[Xmca-l] East York - Toronto

Tue Sep 4 04:02:16 PDT 2018

Dear all,

Anybody close to East York, Toronto please?

Ulvi

4 Eyl 2018 Sal 13:46 tarihinde Alfredo Jornet Gil <a.j.gil@ils.uio.no> şunu
yazdı:

> (I meant that "I am NOT talking for anyone else")
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> on behalf of Alfredo Jornet Gil <a.j.gil@ils.uio.no>
> *Sent:* 04 September 2018 12:41
> *To:* eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> *Subject:* [Xmca-l] Re: Rogers day
>
>
> Annalisa, Doug, all,
>
>
> just to address the issue that seems to linger on "what may Lakoff and
> Johnson be critiqued for", if I may re-phrase the question this way, and
> being clear that I am talking for anyone else than myself. First, I think
> there are way more reasons to praise than to critique their work on
> metaphor, among others, because we ought to them having this and many
> other discussions on such a relevant topic. But I mentioned that one
> objection to their book is that "flesh" was precisely what was missing from
> their account. What this claim refers to is the sense I got, upon reading
> the book and other of their works, that their analyses, while very
> illuminating with respect to the prevalence and form of metaphors in
> conceptual thinking, they seemed to remain with a quite formalistic
> sphere. As Huw seems to be critiquing in prior posts, their accounts speak
> of metaphors we live by, but not of the way they come to be formed as part
> of living. Missing is a genetic account, and that, I think, has to do with
> an account of how flesh, as living matter, is not just another piece of
> matter; that the logic of its explanation is not formal but genetic (which
> was Bateson is talking about too, that "syllogisms in grass", as he refers
> to them, make sense because they the logic of growth and formation). But
> then, as I understood it (and perhaps I am outdated now), Lakoff's and
> Johnson's works rely on notions of "embodied image schemata" as a way to
> account for the formation and prevalence of these metaphors.
>
>
> But if it is the formation of bodily images what makes flesh "flesh,"
> then this formation needs to be accounted for, and also we need to
> understand how such an account would differ from cognitive processing
> theories, besides the observation that now "information" of the world
> is being represented as consistent with bodily actions rather than with
> abstract perceptions.
>
>
> Of course, the critique is not mine, and it has been elaborated by authors
> such as Maxime Sheets-Johnstone, who adresses all forms of "embodied"
> cognition, claiming that it is a problem that we try to understand how our
> bodies are involved in thinking by "forthrightly packaging the subject of
> their concern into a readily available pre-existing and pre-formed
> material container with a readily available linguistic signifier, namely,
> the all-purpose lexical band-aid of embodiment and its lexical derivatives"
> (see attached article, titled "Embodiment on Trial", which I share for
> educational purposes only in this private list). W-M. Roth has drawn on
> these arguments to elaborate a critique and advance a "mathematics in the
> flesh" approach ( https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781136732218 ).
>
> More recently, Ilyenkov's Spinozist idea of the "thinking body" has been
> inspiring from a dialectical materialist perspective, according to which it
> is not schemata but rather object-orientedness nature of objective activity
> that would explain intelligent movement. But here, I am not aware of work
> in which the notion of metaphor has been taken up or elaborated along the
> larger framework.
>
>
> Well, to summarize, the problem with schemas is that they take the
> metaphoric relation and read it backwards, so that we can map actions to
> concepts formally. But a further challenge involves reading metaphors
> forward, as means not of conceptualizing already gone realities, but as a
> means of and for intelligently acting in the world. So, I hope this helps
> on the issue of "exceptions" to Lakoff.
>
>
> As per Doug on the central role of image (by the way, thanks for your
> beautiful post on the meaning of cherry blossoms), I wonder what an "image"
> that is "metaphoric and metonymic" (so not simply "visual") is , and
> whether and how that may relate to the notion of object-orientedness that I
> mention above.
>
> 
>
> Cheers,
> Alfredo
> ------------------------------
> *From:* xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> on behalf of Huw Lloyd <huw.softdesigns@gmail.com>
> *Sent:* 04 September 2018 11:02
> *To:* eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> *Subject:* [Xmca-l] Re: Rogers day
>
>
>
> On Tue, 4 Sep 2018 at 01:53, Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu> wrote:
>
>> Huw,
>>
>>
>> One possible argument that I see metaphor readily as a basis, is because
>> animals seem to dream, as Douglas has so aptly discussed, and I do plan to
>> respond more to his post but I would like to read it one more time and I
>> just scanned the thread as of late.
>>
>>
>> If something is lauded, it might be for a reason, and it might be the
>> case that you are missing something or you have dismissed something that
>> everyone else accepts.
>>
>
> Yes.
>
>
>>
>> What isn't clear to me is what you are rejecting. You have made a
>> reference to Shön, but that doesn't really do much unless one has read
>> Shön, so why don't you explain it more transparently?
>>
>
> If the opinions offered are distinguished from the opinions offered as
> assertion, it may be more apparent that I have done so up to a point.
>
>
>>
>> What are your 20 exceptions?
>>
>
> Dear Annalisa, I have no present wish to enumerate and turn over them all.
> The assertion was about the extent to which an opinion was formed, not an
> invitation to squander more time on it. If you take care with the few
> points I have made then it may be apparent that they stand for more than
> solitary issues. One needn't describe all the ripples if one can identify a
> few stones. But if you are annoyed by this response, then that may be
> usefully applied in looking for yourself.
>
> Huw
>
> [...]
>>
>> It is possible.
>>
>>
>> Kind regards,
>>
>>
>> Annalisa
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------
>> *From:* xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>
>> on behalf of Huw Lloyd <huw.softdesigns@gmail.com>
>> *Sent:* Monday, September 3, 2018 2:44:21 PM
>> *To:* eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
>> *Subject:* [Xmca-l] Re: Rogers day
>>
>> Yes, the paintbrush example also crops up in the "displacement of
>> concepts" text (p.87), which was first published in 1963. From
>> recollection, I liked it for the processual perspective and, of course,
>> it's tying in with later work. Perhaps Schön's account also helped me
>> get over the hump of many over metaphoric accounts, which seemed to miss
>> quite a bit and fudge the issue.
>>
>> Best,
>> Huw
>>
>> On Mon, 3 Sep 2018 at 21:11, Julian Williams <
>> julian.williams@manchester.ac.uk> wrote:
>>
>> Huw/Doug
>>
>>
>>
>> And ..  I found a citation in an old paper in ESM from … 200? when we
>> wrote about metaphor as a sort of abduction between in-and-out of school
>> activity … I remember the whole book is great but loved this one in
>> particular:
>>
>> Schon, D.A.: 1995, ’Generative metaphor: A perspective on problem-setting
>> in social policy’, in A. Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought: 2nd Edition,
>> Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 137–163.
>>
>>
>>
>> Julian
>>
>>
>>
>> *From: *<xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of Julian Williams <
>> julian.williams@manchester.ac.uk>
>> *Reply-To: *"eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
>> *Date: *Monday, 3 September 2018 at 20:59
>> *To: *"eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
>> *Subject: *[Xmca-l] Re: Rogers day
>>
>>
>>
>> Huw/Doug
>>
>>
>>
>> This is the same Schon that wrote about ‘generative metaphor’ – as in his
>> analysis of the ‘paintbrush as a pump’ …?– sorry I have not been following
>> the conversation and if this is irrelevant please ignore it!
>>
>>
>>
>> Julian
>>
>>
>>
>> *From: *<xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of Huw Lloyd <
>> huw.softdesigns@gmail.com>
>> *Reply-To: *"eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
>> *Date: *Monday, 3 September 2018 at 20:43
>> *To: *"eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
>> *Subject: *[Xmca-l] Re: Rogers day
>>
>>
>>
>> Doug,
>>
>>
>>
>> I found your email in spam -- possibly yahoo are not verifying emails?
>>
>>
>>
>> As you note they're opinions. I found that text sloppy, superimposing
>> metaphor onto language and concepts rather than actually looking for them
>> in their genesis, with many other unwarranted generalisations and poorly
>> articulated assertions. No doubt it wouldn't have been such a
>> disappointment if it hadn't been so lauded.  Historically I have found Sch
>> ön to be a rewarding read, so I was delighted to find his old text on
>> "displacement of concepts" which is true to its title. It is a reprint in
>> the series "Classics from the Tavistock Press".
>>
>>
>>
>> In his chapter(s) on homology, Stafford is not addressing metaphor in its
>> development but rather describing the role of analogy in the formation of
>> ideas, prior to the formulation of more precise definitions that may be
>> isomorphic across domains.
>>
>>
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Huw
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, 31 Aug 2018 at 08:59, Douglas Williams <djwdoc@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi, Huw--
>>
>>
>>
>> Coincidentally, I spent a term at UCB to study with Lakoff, and he took
>> about twenty or so exceptions to my exceptions, though I was thinking they
>> were questions. It would be interesting to see you debate, as I was not up
>> to the challenge (my main radicalism was to note parallels between things
>> in the Cognitive Linguistics model and thinking in complexes (LSV), and
>> Whorf/Sapir, GH Mead, Dewey, and so on, and wondering if there could be
>> some cross-disciplinary unity that would improve on all of them. Not
>> interesting questions for him, at the time, at least.
>>
>>
>>
>> Barring the debate, I'd be interested in seeing your take on the flaws of
>> the cognitive metaphor approach, or do Schon or Beer happen to address
>> themselves to Lakoff in particular?
>>
>>
>>
>> I find Cognitive Linguistics quite interesting. Even if some of the
>> explanations are wrong (as is certainly true with Freud's hydraulic
>> cathexes and repression of the id relating to jokes--seeking, like water,
>> the way of least resistance to the sea), the observations are interesting,
>> and well worth pursuing deeper. I also looked a bit into Ronald Langacker,
>> which is the more austere form of embodied language, relating to an
>> embodied basis for grammar, which is also quite interesting, though more
>> calculus to Lakoff's algebra, at least to me. But this is an area of study
>> that is expanding its adherents,
>>
>>
>>
>> Mark Turner's *More Than Cool Reason* and *Death is the Mother of Beauty*
>> are the better places to begin from a literary appreciation standpoint.
>>
>>
>>
>> And for Alfredo and Annalisa--
>>
>> I think one needn't go terribly far into anthropology to find that
>> embodied imagery clothed and complicated with words is the foundation of
>> all kinds of complex interactive imagery and behaviors, from Balinese
>> cockfights to "Christian" leopards in Ethiopia, to the *mono no aware*--the
>> awareness of the infinite sadness and beauty of the cycle of life--which is
>> evoked by the *sakura*, the cherry blossom.
>>
>>
>>
>> The Meaning of Cherry Blossoms in Japan: Life, Death and Renewal
>>
>>
>> The Meaning of Cherry Blossoms in Japan: Life, Death and Renewal
>>
>> Japanese sakura are not only sublime to look at, they're deeply revered
>> for their symbolism. Find out the true m...
>>
>> Cherry blossoms as the image of human life, or autumn leaves, or winter
>> snows, or the return of the salmon--very commonly, mixtures of renewal or
>> restoral, mixed with death and decay, and other emblems of seasonal
>> cycles--is a constant imagistic theme across many cultures, related
>> specifically to humans--so that these things *are* humans,
>> unconsciously, at least, as we have put off . The rituals in Japan around
>> the sakura are in concert with the theme of ancestor worship, another kind
>> of day of the dead, and consistent  with much more wordy expressions of
>> something embodied in the imagery--this from Stevens' "Sunday Morning:"
>>
>>
>>
>> Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
>> Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
>> And our desires.
>>
>>
>>
>> a common theme...
>>
>>
>>
>> Qui beauté eut trop plus qu'humaine?
>> Mais où sont les neiges d'antan! (Villon)
>>
>>
>>
>> Each Morn a thousand Roses brings, you say:
>> Yes, but where leaves the Rose of Yesterday?
>> And this first Summer month that brings the Rose
>> Shall take Jamshýd and Kaikobád away.(Khayyam)
>>
>>
>>
>> But one step deeper: What really strikes me as the core of metaphor and
>> analogy--see, here was my idea of a multidisciplinary research project that
>> was always beyond my abilities or means--is the fixation of memory and
>> associations and emotional associations in dreams. They are metaphoric and
>> metonymic through blending of imagery--for we remake past and present
>> memory in dreams--and in dreams, which was a radical idea 25 years ago, but
>> emerging as the dominant paradigm now--we form and reshape the past and
>> present in sequences that develop through recalling and associating past
>> fixed memories with newer ones. All mammals (except the echidna, a very
>> primitive group of mammals) dream, emphasizing the essential adaptive
>> nature of dreams, which we have known heuristically, and increasingly
>> scientifically, are associated with memory. And what do animals dream?
>> According to Temple Grandin, mammals think (and dream) predominantly in
>> images. They think in pictures. We think in pictures too, but words and
>> internalized schemas and phrases overwhelm the imagery. But it is in dreams
>> that we come relatively closer to the more common mammalian world of
>> imagistic cognition--though even there, we bring in sociocultural schemas.
>> Images are less mediated in words, more direct to our own perceptions. Part
>> of the appeal to poetry, surely, is in the way that a good poem can reach
>> into imagery, and evoke sensations and sounds of the sort that are closer
>> to a pre-verbal sensory and narrative world. It is precisely the power of
>> imagery that struck people about the early cinema. We have learned to take
>> cinematic narratives for granted now, but they continue to have social
>> effects that are probably underexamined.
>>
>>
>>
>> For narratives to seem most numinous to us, most self-evident or
>> profound, it would make sense that they probably typically evoke the
>> imagistic thinking our words and socially internalized narratives often
>> convey implicitly, concealed behind words, and that we perceive in our own
>> embodied world of imagery.
>>
>>
>>
>> Which leads us back to the unconscious. One part of it, which I draw from
>> Grandin, is that perception of raw sensory data is still what we do, all
>> the time. Though it is mediated by words and social narratives, and to some
>> extent shaped by them, the extreme perception that enables dogs or cats to
>> perceive narratives of the sensory world we don't notice, are still there.
>> They tug at us, and we react unconsciously (preconsciously) to them.
>> Emotive associations with imagery (the evolutionary benefit of fear, anger,
>> pleasure and pain), evoked in the background of our mind through words, and
>> schemas that touch on these strings of preconscious perception and memory
>> would give a sense of how a cinematic narrative is constructed literally to
>> play on common sensory experience, mediated through shared sociocultural
>> themes--and how some of these themes that are universal to human
>> experience, would be so similar in their imagery in human culture.
>>
>>
>>
>> But that's a lot (obviously some bottled-up thought--and probably less
>> interesting to you than to me), and it's time for me to sleep, perchance to
>> dream...
>>
>>
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Doug
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On ‎Tuesday‎, ‎August‎ ‎28‎, ‎2018‎ ‎01‎:‎57‎:‎45‎ ‎AM‎ ‎PDT, Huw Lloyd <
>> huw.softdesigns@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> After taking twenty or so exceptions to "The now-classic, Metaphors We
>> Live By" in the first fifty pages, my copy now resides in a pile of books
>> the only use of which is to refer to errors. One of the basic errors seems
>> to be Lackoff's assumption that we only have one conceptual system. Rather,
>> I would commend Donald Schon's "Displacement of Concepts". The use of
>> homology (by Bateson) is also systematically (and simply) presented by
>> Stafford Beer in his text on "Decision and Control".
>>
>>
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Huw
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, 28 Aug 2018 at 07:31, Alfredo Jornet Gil <a.j.gil@ils.uio.no>
>> wrote:
>>
>> oh yes, the chapter! Here it is :)
>>
>> Alfredo
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------
>>
>> *From:* xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>
>> on behalf of Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu>
>> *Sent:* 28 August 2018 07:05
>> *To:* eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
>> *Subject:* [Xmca-l] Re: Rogers day
>>
>>
>>
>> Hi Alfredo and venerable others who continue to peruse the thread,
>>
>>
>>
>> Thanks for your verdant post! I must say that in regard to your syllogism:
>>
>>
>>
>> Grass dies;
>>
>> Men die;
>>
>> Men are grass.
>>
>>
>>
>> I would reply:
>>
>>
>>
>> Grass dies;
>>
>> Men die;
>>
>> Men are grass cut down by the grim reaper;
>>
>> but grass grows back if watered by mother nature;
>>
>> A mother who lives forever.
>>
>> Just to give a feminist twist, though I hope not too essentialist.
>>
>>
>>
>> However, I was taken by surprise on your take on Lakoff and Johnson, and
>> I had to think a little before I replied, so that I respond more
>> thoughtfully (I hope).
>>
>>
>>
>> For me, the "flesh" part of the book's content references embodied
>> thinking, which I may have already said, and I hope I'm not repeating
>> myself. The assertion being, we can't think without a body and also that we
>> are not robots with brains for our CPUs. I wish I had the book at my
>> fingertips right now to say more on that.
>>
>>
>>
>> It took me a little bit to consider what embodied thinking actually meant
>> while reading the book, because looking back I see how many Cartesian
>> assumptions I had to unlearn when thinking about mind. Also reading David
>> Kirsh's work on dancers and how they mark with their bodies when learning
>> new sequences of steps helped me to understand. Using a bookmark is a form
>> of embodied thinking (real books not digital browsers!)
>>
>>
>>
>> The problem with thinking about thinking is that we forget that we have a
>> body already in place sitting in a soup of evolution, culture, history,
>> etc, and how there is an illusion that we are bubbles of consciousness
>> thinking like Rodin's thinker on a stool. That pose has become the
>> shorthand for mainstream conceptions of a thinker.
>>
>>
>>
>> I'm even remembering how the documentary of Hannah Arendt shows her
>> laying on a couch smoking a cigarette while contemplating evil (which might
>> just a postmodern cinematic redo of David's Madame Recamier perhaps?).
>>
>>
>>
>> Anyway, there was also something Kirsh wrote in another paper about
>> metacognition about libraries that I found illuminating, and I'm not
>> referencing green-shaded lamps. Recalling from memory... it was something
>> like: how if not for size and height of the tables (horizontal) we could
>> not read the books stored on the shelves (vertically) because sometimes we
>> want to lay many books open at once and compare them, and how we might use
>> a finger to keep our place while checking and comparing texts. So
>> environment has a lot of power in how we digest our tools for thinking as
>> well.
>>
>>
>>
>> How could we conceive of vertical and horizontal without bodies (and
>> without gravity and a horizon).
>>
>>
>>
>> Also, that the way we see, which the eyes only have a small part in, also
>> has to do with our bodies, because sometimes we have to walk around things
>> to know about them, something the eyes can't do alone. Or how the organs of
>> perception work in unison, such as smoke and fire may mean danger when we
>> see flames, smell burning wood and our skin feels heat. But when we have
>> one of those faux fireplaces with digital flickering flames, we just feel
>> coziness (or an aversion to the kitsch)!
>>
>>
>>
>> Anyway, Bateson was an inspiration to Hutchins, and his work assisted in
>> Hutchins's development of his approach to distributed cognition (Bateson is
>> someone on my reading list). I also feel that there is a connection to what
>> you offer about Bateson's observation of metaphor as a "primary" language
>> to Levi-Straus's Science of the Concrete, as described in the first chapter
>> of Le Pensée Sauvage whose connotation, I might add, is lost when
>> translated to English's "The Savage Mind" because in the French (as I
>> understand) is a double enténdre of savage mind and wild pansy at the same
>> time. I take that to be a wonderful reference to the wisdom of the natural
>> world inherent in what we used to call "primitive" or "uncivilized"
>> cultures. It is a beautiful, embodied metaphor which is far more meaningful
>> than the English, which ironically seems more idealized, or Cartesian (who
>> was French!)
>>
>>
>>
>> I would enjoy to look at that chapter you almost attached if not for want
>> of a plane to board.
>>
>>
>>
>> With regard to the metaphor and how it fails, is that metaphor is
>> aspectual. Just like a tool might have a proper and improper application,
>> so does a metaphor.
>>
>>
>>
>> In Vedanta, for example, there is a drshtanta (sanskrit for
>> "teaching-illustration") for the dehatma-buddhi, which translates roughly
>> to the "mind-body-sense complex," (and also references that the
>> dehatma-buddhi is the self and the self is the dehatma-buddhi as 1:1
>> equivalence and how this equivalence is an illusion), anyway, the drshtanta
>> of the red-hot iron ball is a very old metaphor used to explain something
>> very hard to explain rationally.
>>
>>
>>
>> It is used to show how one might perceive that the attributes of iron
>> might associate to the fire and vice versa, because they are indeed at that
>> moment in time inseparably presenting in the same loci. It would take for
>> one to have prior knowledge of the attributes of fire to know that the
>> roundness and heaviness of the ball does not belong to fire but to iron,
>> and likewise the knowledge of iron to know that the heat and the redness
>> belong actually to fire not to iron. It is impossible to physically
>> differentiate the red-hot from the iron ball, say by pulling them apart
>> into smaller pieces (which Descartes tries to do: to see a thing in parts
>> adding into a whole). It is a beautiful metaphor for explaining how the
>> self takes on attributes of the body and the body takes attributes of the
>> self. And yet the drshtanta fails if someone from the peanut gallery says,
>> "Just dunk it in a pool of water like any old blacksmith and you'll figure
>> that one out," and the peanut thrower would be right, but the metaphor, if
>> used in a surgical way, is very apt to show the illusion of the location of
>> consciousness (self). So the metaphor, when used with precision, is a
>> useful tool.
>>
>>
>>
>> One doesn't get far with a screwdriver if everything seems a screw,
>> especially if the screw is a nail.
>>
>>
>>
>> I think with a metaphor (as a cognitive tool) it's the same. Of course
>> there is danger if we mix our metaphors inappropriately, which is another
>> way they can fail.
>>
>>
>>
>> I feel compelled to find an example in which metaphors help
>> problem-solving in life situation...perhaps it is a job for Superman or
>> some other superhero.
>>
>>
>>
>> Kind regards,
>>
>>
>>
>> Annalisa
>>
>>
>>
>>
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