On 03/11/2015 09:59 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
You are a good sport. I apologize for the rhetorical technique, which is trappy. (I tried in my teaching NEVER to ask anyone a question to which I thought I knew the answer, and, of course, I violated that rule, here.) You are kind to humor me.
Heh, that's what we're here for! But, of course, I think you're wrong in several things you say below. What's actually happened here is that the meaning you _inscribe_ into the specification does not match the meaning I inscribe. That does not mean metaphor is rampant.
You answer perfectly demonstrates the two problems with "plain speaking". (1) It inadequately specifies. Having watched this simple demonstration, you would know more about the path of the eraser than you have said.
No. I would not know more than what I said, precisely because of the magic tricks you're talking about.
You would know, for instance, that it went "down" .... i.e., "fell".
Not necessarily. The only reason I knew it would _move_ is because you told me you "released it". For all I know, there was a thin wire attached that would make it move slightly down before arcing to the left. Or maybe we're standing in one of those tilted rooms that bias our sense of "down". That's why I said "move" instead of "fall".
(2) Nevertheless, scrupulous as you have been, it implies a [micro] metaphor, and it says much more than is known. It asserts the "identity" of the eraser, by analogy with other objects that we have seen move behind another object and reappear.
No, it merely grants the observer (me) the ability to recognize objects (what BC Smith calls registration), to separate it (faster than the other dynamics of the scenario) from everything else. Again, this has to do with the observer, not with the experiment.
It asserts "object constancy" as a theory.
Again, no. It relies on consistency in my ability to recognize objects. If the object looked like, say, an eraser on one side and a coin on the other, and it tumbled in just the right way before and after being occluded, then I would see that the process destroyed the first object and constructed a new one ... again, magic. Similarly, if I were _not_ consistent in my ability to recognize objects, then I may not think the thing that appeared was reappearing.
Little did you know that the notebook is equipped with a special net that catches the first eraser and that I released a second eraser as the first fell into the net.
Here, you _almost_ got me. But I only said that I _expected_ an object to reappear and continue moving (in whatever continuous path representing the force implied by your "release"). Your net would, like the others, have been a good magic trick, showing the destruction of the object.
I have worked with my students with this simple demonstration ever since the 70's, and we keep coming back to the same conclusion. That the effort to remove metaphor from description is hopeless and that the information price paid in the attempt to mimimize metaphor is too great. This conclusion is equivalent to saying that description and explanation are the same operation seen from different points of view, and that the distinction between poet and bench scientist must come from some place other than their use of metaphors.
Unfortunately, I think you have a hammer and, hence, everything looks like a nail. I agree that we cannot remove metaphor from the _minds_ of the talker and the listener. But we can remove it from the behavior of the experiment controller and measurer. And the words you use can be stripped of metaphor so that a person who doesn't understand your language (or language at all) can reproduce your actions (as long as she has the same sensors and effectors you have). Do you claim that mimicry is metaphor, that _everything_ is metaphor?
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