Paul (and the rest of the list):
If you say 'it' is raining, what's the 'it'? Something (nature, the
clouds, etc.) is being 'ferried across', transposed, transformed into a
dummy subject. This process confers a doubtful coherence on 'it', a fallacy
(though a necessary one) much like Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced
concretenes. Granted, this a different level of metaphor from the
transposition of 'raining' into 'pissing', but it's a metaphor nonetheless.
Michael Whitworth
----------
>From: "Paul Taylor" <[log in to unmask]>
>To: <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: Childbirth and Metaphor
>Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2000 6:07 pm
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: <[log in to unmask]>
>
>> I
>> give this example partly to emphasize that scientists, like other humans,
>> use language to communicate. And language is metaphorical, as is every
>> form of concept-making. Sokol seems to argue for the empiricism of
>> scientific terminology. Well, we wish. But no terminology is empirical.
>
> I'm not much challenged, in this discussion, by the news that scientists use
> language to communicate. I can also accept that language is riddled with
> metaphors, but I don't think that this implies that every thing we say is
> metaphorical.
>
> If I say "It's raining", I am making a simple, literal statement. If I say
> "It's bucketing down", or "It's pissing down", then I'm speaking
> metaphorically. I don't know why the difference isn't obvious.
>
> I don't know what is meant by "no terminology is empirical". Isn't this
> empirical terminology: "measurement", "observation", "test"? If that's not
> what you mean, then aren't we left with what Sokal was saying, i.e. that the
> empirical, the scientific, is not textual (or terminological)?
>
> If I thought metaphor were trivial or inconsequential, then I wouldn't be a
> subscriber to a poetry discussion list. But that doesn't mean that I must
> agree on the centrality of metaphor (or textuality) to every human
> endeavour.
>
> Let me quote someone else, defending mathematics against a type of feminist
> criticism which finds sexist metaphors throughout that discipine. Objecting
> to the statement that "metaphor plays a central role in the construction of
> mathematics", Gross and Levitt (Higher Superstition, p.116) write:
>
> "No! It does not. . . One of us [Levitt], speaking as a mathematician who
> has seen an awful lot of mathematics 'constructed' and has constructed some
> himself, can testify to the uselessness of metaphor in mathematical
> invention, although analogy - a rather different notion - can be of some
> help. Mathematical intuition is something much more mysterious than
> metaphor."
>
>
>
>> Secondly, I'd like to challenge Sokol's "After all, a metaphor is usually
>> employed to clarify an unfamiliar concept by relating it to a more
>> familiar one, not the reverse." This truism, like many truisms, is not
>> true, as a glance up at the example above will attest: an unfamiliar
>> concept (the bomb) is elucidated by reference to another unfamiliar
>> concept (childbirth).
>
> It is not a truism, it is simply a justifiable claim about the explanatory
> role of metaphor, in the context of writers who seem to be doing the reverse
> of this, i.e. people like Baudrillard, Lacan, and others whose means of
> presenting some of their very unobvious ideas is in terms of other ideas
> which cannot throw light on the subject if they are irrelevant or garbled.
>
> Moreover, in your example, the concept of the bomb, unfamiliar or not, is
> not being "elucidated" by reference to another concept: it's simply a case
> of referring to the bomb in a metaphorical, even coded, way.
>
> You may well be right about the cultural invisibility of childbirth. I don't
> know.
>
>
> Paul Taylor.
>
>
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