The Meaning behind AKMA’s Words
[I’ve been a bad blogger and am now catching up on the blogreading that events kept me from for about a week.]
AKMA is once again doing the hard work for us, worrying about how our ways of talking about literalism are themselves infused with non-literal metaphors:
Am I being perversely literalistic if I ask, “If the world is behind the text, why can?t I reach around and touch it?”
And in a follow-up entry he writes:
…metaphors such as “the text is a mirror” should help us understand something that would otherwise be obscure, or they risk further obscuring the topic by introducing problems with the metaphorical representation of the topic that aren’t already implied by the topic itself. And that phenomenon matters all the more urgently since “clarity” and “obscurity” are themselves metaphors…
Hofstadter’s book should have been titled Gödel, Escher, Bach and AKMA (where “AKMA” is in fact a metaphor for the best of post-modernism). You want to understand our relationship to the texts and meanings of the world, asks PoMo with it’s sharp-edged and often superior air? (Not AKMA!) Then you’d better recognize that there’s a metaphysics concealed within the concept of understanding: foundations, things “standing for” or “representing” other things, understanding as an “inner” state, etc. That metaphysics is self-contradictory: it says it’s only real when it stands on a firm foundation, but such foundations are neither firm nor foundational. So, what then is understanding to do?
Welcome to the 21st century where we can no longer say “A metaphor is a bridge for understanding” without falling off the bridge. Laughing.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
“. . . falling off the bridge. Laughing.”
That’s why I needed surgery!
As Richard Feynman reported via an elderly woman who attended one of his talks about the foundations of the universe: “You can’t fool me, it’s turtles all the way down”. The converstation has already been going on for countless generations before we got here.
The truth is that each metaphor, each mathematical or scientific model is a bridge to a particular (potentially open) set of truths. The foundations
lie in the physical, biological, psychological of the world as we find it, and not always as projected by current theory. Theory never ends and is never complete or final, but the real world is and that is where truth is grounded.
May I suggest that the linguistic tools that we use to debate philosophy and post-modernism, evolved to serve human survival, and our cognitive capabilities are more suited the the physical/cultural environment of primative man than the highly artificial world of academic debate.
Tell me a good story and I will understand. Show me how it works and I will learn how. All is founded in practice.
Hit Me Again
Well, I’d had some light brushes with spam commenters before, easily cleaned up with deletion or excision. But the last two days, my spam-comments went through the roof, and I’ve commissioned the Disseminary’s trusty technical service…
AHHH Betsy beat me to it!
BTW, DW, what is a non-literal metaphor?
The cat is a feline to the canine.
A metaphor is an understanding that a bridge breaches a gap.
Or as Steven Wright put it: it’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to paint it. (If we understand painting to be a literal painting as in house painting as opposed to a world wide party as in paint the town red…etc. ad infinitum.