Hi elephant, and all,
matter of fact, I was wishing that elephant's question about whether can we
understand the world without metaphors would have become a thread; I think it
may really be relevant, at least it is pretty interesting.
My opinion is that no, we cannot do without metaphors, when speaking of abstract
concepts. Even if we prune our words as to use no metaphor at all to communicate
with each other, our mind still works with metaphors. I have no argument as for
now, but would like to recast elephant's question in more empirical terms:
- did you remember to have reasoned about metaphysics without referring to some
more or less physical metaphor in your own mind?
It seems to me that I never did. It may be worth noting that we even *defined*
some of the central ideas of MOQ (eg., static vs dynamic) using what, honestly,
we probably all regard as metaphors: continuous vs discrete. "Continuous"
reality: obviously reality is not something that has infinite digits after the
dot, not literally, is it? (Neither it has the properties that "continuous" is
characterized by in other contexts). As for myself, when I think of discrete
language versus dynamic quality, I tend to visualize a lattice of points
(linguistic statements) floating in a three dimensional space (reality).
The only exception I can think of is using some specifics to reason about the
general, eg, reasoning about static and dynamic quality visualizing some
specific situation of daily life. But then again, this latter tool seems to be
useful to check one's ideas, but of course not to be used when one tries to
infer (guess) general rules. For this goal, metaphors seem the only viable path.
What about the other thinkers of MD?
Thanks for helping this enquiry :)
Andrea
elephant wrote:
> ROGER:
> > perhaps all we ever do is think and speak in metaphors.
>
> ELEPHANT:
> This is something I seem to change my ideas about from time to time, largely
> because no-one can tell me definitively just exactly what metaphor *is*.
>
> Ideas?
>
> I'm particulaly interested because it seems to me that you can't call most
> human language *literal* exactly, given that it's the words as begets the
> objects, not the other way around. On the other hand, that doesn't
> automatically make such words metaphorical - I mean "metaphorical" might not
> be a direct opposite of "literal", there might be some langauge which is
> neither a report of a thing in terms of itself, nor a depiction of a thing
> in terms of another. Most language in fact. And if it's this third
> category of languge (neither metaphoric nor literal) which is really
> fundamental (what gets the objects off the ground, so to speak, so that we
> can later come along and be 'literal' about them), maybe we want to say that
> metaphor *can't* be all pervasive. But then again we don't really know what
> metaphor is.... if you say with one camp that it's depicting one thing
> through another, then it looks like metaphor cannot go right down to the
> root of language - because the root is where you have no thing to describe
> anything in terms of. But maybe the initial act of naming, of numbering -
> maybe this too is seeing one thing in terms of another - imposing *formal*
> being on the *dynamic*..... Or is this something else again from what we
> normally call "metaphor" - what say you?
>
> I'm not sure at all, not at all at all. It's damm hard to speak for what
> other people "normally" mean when they use words. "Metaphor" particularly.
>
> yours puzzled,
>
> Puzzled Elephant
>
>
>
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