Great essay! It's metaphors all the way down, and sure, that's confusing, but being in denial of it is actively harmful. We need higher precision ways of talking about how we use our tools of understanding. Metaphors for the ways in which we metaphorize.
right! I'm trying to develop an idea of "metarigor" to cover this—but since it doesn't have direct correspondence to mutually measurable phenomena, it relies on us agreeing on social patterns which makes it very trick to define. I think the easiest way to start might be to catalog how metaphors "breakdown" and what force they're coming up against that does this—often it has to do with the gymnastics of maintaining the metaphor being too high-energy in comparison to some alternative that is clear in the context, e.g. the model of an atom going from plum pudding to the nucleus model due to the gold foil experiment.
I look forward to reading more from you about that! A cataloguing approach may be very fruitful, at least to be able to give clear examples of some of the dynamics that are involved in more subtle ways everywhere else as well.
A difficulty is that a full map of this territory would need to cover all our various uses of metaphor, including religious and rhetorical, and it's hard to draw a clear border for what's scientific—or at least this is something I'm not at all clear on yet, although a hand-waving "math vs narrative" and "bottom-up vs top-down" gets you some of the way there.
I'm working on a framework I call "metaphorical realism", with which I intend to sort of simultaneously bracket and encompass scientific realism, religious realism and naive realism. It's a very thorny subject, as everyone understandably has really strong feelings about the concept of reality. I won't have much to say about scientific methodology though, at least not initially, so this is just a tangent to give context for why I'm so excited about your use of the metaphor term.
that sounds really dope, would be very excited to read more as you develop it!
yeah—I don't think I'm at all concerned about how scientific these metaphors are, so much as how they help-us coordinate without needing to be deeply in the same context. To me that's where people start to talk about "objectivity" (despite that being a cursed term in my view) because then people don't need to spend a lot of time "getting" what you mean. So I'm interested in figuring out what metaphors work and what kind of shared reference points they need so that people can coordinate with less context than "we've been actively working together for 5 years".
I just meant "scientific" as a particular kind of "knowledge legitimization". Science can't avoid the use of metaphors, and even applied math is in a sense a metaphor, in that we have our mathematical models stand in for reality as an interface to it. It's important to have clear criteria for what kinds of uses of metaphor are meaningful in different contexts, although I'm vague on how to make these kinds of distinctions.
I think of metaphors as projecting the familiar onto the unfamiliar in order to get a handle on it. In other words, the most widely resonant metaphors relate to things we all know, such as basic things having to do with the body. I think one of the best arguments for a shared curriculum is that we get to have metaphors in common. In principle, that curriculum could be the bible, sports or microbiology. All of these present more or less clear patterns that we can map onto all kinds of other things. Building such common metaphor bases should be an explicit goal. https://twitter.com/metaphorician/status/1420823498226814983
Great essay! It's metaphors all the way down, and sure, that's confusing, but being in denial of it is actively harmful. We need higher precision ways of talking about how we use our tools of understanding. Metaphors for the ways in which we metaphorize.
right! I'm trying to develop an idea of "metarigor" to cover this—but since it doesn't have direct correspondence to mutually measurable phenomena, it relies on us agreeing on social patterns which makes it very trick to define. I think the easiest way to start might be to catalog how metaphors "breakdown" and what force they're coming up against that does this—often it has to do with the gymnastics of maintaining the metaphor being too high-energy in comparison to some alternative that is clear in the context, e.g. the model of an atom going from plum pudding to the nucleus model due to the gold foil experiment.
I look forward to reading more from you about that! A cataloguing approach may be very fruitful, at least to be able to give clear examples of some of the dynamics that are involved in more subtle ways everywhere else as well.
A difficulty is that a full map of this territory would need to cover all our various uses of metaphor, including religious and rhetorical, and it's hard to draw a clear border for what's scientific—or at least this is something I'm not at all clear on yet, although a hand-waving "math vs narrative" and "bottom-up vs top-down" gets you some of the way there.
I'm working on a framework I call "metaphorical realism", with which I intend to sort of simultaneously bracket and encompass scientific realism, religious realism and naive realism. It's a very thorny subject, as everyone understandably has really strong feelings about the concept of reality. I won't have much to say about scientific methodology though, at least not initially, so this is just a tangent to give context for why I'm so excited about your use of the metaphor term.
that sounds really dope, would be very excited to read more as you develop it!
yeah—I don't think I'm at all concerned about how scientific these metaphors are, so much as how they help-us coordinate without needing to be deeply in the same context. To me that's where people start to talk about "objectivity" (despite that being a cursed term in my view) because then people don't need to spend a lot of time "getting" what you mean. So I'm interested in figuring out what metaphors work and what kind of shared reference points they need so that people can coordinate with less context than "we've been actively working together for 5 years".
I just meant "scientific" as a particular kind of "knowledge legitimization". Science can't avoid the use of metaphors, and even applied math is in a sense a metaphor, in that we have our mathematical models stand in for reality as an interface to it. It's important to have clear criteria for what kinds of uses of metaphor are meaningful in different contexts, although I'm vague on how to make these kinds of distinctions.
I think of metaphors as projecting the familiar onto the unfamiliar in order to get a handle on it. In other words, the most widely resonant metaphors relate to things we all know, such as basic things having to do with the body. I think one of the best arguments for a shared curriculum is that we get to have metaphors in common. In principle, that curriculum could be the bible, sports or microbiology. All of these present more or less clear patterns that we can map onto all kinds of other things. Building such common metaphor bases should be an explicit goal. https://twitter.com/metaphorician/status/1420823498226814983