `problem\u2019 of induction\u201d, there will be ways we do this that are to some extent arbitrary w.r.t. the situations, though perhaps quite predictable from a knowledge of what we are like, and how we imprint past histories of situations on ourselves. </div><div><br></div><div>But anyway, that much to say I agree with you in intent, but I want to choose my own level of hedging, and not just sign off on somebody else\u2019s, whose style I often don\u2019t understand.</div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div>I can see your coming back to me to say that I am confusing perception with the reporting of perceptions. </div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Something along this line, but I think I can make a more concrete claim, at least at an image-analogy level. In a moment\u2026.</div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div>You are right. I am confused about that. I am not sure there is really any useful distinction there to be made. </div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Skinnerian. Although I should only call you that if you had said \u201cI am sure there is not any useful distinction to be made\u201d. </div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div>But let's not have that argument because we don't really have to. For a perception to be scientific it must be reported, and I think you agree that every report of a new experience must be in terms of previous ones. </div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Wikipedia would call this \u201cweasel wording\u201d. \u201cIn terms of\u201d? \u201cReporting?\u201d This is where all rubber meets any road.</div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div>Even if I have just seen a unicorn for the first time and even if you insist that I have genuinely seen the unicorn in its true unicornity, you will agree that <b><i>my report</i></b> will be something like "I just saw a horse with a white narwhal horn in the middle of its nose -- unless, of course, somebody has previously told me that that's what a unicorn <b><i>is</i></b>. </div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Your willingness to reduce ad absurdum is fine; I like to do that too. But you have thrown the baby out with the ditchwater, and I think you insist on not recognizing that. Your endless invocation of unicorns is a dodge from what the whole list keeps shouting back at you, and about which you (seem to me to) refuse to join in the exercise with them. MWOTHW</div><div><br></div><div>Here is where I can try to be constructive.</div><div><br></div><div>1. Whatever one should want to mean by \u201cour thoughts\u201d or \u201cour experiences\u201d, I think that must be very high-dimensional, or we are not being serious. (More accurately, it will have lots of scales, and while some of them may be lower-dimensional, there will be essential ones that are not. That will be the kernel of the list of points I will argue here.) </div><div><br></div><div>2. Any of these term-keyword-monikers (whatever you want to call them), terms like \u201cunicorn\u201d, are just tags pinned to some much larger fabrics of experience and thought. Here I want to be allowed to use math terms (e.g. \u201cdimensionality\u201d), because the body of gained experience I want to invoke in my analogy needs them, even if I can\u2019t cash them out in formal models. These tags are _vastly_ lower-dimensional than the fabrics to which they are pinned (being a person who, culturally, inherited the European Middle Ages and its mythologies). </div><div><br></div><div>2a. Now, note that there is a certain amount of dynamics that the tags can undergo on their own, through more-or-less regular, formalized, or recognized \u201crules\u201d of syntax, the more regular parts of semantics, etc. The ongoing filtering of usage in populations of language-users probably often favors usages in which these _low-dimensionall!!!!_ dynamics roughly trace the high-dimensional dynamics of the underlying fabrics. Then, language gives us some benefits of cognitive economy without complete loss of reliability. What we CANNOT ESCAPE, I claim, is that the term-dynamics, while perhaps higher-dimensional than the term-dictionary, is still vastly lower-dimensional than the thought/experience-dynamics of embodied life doing and thinking about things.</div><div><br></div><div>2b. The place I have sympathy for things DaveW asserts, even if I cannot understand him, is that I hear him saying the dimension reduction is very severe, and the syntax and semantics isn\u2019t particularly good, and we are too lazy in wanting to spare attention from the costly fabrics of experience, so that we can transact only in the thin overhanging spiderwebs of terminology and formal systems, with the result that we get a lot of stuff wrong. That general assertion seems plausible to me, and surely must be right in some cases. I probably think the term systems do better, more often, than DaveW does, but that\u2019s a discussion about degree, not existence/non-existence of both effects. </div><div><br></div><div>I wish I could give you the image of dewdrop spiders, which I have happily watched on morning exercise for many seasons: they make little tiny, zip-line-like shadow webs parallel to the thick webs of the spiders they parasitize and prey on, so that they can walk along their shadow-webs and be unsensed by the host spiders, which would eat them if they recognized them:</div><div><div style="display: block;"><div style="-webkit-user-select: all; -webkit-user-drag: element; display: inline-block;" class="apple-rich-link" draggable="true" role="link" data-url="https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/2321437/bgimage"><a style="border-radius:10px;font-family:-apple-system, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;display:block;-webkit-user-select:none;width:228px;user-select:none;-webkit-user-modify:read-only;user-modify:read-only;overflow:hidden;text-decoration:none;" class="lp-rich-link" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/2321437/bgimage" dir="ltr" role="button" draggable="false" width="228"><table style="table-layout:fixed;border-collapse:collapse;width:228px;background-color:#8CA1AB;font-family:-apple-system, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;" class="lp-rich-link-emailBaseTable" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0" width="228"><tbody><tr><td vertical-align="center" align="center"><img style="width:228px;filter:brightness(0.97);height:228px;" width="228" height="228" draggable="false" class="lp-rich-link-mediaImage" alt="RSBQJ0VQ108K6KQK9KHK2KZK6KLKUKRK6K5QEK5QEKKK9KEQO0SKB06QNKSKC05QA0PQEKMKAK4K1K4KOKGKLSMK309Q.jpg" src="cid:0ED45B03-B369-4B72-9460-D88BAB8B77D7"></td></tr><tr><td vertical-align="center"><table bgcolor="#8CA1AB" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="228" style="table-layout:fixed;font-family:-apple-system, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;background-color:rgba(140, 161, 171, 1);-apple-color-filter:initial;" class="lp-rich-link-captionBar"><tbody><tr><td style="padding:8px 0px 8px 0px;" class="lp-rich-link-captionBar-textStackItem"><div style="max-width:100%;margin:0px 16px 0px 16px;overflow:hidden;" class="lp-rich-link-captionBar-textStack"><div style="word-wrap:break-word;font-weight:500;font-size:12px;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;text-align:left;" class="lp-rich-link-captionBar-textStack-topCaption-leading"><a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/2321437/bgimage" style="text-decoration: none" draggable="false"><font color="#FFFFFF" style="color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.847059);">Dewdrop Spider, Argyrodes elevatus - Argyrodes elevatus</font></a></div><div style="word-wrap:break-word;font-weight:400;font-size:11px;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;text-align:left;" class="lp-rich-link-captionBar-textStack-bottomCaption-leading"><a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/2321437/bgimage" style="text-decoration: none" draggable="false"><font color="#FFFFFF" style="color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.54902);">bugguide.net</font></a></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></a></div></div><br></div><div></div><div>3. Your arguments that "every report of a new experience must be in terms of previous ones\u201d \u2014 if I could pin you down to any real committed meaning around the various weasel-wording and dodges \u2014 I believe to express a belief (by you) that you get empirically important consequences from a system of metaphors _at the level of the tags_. (And btw, I am not as nasty about weasel-wording as I sound. I do it all the time too, as I think everybody does who doesn\u2019t have a hard-packed way to express what he wants to mean.) The Unicorn and Horse and Narwhal is a cherry-picked example that seems to justify your view. But I think the cherry-picking makes it exactly a non-apt example for the cases where I believe we have real problems to solve. The electron? for Thompson and Rutherford and their contemporaries? Classical states and quantum states? Organisms and \u201cunits of selection\u201d (or not; reproductive lifecycles would be better) in biology? Places where I do think people sometimes have real trouble, and make real errors. </div><div><br></div><div>3a. It is that belief that I attribute to you, that I disagree with. I think that the fabrics of experience are high-dimensional, that they are built up and inhabited in the ongoing life of practice (my objection to your short-hand of \u201creports\u201d), that the gestalts with which we respond to them are very \u201cholographic\u201d \u2014 by which image I want something like \u201cthey change qualitatively due to collective effects, with even small changes in the viewing angle that we adopt when we go to use one of them\u201d, and that the combinatorics of them is _very_ high relative to any combinatorics we can give to term-and-tag systems, their syntactic and quasi-formal semantic rules. Moreover, when genuinely new experiences become available for people, those soak into the fabrics of our lived embodiment up to that time, and the gestalts that we generate from the pre-existing together with the novel, are their own whole kind of generated things. Not only is the experience novel; the possibility for combination with prior experiences is novel, and the way we generate a gestalt from it is novel relative to all the gestalts we generated from the experiences before the latest one. I think _that_ is what our learning process consists of, if I look at it in practice and try to describe it in some kind of faithful way. </div><div><br></div><div>3b. Tags get pinned onto all that dynamic along the way in iterative stages. Some of their role might be generative, but a lot of it is surely ex post and synoptic. </div><div><br></div><div>3c. Here I won\u2019t go the whole mystic on you, in either of two ways (I wouldn\u2019t even if I could, which I can\u2019t). One way would be to abdicate: to say \u201cIt\u2019s all just so big, that nothing can be said, and we can only repeat the holy Om that subsumes all realities\u201d. I also won\u2019t claim I have some magical system that _does_ handle all of experience in its whole vast dimensionality, because I don\u2019t believe we do that, or that we have such systems. I attach great value to Leslie Valiant\u2019s arguments in Probably Approximately Correct, and A Theory of the Learnable, that we do mostly what we can do robustly, and that is a limited scope. (The keyword for the above is PAC learning.)</div><div><br></div><div>3d. So, for sure, I think there is a well-motivated question to be asked: The benefits of economy can be so large that they can be categorical: what we cannot do easily enough, we probably don\u2019t do at all. If metaphor-mapping at the level of the tag system can get _anything_ of the underlying practicial-experiential-dynamics correct, we are likely to use it. The question, then, becomes \u201cWhen is this actually happening, and what is your evidence for it, in a serious study?\u201d</div><div><br></div><div>Eric</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div><br></div><div>Thanks for your generosity. </div><div><br></div><div>Nick </div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div> </div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, Mar 22, 2026 at 6:04\u202fAM Santafe <<a href="mailto:desmith@santafe.edu" target="_blank">desmith@santafe.edu</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div>This is good, Nick,<div><br></div><div>There are some things you say here to which I think I can reply constructively. I will commit the indiscretion (c.f. Pound) of responding to a couple of sentences that weren\u2019t addressed to me, and then others that were.</div><div><br></div><div>(TL:DR of course)<br id="m_2169717526572001725m_-3687529388876943206lineBreakAtBeginningOfMessage"><div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div>On Mar 21, 2026, at 16:07, Nicholas Thompson <<a href="mailto:thompnickson2@gmail.com" target="_blank">thompnickson2@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div><div><div dir="ltr"><div><br></div><div>I will work backwards. What is the test by which you determine whether your talc-ing of the lens has improved your vision or whether it has made it worse? That's not a rhetorical question. Work it through in your imagination. How exactly do you determine this? This is the question that lies at the bottom of EricS's complaint about TK. </div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>As usual for me, I don\u2019t know how to describe a general system, but I think I can work backward from example cases. </div><div><br></div><div>Note: I will need to say later that you seem to scope the word \u201cmetaphor\u201d much wider than I ever would, and as a result you seem to assimilate categories that to me are very different and need to be handled differently. Because I tend to see lots of different types at work, my examples tend to be fairly narrow and particular.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Case 1: There are certain formal presentations that claim to capture what makes a dynamic \u201cevolutionary\u201d. They are derived from the population geneticists\u2019 conventions. As formal systems, they are whatever they are. Terms are defined; you can check whether they are coherent, and wherever they are, you can calculate things with them. There isn\u2019t anything in this exercise of a formal system that one could regard as being \u201cin error\u201d, as long as you use the terms in ways that keep them coherent. To the extent that they get bound do observations of phenomena, they are being treated as a model (in one sense of that term; several somewhat different senses exist). </div><div><br></div><div>The place where metaphor enters is in the choice to see this formal system, as opposed to some other one, as a model, and here I think we can argue that there are understandable motives, and also errors. I take this to be the main program you are after, and one that I also want. </div><div><br></div><div>Within the usual setup, there is an (appropriately) ugly term called \u201cunits of selection\u201d. It has all sorts of problems and inadequacies, hacks, compromises, and so forth. For a very limited range of cases, it is a good abstraction, and sufficient for certain statistical needs. (That last sentence has a trumpy structure.) It is related to another term that need not be ugly but is often made so: \u201clevels of selection\u201d, for which the obligatory book to cite (whether or not one has read it) is Samir Okasha\u2019s. </div><div><br></div><div>I will argue that the choice to insist, cult-like, that an evolutionary process can only be formalized around \u201cunits of selection\u201d is an instance of making a metaphor in which the source domain is our folk-experience of \u201corganisms\u201d about as it would have been available (and would have seemed unproblematic) to Darwin. And I would argue that an error is made when the metaphor is applied to systems in which the target lacks infrastructure that could ever let it take on capabilities that organisms have (say, of long-term type-stability of kinds that biology usually doesn\u2019t even question), and that are essential for organisms to provide what they provide to evolutionary dynamics. This misattribution gets particularly acute for Origin of Life problems, so they bring it into sharp relief. </div><div><br></div><div>Notably, the _only_ reason I am willing to make this charge is that I can construct other formal systems to adopt as models, which don\u2019t insist on anything that is metaphorically so literally bound to organisms a la Darwin, and that will be more faithful to the play-out of the phenomena to which they are being applied \u2014 even by the terms that the evolutionists set out for themselves about what is the specifically \u201cevolutionary\u201d aspect of some dynamic. This is the usual situation of not knowing there was a question until having constructed an answer enables one to articulate that question.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Case 2: I second either DaveW or John Searle (different as those two are) in not much liking the \u201cbrain is a computer\u201d classification, and in thinking it is a mis-used metaphor. In two ways, my objection can\u2019t be like Dave\u2019s is: 1) I don\u2019t have something else that I want to put in place of the \u201ccomputer\u201d source domain, and 2) I don\u2019t understand the mystics\u2019 position. And Searle in general has too much other baggage that I don\u2019t want to endorse, that I have only maybe a sliver of overlap with him. But I can say I have my own, very tentative, objection. A place I differ from the others is that I am a lot more optimistic that current ML systems will have _a lot_ to say about brains and thought, along lines Marcus advocates, and I think there is a crisp question one can pose from that view.</div><div><br></div><div>For me, the core of the objection is that, as I use the term \u201ccomputer\u201d, if I mean a formal system, then I intend one of the formalized classes: maybe Church/Turing equivalent, or maybe some formalized process calculus, or maybe various kinds of gradient-descent as in neural net architectures with their training protocols. If I mean the common/sub-formal usage, I intend the family-resemblance sense in which we will clump many engineered systems as \u201ccomputers\u201d if they will carry some parts of the formal markings without inconsistency (von Neumann machines that don\u2019t have infinite Turing tapes, but that will carry out algorithm fragments exactly as the Turing machine would if the tape isn\u2019t limiting to that fragment, etc.)</div><div><br></div><div>My speculative resistance to the \u201cis a computer\u201d assignment, is that it seems to make brains a sub-class of some other engineered system, or to suppose that the partial ability of brain activity to carry formal markings without inconsistency gives us reason to believe that there are _no other markings_ that it might also carry that are worth articulating, and that are essential to its brain-ness or thought-ness. I take this to be Searle\u2019s point in saying \u201cmy brain is like my stomach\u201d: it is its whole self, which may as well be indefinitely complicated and unknown to me, beyond a few of its functions that I can describe. Don\u2019t, if I can use a Glen construction correctly, \u201cpre-emptively register\u201d. </div><div><br></div><div>My optimism for bringing in the computer metaphor heavily is that it seems entirely reasonable to suppose that there are many things the brain does, which we experience and classify (in our folk language since antiquity) as \u201cthinking\u201d, that computers are also doing, and that for practical purposes they are doing \u201cin the same way\u201d. </div><div><br></div><div>About the latter I need to give two details to be understandable, because here I think there is a puzzle to solve (tip to TK). I would maybe _not_ want to pursue either of the arguments that: 1) the brain _cannot_ be doing what the ML computing machines are doing, because they are different substrates; or 2) that the brain _should_ be doing what the ML computing machines are doing because Hopfield designed them to imitate what he understood neurons to be doing. A much more fun problem for me would be the conjecture: There is a certain class of pattern-finding and pattern-modeling problems that are richly furnished by the world, for which there is a class of \u201cmost easily found\u201d ways of solving them. Brains and ML computing machines may be doing effectively the same thing, because they have both found these easiest ways, in spite of some difference of substrate, and perhaps guiding the convergence of other aspects of substrate (approximated, let us guess, by Hopfield et seq.) This is the kind of computational-complexity or algorithm-type argument I would make for protein folding, or for metabolism, along similar lines. Abstract a little bit away from material things, and ask about the nature of patterns of events in a world of noise, and then ask for paths of least resistance.</div><div><br></div><div>So the metaphor of \u201cis a computer\u201d had great service to give, if it directed us to understand the nature of problems, after which, like WIttgenstein\u2019s ladder, we have the sense to throw it away. </div><div><br></div><div>Moreover, the ability of computers to do _really what_ brains are doing in one respect, while being different in others, gives us angles on the brain by disaggregating these aspects, in ways we rarely get with whole brains, apart from idiosyncratic cases of pathology that expose part of the machinery, though generally not for the sake of making it easy for us to interpret.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>I think one could go on, with similar rather narrow cases of this kind.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Continuing my self-indulgence, I do want to repeat something I wrote some months ago, about one aspect of the term \u201cmetaphor\u201d. My understanding is that, narrowly, it applies to a specific language construct: calling one thing by the name of something else that both speaker and listener understand it is not. I am willing to extend that as far as \u201creferring to one thing in the image of another that both referrer and recipient know it is not\u201d. So, to go beyond just names, to general constructs for images or referents. </div><div><br></div><div>I would not, then, refer to just-any-old-gesture in some direction as \u201ca metaphor\u201d. I think (in current American English usage; I won\u2019t proclaim about old Greek), the deliberate violation is a core sense of the term \u201cmetaphor\u201d that sets it apart from other assimilation-indicating terms, like \u201canalogy\u201d, or \u201cfamily resemblance\u201d, or various other senses of \u201cmodel\u201d. </div><div><br></div><div>I am actually even violating my own usage here, in the previous two examples, in that the known-and-intended name violation is often _not_ part of what the units-of-selection crowd or the brain-is-a-computer crowd do. i will say that, when processed properly, that violation aspect does arise and makes them (imagistic) metaphors-proper.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><div dir="ltr"><div>We would like to think it's not "just" a social test. This is where Peirce takes off, I think: yes, it's a social test, but it's not "just" a social test. In fact, the long term social test has methods, it has rigor, it has precision, it has all the good things that collective human cognition can have. These are scientific methods and the pursuit of such methods will lead you to have fewer surprises in your life. The one thing it will never have is experience of entities beyond the realm of human experience. It follows that every sighting of a thing previously not encountered has to be a metaphor. </div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>This is the point I telegraphed above: Nick\u2019s usage of \u201cmetaphor\u201d is so wide that he is willing to make a logical-ish claim that \u201cIt follows that\u2026.\u201d In my usage, no such \u201cit follows\u201d can be asserted.</div><div><br></div><div>There are all kinds of new sightings in my world that \u201ckinda remind me of\u201d something else more familiar. That is the part of what you say that I think is generic. We are little systems (pace Dave) in a world that is bigger than we are, and there is no general solution to the Problem of Induction. For that reason we cannot help but classify.</div><div><br></div><div>But such classification can be any-old kind of binding of situations and systems. I think that when people on the list have preferred \u201cmodel\u201d over \u201cmetaphor\u201d for cases in point, it is the sense of \u201cmodel\u201d that: two phenomena are somehow in some common category, and whatever that category is, I am willing to take one as \u201ca model of\u201d the other. </div><div><br></div><div>I actually think that, at one remove, this is what we do with our formal systems as well. Once declared into existence, a formal system becomes one more thing-in-the-world. We can exercise it, participate in its use, and grow our own experience-base with it. When we \u201cbind\u201d that experience with the formal system to our experiences with some other phenomena \u2014 taking the formal system for \u201ca model of\u201d the naturally occurring phenomenon \u2014 that binding occurs in ineffable domains that can be as hazardous as those that assimilate experiences with distinct natural phenomena. It is here that the question of what empiricism is becomes both hard and interesting. </div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div>EricS. I have, as you know, enormous respect for you,, and gratitude for your open-mindednss back in the old days when we heathens were allowed to tread the sacred halls of the Institute and, if we were very respectful, pet the cat.. When i remember those days, it is bizarre to me that we cannot share a good laugh about the contradictions in your paragraph: </div><br><div><div><div><div style="margin-left:40px"><b><i>It is tempting to laugh at the way to take Glen\u2019s meaning; where when Glen argues that one should
look through the lens in the sense of meaning-making, Nick
claims innocently to understand that as looking through the lens
at <span style="background-color:rgb(0,0,255)"><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">(invented?</span></span> Freudian-style emotional motives. There will
never be a thrust that gets through that parry, we have watched
it for decades. All good fun. </i></b></div></div></div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I think you left out a couple of words, perhaps in an act of social generosity. But let\u2019s see if I can understand what you say is a contradiction. </div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div>First we need to clear up some metaphysical ground. Two bird watchers out for a walk in Santa Fe on a recent afternoon. </div><div><br></div><div>BW#1: I just saw a blue-footed booby. </div><div>BW#2: There are no blue-footed boobies in Santa Fe in April.</div><div>BW#1: Nonetheless, I just saw a blue-footed booby. </div><div><br></div><div>Now there are several understandings of this situation that resolve the contradiction and still leave BW#1's assertion to be true. </div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>This can go down lines a lot like Imre Lakatos\u2019s critique of the Logical Empiricists\u2019 program. But, I understand, not the point of this thread of sentences. </div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div>These include all sorts of altered states, delusion, illusion, etc. . And there is the intenSionality issue; BW#1 may speak a language in which "blue-footed booby" refers to the bird which BW#2 would call a "Stellars Jay." Science can handle all of those. </div><div><br></div><div>The tricky understandings are those in which we declare BW#1 to be telling some sort of lie. He is joking, he is faking, he is claiming falsely, he is arguing dishonestly, etc. Now these understandings all imply that BW#1 is disingenuous. Such claims can, of course, can be verified, but such verifications involve long experience with the speaker and his context and require one to assume that he is not to be trusted or does not know the nature and quality of his own acts, or both. Such claims are inherently insulting, and, at the best, require great circumspection and tact in their verification. </div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I agree. Bad Faith is a nasty charge to level against somebody, and I think I don\u2019t want to do that. </div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div>So, lets assume that Nick is being honest when he says what he first sees when he reads a correspondent's posts is a troll under a bridge grumping about who is walking over his bridge. Let's assume that that is what Nick naively sees. That's his first impression. </div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I actually believe this. How much it was the point of the \u201clenses are for seeing meaning through\u201d analogy, versus how much not, is a fair question. My take was: the trolling is largely for entertainment, and to add force and emphasis here and there, but there was a serious accusation \u2014 to the main point of the thread \u2014 of behaving like an Analytical Philosopher of my acquaintance, who when she hears \u201cNecessity is the mother of invention\u201d responds with \u201cTell me about your mother\u201d, sort of refusing to admit that she knows there is relevant context beyond the surface forms. Moreover, refusing to admit she can figure out that there must be other context, even if unknown to her, by choosing, among the many glosses for a word, one that clearly made the sentence senseless. (In the case of the Analytical Philosopher, over years, I came to learn that she often didn\u2019t actually know about some of this context, and with time to deliver it across gradually, she became quite willing to engage with it, to her credit. So she turned out to be a good-faith actor. Just very, very hard to have a non-maddening conversation with, in any short spell.)</div><div><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div>And let's assume that he has to actually apply all sorts of analytical tools to see through to the valuable arguments beneath. Let's not assume (unless you are prepared to make the argument) that he is lying about having this experience.</div><div><br></div><div>Now this is tricky, because I (a somewhat respected correspondent) have been goaded into reporting a first impression of the words of another (more respected correspondent) which is apparently discordant with your understanding of the latter . </div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Dunno. Is the affect you sincerely perceive actually there? Or is it invented or imprinted? I am _so_ lucky I am a third person who can\u2019t know either, and I can stay off to the side. Too much responsibility if I had to have an opinion. So my saying that the affect response is not the point is not a claim that I either agree or disagree with the affect assertion. </div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div>The one thing we cannot do is shrug. If there is one thing that must be true about scientists is that they care about disagreement. Obviously, not all disagreements are of equal importance, so one has to prioritize. But if one does tackle a disagreement, one has to examine not only the disagreement between two experiences, but the lenses through which those experiences have been seen. </div><div><br></div><div>Those of us who use metaphors must be willing to examine them. We can never say, "Of course that is what my metaphor means." That is all I have ever been saying. </div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>And of course, with this, I have been on board all along, which is why I post. Where I bicker, it is usually about how many different categories there are, and when those differences matter. </div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div>Those of you who claim (if there are any of you) that some things are directly seen while others arrived at through analysis, pretense and sophistry must be prepared to explain how some experiences come to be simple while others are complex. </div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Nick </div></div></blockquote><br></div><div>Anyway; enough out of me for today, </div><div><br></div><div>Eric</div><div><br></div><br></div></div>.- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..<br>
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