New metaphors can create new realities

[coberst]

New metaphors can create new realities

Lakoff and Johnson, coauthors of “Metaphors we Live By”, speak of a newly arrived Iranian student who had mistaken the constant refrain he heard from other students that “the solution of my problems” meant that they were talking about a metaphor that was unfamiliar to him but sounded very intriguing. This Iranian student was very disappointed when he discovered that these other students were speaking in frustration rather than of a new and wonderful metaphor.

He had mistaken this ‘solution of my problems’ was some kind of chemical mixing bowl, “which he took to be a large volume of liquid, bubbling and smoking, containing all of their problems, either dissolved or in the form of precipitates, with catalysts constantly dissolving some problems (for the time being) and precipitating out others.”

The authors see this as an accidently developed but marvelous new metaphoric means for viewing problems and their solutions. The normal metaphor for problem solving is usually the puzzle metaphor, ‘problem is puzzle’.

This new problem metaphor, ‘problems in solution’, offers a deliciously new and useful slant on the nature of problems and the nature of solving problems in life.

‘Problems in solution’ metaphor would entail:
• Problems never completely disappear
• Solving one problem may precipitate another
• Since we have little control of what goes into he pot we constantly find new ones and old ones under another guise
• A catalyst for solving one problem my promote another
• A temporary problem solution may be the most we can hope for
• Problems are part of the natural order of things

The ‘problem is puzzle’ metaphor leads us to believe that there is an ultimate right solution whereas the ‘problems in solution’ does not.

All this does not mean that it is easy to change metaphors that we live by but it does point up the importance of metaphor and how metaphors affect our world view and our daily mundane existence.

Can you think of a new but marvelous metaphor?

Can metaphors help save us from our self?

Is ‘war on terrorism’ a useful metaphor? For whom is it useful?

[Symbology]

Here are a few related quotes I keep in my palm pilot for just such an emergency

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.
- Orsen Scott Card

The trouble with metaphors,
they can change forms depending on context and mood
- Yoh-Han Pao

Since finding out what something is, is largely a matter of discovering what it is like, the most impressive contribution to the growth of intelligibility has been made by the application of suggestive metaphors

- Jonathan Miller

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.
G.K. Chesterton

[Pyrotex]

Science has often progressed because of the invention of a new metaphor, and has at times remained stagnant for lack of one.

The metaphor of "energy" as the irreducable ability to do work, separate from matter, invisible and abstract--led to huge strides of understanding in physics and chemistry.

Our lack of powerful new metaphors (even one would do) blocks our understanding of the sub-atomic realm. Quarks and strings give us only vague and unsatisfactory glimmerings of what may underlie all that is.

Gravity, Relativity and Consciousness are crying for new metaphors woven of new threads.

[coberst]

Global capitalism is empire.

Courtesy of George Soros and his book “Open Society” I shall introduce my new metaphor; ‘global capitalism is empire’.

Global capitalism is more extensive than any other empire--the sun never sets on global capitalism--it rules entire civilizations--it is almost invisible and possesses no formal structure--it governs those who belong to it, and those who do not belong to it are toast--it has a center and a periphery--it is constantly seeking new conquests--the empire generates deep disquiet at the periphery--it is non territorial, seeking to always be ‘off-shore’--it turns land, labor, and capital into commodities--it penetrates non economic areas of civilization.

[Pyrotex]

At first glance the significance of global capitalism as a new metaphor is that it is "monadic"-it is the single and only instantiation of its class.

Prior forms of capitalism had to contend with competition from other, distinguishable forms of capitalism. The boundaries between these abstract economic territories flowed back and forth, and occassionally 'broke'--causing either a local merger of economies, or a localized region of economic chaos and upheaval.

Now there is, by this metaphor, just one capitalism, bounded only by the outlying regions of itself against itself, where there may be tiny pockets of local economy, held intact only by virtue of isolated geography.

This begs new questions. Is a global economy more or less stable than a global system of local, discrete economies? Does a global economy have 'tipping points'? If a global economy 'stumbles' at a tipping point, does it degrade gracefully, or does it collapse totally?

If there is only the one global economy and it stumbles or collapses, what options do we have? [You can only fit just so many refugees on Fiji.]

[coberst]

Originally Posted by Pyrotex

At first glance the significance of global capitalism as a new metaphor is that it is "monadic"-it is the single and only instantiation of its class.

Prior forms of capitalism had to contend with competition from other, distinguishable forms of capitalism. The boundaries between these abstract economic territories flowed back and forth, and occassionally 'broke'--causing either a local merger of economies, or a localized region of economic chaos and upheaval.

Now there is, by this metaphor, just one capitalism, bounded only by the outlying regions of itself against itself, where there may be tiny pockets of local economy, held intact only by virtue of isolated geography.

This begs new questions. Is a global economy more or less stable than a global system of local, discrete economies? Does a global economy have 'tipping points'? If a global economy 'stumbles' at a tipping point, does it degrade gracefully, or does it collapse totally?

If there is only the one global economy and it stumbles or collapses, what options do we have? [You can only fit just so many refugees on Fiji.]

If the global capitalism stumbles, which it will not doubt do and is possibly in the process of doing now, everyone suffers. The poorer nations will suffer more than the prosperious ones because the more prosperious ones have more control of the matter.

You are correct about there being only one global capitalism, which perhaps makes it more like an empire. Perhaps like the Roman empire.

The only form of competition will be on the personal or corporate level. I suspect that there will be less and less corporate competition as things move forward.

Since capital is very mobil and labor is not there will be a greater edge to capitalism than there exists today. The gap between have and have nots will grow.

[coberst]

Self-actualizing self-learning is Viagra.