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having just spent some time in a response to chuck, wandering off in my directions, reading yours was a lot of fun and made me laugh also at my own thoughts...thanks. but I am not sure if I agree with its strictness though....is it really this strict and exclusive in your opinion? doesn't it leave lots of quite feasible analogies and metaphors homeless...and therefore hard for us to understand and make sense of? cheers, kh At 22:51 +0100 22.7.2003, Michael A R Biggs wrote: >I would like to respectfully disagree with Chuck and Ken, and say something >briefly about metaphor and analogy. > >Firstly "design is like weaving" is not a metaphor. > >The reason is that [in the linguistic context differentiated by Klaus] >metaphor states something that is literally false. It therefore need to >make an assertion rather than a comparison, e.g. "designing is weaving". >The power of the metaphor comes from the plurality of allusions that this >[literally false] assertion makes. To this extent I agree with Chuck that >"It is only when transferred understandings are recognized to be >appropriate in the new context that one has really successfully applied a >metaphor;" although, of course, one cannot determine whether this condition >has been met. > >Analogy, on the other hand, makes a comparison of a specific form: A is to >B as C is to D. "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" has the >form of an analogy. We infer the relative need of a woman for a man from >our supposed greater appreciation of the relative need of a fish for a >bicycle. This is called "argument from analogy", an activity much frowned >upon by logicians and Aristotelians because it is unspecific about which >aspect of female need is unfulfilled by men in ways that fishy needs are >unfulfilled by bicycles. For example, we might understand that both >bicycles and men are unsatisfactory modes of transportation for either >whereas they might seem equally satisfactory as objects of derision.