[Xmca-l] Re: Rogers day

[Huw Lloyd]

I sent it 11 days ago, Doug.

On Tue, 18 Sep 2018 at 07:57, Douglas Williams <djwdoc@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hi, Huw--
> I will look forward to seeing the draft. I'm very much interested in
> thought and interaction as a layered, complex interaction (in both V and
> the normal sense of the word), so look forward to learning more.
>
> Regards,
> Doug
>
> On ‎Friday‎, ‎September‎ ‎7‎, ‎2018‎ ‎12‎:‎46‎:‎55‎ ‎PM‎ ‎PDT, Huw Lloyd <
> huw.softdesigns@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Hi Doug,
>
> At first I thought you were talking about Bernshtein with respect to
> embodied expression in action. It is nice to hear of Eisenstein taking a
> theoretical interest beyond surface details. This seems quite reasonable
> from my position, in which orientation can be considered as a concern for
> the pragmatics aspect of semiotic categories.
>
> There is nothing amiss in associative thinking itself, but rather there
> are broader and more coherent circuits of thought that may be realised
> beyond such. Through employing more sophisticated and layered perspectives,
> one can interpret differently, hence re-construe content. A change in the
> background -- perspective or orientation -- can change the contents or
> meaning of the foreground.
>
> On metaphoric linkage, one would need to be careful to distinguish
> association in simple action from linking by outcome and from linking by
> process in the contextual extension of a word, phrase or term (to point to
> three of potentially many forms of extension). Each form of cognition can
> introduce further forms of extension (or displacement). I will send you the
> draft which is about these differing perspectives and ideas concerning how
> shifts can be realised through "conversation" (Pask's term) and
> orientation. In addition to deliberate displacement/extension there is also
> the displacements that arise across levels of sophistication, such as the
> child's concretised apprehension of abstract phrases. No doubt much more
> can be said.
>
> Huw
>
>
>
> On Fri, 7 Sep 2018 at 04:36, Douglas Williams <djwdoc@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Hi, Huw--
>
> I'd be interested in hearing more about this. As you may now (probably
> most people on this list have forgotten more than I know), Eisenstein,
> influenced by Mayerhold, was attempting to develop a more scientific
> understanding of Mayerhold's biomechanics in which the embodiment of bodies
> in action within space was capable of communicating thoughts, feelings,
> emotion. Eisenstein seemed to have some research program going on in the
> late 1920s-early 1930s with Vygotsky school researchers, though that fell
> apart (as with much of everything else very early on--in part politics, and
> in part Eisenstein's inability (personally or socially?) to build the kind
> of sustaining research program that would develop it.
>
> Vygotsky's comments about thinking in complexes of objects with factually
> present connections which lack logical unity, but can have consistency over
> time (concrete associations: same colors, movements, sounds, etc--or
> collections: color contrasts, synesthesic associations generally, such as
> purple evoking yellow, a specific car engine associated with specific
> events or people, a smell triggering a narrative sequence of images or
> memories)  puts us very much in the world of metonymy, metaphor, and the
> pre-neocortex world we probably share with mammals generally, in which
> mammalian image-narrative recall, dreams, cinematic imagery, theater, and
> other forms of--let's say--thinking in action in space and time through
> recall or performance--operate.
>
> I know that's a rather dense nest of ideas, so I'll leave it at that. This
> is the kind of thing that, when I pitched it to Lakoff directly, ended up
> closing rather than opening interactions--though I did notice that he later
> turned to preconceptual political narratives as an area of interest, which
> is what my dissertation was about. so I have always counted that as a small
> victory for my chiseling into his worldview. though what he came up with
> had nothing to do with me.
>
> This research project is my Zaigarnik nightmare from academia: my own
> version of unified theory of everything in human culture that I sense is
> there, and see the shadow of in many things, but never quite the thing
> itself...
>
> Regards,
> Doug
>
> On Tuesday, September 4, 2018, 4:59:46 AM PDT, Huw Lloyd <
> huw.softdesigns@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Re "oriented-ness", Ilyenkov, "intelligent movement", as a prelude to some
> technical study on orientation, I formulated a "perspective-based theory of
> cognition". It's in draft form and would probably benefit from a few
> sympathetic reviews. One of the reasons metaphor does not show up in this
> explicitly is that it becomes less meaningful when it is recognised as
> being non-discrete, i.e. as being a process amongst others.
>
> The issue is similar to an issue (or limitation) I had with one of Ruqaiya Hasan's
> books (perhaps an early one) in which she declared that the superficial
> constraint of her topic by formal categories was insufficient, that she was
> interested in expressing meanings that go beyond this, but then turning
> around and declaring that she would only focus upon her (formally
> identified) subject matter, thereby proceeding to paint the world in terms
> of her categories -- like painting the whole world with metaphor.
>
> Best,
> Huw
>
> On Tue, 4 Sep 2018 at 11:44, Alfredo Jornet Gil <a.j.gil@ils.uio.no>
> wrote:
>
> 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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