[FRIAM] Metaphor... and more...

Fri Mar 27 13:39:05 EDT 2026

EricS,  I stipulate that there is no scoundrel worse than the old professor
that insists that others read his old papers.  It is one of two papers in
which I engage in "formal" metaphor analysis.  I think it is, of all the
papers I have written, the most interesting, not because it is the best,
but because the can of worms it opens is largest and juiciest.  You will
find it at

Thompson, Nicholas S. “Shifting the Natural Selection Metaphor to the Group
Level.” *Behavior and Philosophy*, vol. 28, no. 1/2, 2000, pp. 83–101.
*JSTOR*, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27759407. Accessed 27 Mar. 2026.

There is no pay wall, but there is a song and dance.   I will try to attach
a copy below.  I think I will stand or fall on the value of this paper as a
demonstration of the manner in which metaphors can guide useful arguments
if taken seriously.

On Fri, Mar 27, 2026 at 5:34 AM Santafe <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:

> This is a great note, in the sense of being helpful from endless going
> around in circles, and written to get somewhere.  I am always grateful when
> EricC visits from the Oort cloud and enables a conversation to go into some
> direction again.
>
> I want, though (of course) to object to something.  And a paragraph below
> enables me to see the way I want to do it.  EC already understands the
> source of the objection, and I will include the final paragraph where it is
> flagged, though I want to beware oversimplifying to the point of having
> strawmen (which I don’t think is being done here).  But first; the
> objection:
>
>
> On Mar 26, 2026, at 16:25, Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> There are at least three interesting things going on in the
> metaphor discussion. The least interesting aspect of it is squabbling over
> what does or does not count as a metaphor (vice simile, model, analogy,
> etc.). Not that that isn't a perfectly good discussion, it just that it's
> *just* a vocabulary discussion, not an ideas discussion.
>
> 1) What is an explicit metaphor, and to what extent do the constant
> implicit metaphors that permeate our language resemble them? Nick has a
> particular way of thinking about metaphors, based on the intent of the
> person invoking the metaphor. Metaphors always assert that two things are
> alike, not that they are identical, so that implies that all metaphors are
> imperfect, and that that is intentional, and does not invalidate a
> metaphor. Metaphors can thus be divided into intended implications and
> not-intended implication, etc., etc. .... and Nick is fairly obsessed with
> these, especially in scientific contexts where people seem to be using the
> metaphors in different ways and that leads to a deep underlying confusion
> in a seemingly functional field, e.g., Darwinian evolution by means of
> "natural" selection....
>
>
> This is the poster child for a thing that to me is the ultimate non-issue,
> and has been shown to be the non-issue it is for many decades now.
>
> Look up George Price:
> sciencedirect.com
> <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S002251938570149X>
> <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S002251938570149X>
> <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S002251938570149X>
> https://gwern.net/doc/genetics/selection/natural/1995-price.pdf
>
> Price lays out, to a perfectly acceptable degree, an operational
> description.  Of sets of things, of partitioning, of some’s being retained
> and others’ being eliminated, from the ongoing history of sets that are the
> targets of description.  It’s a phenomenon that takes place in nature, in
> all sorts of forms.  We need some lexeme to refer to it.  What is a good
> one?  Selection seems about as apt as anything in English.   Quite beside
> the fact that Darwin wrote about animal breeding, this will still be
> perhaps the most apt word I have available.  Not merely “sorting”, because
> I need also the consequence of the sort that a retention/elimination step
> ensues.  Human intentionality is not imputed to the phenomenon itself at
> all, though there can be a subset of cases where it enters as part of the
> chain of causation.
>
> When anybody resurrects this zombie of claiming that some terrible
> metaphor of human breeding-selection is indelible in the cognition of
> people thinking about evolution that leads them into confusion, my
> experience of the conversation is much like the experiences I have had with
> the Implicit Bias crowd.  It doesn’t take much time around many of them,
> before I am pretty firmly convinced that what they want is to condemn
> basically everybody (but, one by one, whomever they  are talking to).  (The
> nicest image that comes to mind is Aunt Ada’s “I saw something nasty in the
> woodshed” from Cold Comfort Farm, with about as much content.)  The
> motivation is the whole, and any conversation will take whatever sophistic
> form gives the performance of fulfilling the motivation.  To be clear about
> what really is going on, and to think well about it and improve the way we
> handle such problems in living, is incidental to why they do what they do.
> A kind of trojan horse of a kind we so often see: the existence of a
> legitimate justice aim becomes a vehicle for people who want to play
> domination games and to bully.  They don’t erase the legitimate justice
> aim, but by having little serious interest in it (or a secondary and
> self-serving one, at best), they move it out of scope for any interaction
> you can have with them.  At which point I don’t feel like feeding the
> trolls.  Talk to me about really understanding and really helping, and stop
> the performing and pretending, or leave me alone.
>
> I do think one has to have some interest in knowing what people are doing,
> in context of the commitment to get thoughts clear and to solve some
> problems for which the solution has criteria, to keep such intuitions from
> turning into strawmen.
>
>
> The paragraph I promised to acknowledge, which I think also sees all this,
> was this one:
>
> I suspect that much of the frustration of Nick v others on this list is
> the instance of those others that any implications of the flavor text can
> be ignored once the mechanism has been mathematized, vs Nick's instance
> that if the flavor text is still being used it is almost certainly doing
> some metaphor-like work in the background of whoever is using, or hearing,
> the term (because otherwise, why not ditch it entirely).
>
>
> Eric(S)
>
>
> .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. /
> ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe   /   Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom
> https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
> to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> archives:  5/2017 thru present
> https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
>   1/2003 thru 6/2021  http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
>

-- 
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology
Clark University
nthompson at clarku.edu
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson
https://substack.com/@monist
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20260327/c8a948ee/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Shifting the natural selection metaphor to the group level.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 1760476 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20260327/c8a948ee/attachment-0001.pdf>