metaphor

30 Oct 2021 02:15 - 05 Sep 2022 01:05
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    • Something I wrote about in my dissertation, as something of a preliminary to animacy and agency. I was heavily influenced by Lakoff and Johnson's well-known metaphor theory, which blew my mind in such a way that I can't quite remember what it was like to not have a constant reminder in my head that our most abstract concepts are built out of useful culturally evolved mappings to and from the physical embodied world.
    • This is one reason I don't believe much in representational objectivism. Knowledge when looked through the lens of metaphor theory seems much more like a set of pragmatic tools for imposing meaning on a complex world than objective facts. Rationalists are aware of Lakoff but don't seem to have drawn quite the same lessons from him that I have. Which is that all of our concepts have an essential fictionality to them; and are never, despite our best efforts at science, simple objective facts.
    • This is pretty much a trite truism in most places in this postmodern age; rationalists are out of tune with the times, which is not necessarily a mark against them.