Home » Games News » Conceptual and Metaphorical Pluralism
In keeping with local custom, some quotes:
Richard Rorty, from page 398 of Folk Psychology and the Philosophy of Mind (hat tip to Jeff Meyerhoff):
"The Galilean outlook, which says that there is no a priori reason to assume that explanatorily useful terms like 'consciousness' and 'intentionality' denote properties which have intrinsic natures, or structures which empirical research can uncover."
"From this Galilean point of view, anything is recontextualizable either into a context-independent substance or into a slice of an indefinitely wide web of relations, depending upon the need of current empirical inquiry. But there is not sense in asking the question 'Which is it really a substance or a slice?'"
Lakoff and Johnson, from page 70-71 of Philosophy In The Flesh:
Our experience of love is basic - as basic as our experience of motion or physical force or objects. But as an experience, it is not highly structured on its own terms. There is some literal (i.e. non-metaphorical) inherent structure to love in itself: a love, a beloved, feelings of love, and a relationship, which has an onset and often an end point.
But that is not very much inherent structure. The metaphor system gives us much more. When we comprehend the experience of love, when we think and talk about love, we have no choice but to conceptualize mostly in terms of our conventional metaphors - to conceptualize it not on its own terms, but in terms of other concepts such as journeys and physical forces. When we reason and talk about love, we import inferential structure and language from those other conceptual domains. The cognitive mechanism we use is cross-domain conceptual mapping. [...]
Each mapping is rather limited: a small conceptual structure in a source domain mapped onto an equally small conceptual structure in the target domain. For a rich and important domain of experience like love, a single conceptual mapping does not do the job of allowing us to reason and talk about the experience of love as a whole. More than one metaphorical mapping is needed.
[...] Love is conventionally conceptualized, for example in terms of a journey, physical force, illness, magic, madness, union, closeness, nurturance, giving of oneself, complementary parts of single object and heat. [...]
In philosophy, metaphorical pluralism is the norm. Our most important abstract philosophical concepts, including time, causation, morality, and the mind, are all conceptualized by multiple metaphors, sometimes as many as two dozen. What each philosophical theory typically does is to choose one of those metaphors as "right," as the true literal meaning of the concept. One reason there is so much argumentation across philosophical theories is that different philosophers have chosen different metaphors as the "right" one, ignoring or taking as misleading all other commonplace metaphorical structuring of the concept. Philosophers have done this because they assume that a concept must have one and only one logic. But the cognitive reality is that our concepts have multiple metaphorical structurings. [...]
This has bearing on the notion of 'body.' Is 'body' a thing with independent substance, or a contingent part of a infinitely wide web of relations and contexts?
Which conceptualization is chosen seems to have a connection to ideas of cause and effect. If 'body' is thought of as the cause (in whatever line of thinking is being pursued), it is more likely to be conceptualized as a thing with independent existence. If 'body' is thought of as the effect, it is more likely to be conceptualized as a contingent subsection of an infinitely wide web.
Yet neither conceptualization alone provides sufficient structure to draw all the causal inferences that we normally associate with the concept of 'body' on the basis of our experience. 'Body' seems to be both cause and effect, both source and sink of causal energy.
A similar argument holds for most nouns - if you want to consider something as a cause, you usually examine its properties and behavior as if they were independent (i.e. essence); if you want to consider something as an effect, you're most concerned with the ways it depends on other things (i.e. relationships.) Neither seems to be fully adequate for understanding a particular noun concept, and we can easily entertain both possibilities.
Interestingly, these two options both have finite and infinite aspects. If a noun is considered as an effect, this implies that it is a finite stopping point, from which we can work backwards into the past, playing out an infinite number of dependence relationships, until we are forced to decide that it is contingent on everything else we can conceptualize. Yet if a noun is considered as a cause, this implies that it is a finite starting point, from which we can work forwards into the future, playing out an infinite number of causal relationships, until we are forced to decide that everything we can conceptualize is contingent on it.
L&J's metaphorical pluralism, and Rorty's similar conceptual pluralism would imply that neither possibility is right or better, nor is either sufficient without the other. I suspect, though, that it is less complex and cognitively "easier" to enact one concept or the other than it is to enact both simultaneously.