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How could someone write a post like this and leave off the great book “Metaphors We Live By” by Lakoff and Johnson? Is particularly found the part about how me

How could someone write a post like this and leave off the great book “Metaphors We Live By” by Lakoff and Johnson? Is particularly found the part about how metaphors “hide and highlight” information. In other words the metaphor we use necessitates how we think. We often frame arguments using the metaphor of war and that frames how we think. The other party is an enemy that must be defeated, its bloody, and there is a loser. However we could frame it as a dance, in which case they are a partner, and for the outcome to succeed they must move together in harmony. Lakoff has written other fascinating books like how metaphors are used in politics as well as math (“Where Mathematics Comes From”).

kjhughes 2y ago
> Lakoff has written other fascinating books... Favorite fascinating George Lakoff book: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind
IIAOPSW 2y ago
I view it as a side effect of linguistic evolution. Sure you could have a bunch of complex rules to strictly type your nouns and limit the type of verbs that validly relate things in one type to another, but if you simply relax the constraint (or just not bother in the first place) metaphors fall out as a natural consequence. See, I just did it. "fall out". Words don't physically fall, but because there's no constraint on using this physical verb to relate non-physical concepts, I can make metaphorical expressions at no additional cost to grammatical complexity. We do this all the time. We might say a certain fact or circumstance "tells us" something to mean its presence let us make a deduction. Eg "this equation tells us the flow is laminar in this regime". Examples of this sort of thing are abundant.
slibhb 2y ago
The first part of Metaphors We Live By is fascinating. It describes how so much of language is made of dead metaphors. But then you get to stuff like: > We often frame arguments using the metaphor of war and that frames how we think. The other party is an enemy that must be defeated, its bloody, and there is a loser. However we could frame it as a dance, in which case they are a partner, and for the outcome to succeed they must move together in harmony. That's just silly. The reason arguments are described metaphorically as wars is because arguments and wars serve the same function: they occur when we disagree about something and are means of settling the disagreement. Dances, meanwhile, have nothing to do with disagreement and they don't settle anything.
- navane 2y ago
  One way to see a negotiation is as a war, another way to see a negotiation is as a dance.
  - slibhb 2y ago
    No -- we have wars, arguments, and negotiations when individuals or groups disagree about things. All of these things are human activities that we use to settle a disagreement. Dance, meanwhile, has nothing to do with disagreements or making a decision about how things will be. A dance resolves nothing; it's something people do for fun. It's silly to assert that we can simply "think of X as being like Y" and that will make it so. Sadly that is Lakoff's thesis.
    - elmomle 2y ago
      The suggestion of using metaphors for existential framing is nonsensical when one thinks of the ends of the activities, but it makes plenty of sense when one applies it to the process instead. In a negotiation, as long as I know my boundaries and my decision calculus, then approaching it playfully and in a way that brings the other person into the game is a very constructive (and frankly fun) route. This is what is meant by dance rather than fight.
      - slibhb 2y ago
        That's an improvement but is it what Lakoff meant? I don't know -- I read the book years ago but I very much got the sense that his argument was "words have no inherent meaning, essentially all meaning is circular, and so we can think of X as being like Y just as easily as Z".
        stoperaticless 2y ago
        Imagine that you know you are the author of that, but also you just woke up with amnesia and are now trying to figure out why you wrote that book and what did you mean there. Which explanation would you lean on?

kjhughes 2y ago

> Lakoff has written other fascinating books... Favorite fascinating George Lakoff book: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind

IIAOPSW 2y ago

I view it as a side effect of linguistic evolution. Sure you could have a bunch of complex rules to strictly type your nouns and limit the type of verbs that validly relate things in one type to another, but if you simply relax the constraint (or just not bother in the first place) metaphors fall out as a natural consequence. See, I just did it. "fall out". Words don't physically fall, but because there's no constraint on using this physical verb to relate non-physical concepts, I can make metaphorical expressions at no additional cost to grammatical complexity. We do this all the time. We might say a certain fact or circumstance "tells us" something to mean its presence let us make a deduction. Eg "this equation tells us the flow is laminar in this regime". Examples of this sort of thing are abundant.

slibhb 2y ago

The first part of Metaphors We Live By is fascinating. It describes how so much of language is made of dead metaphors. But then you get to stuff like: > We often frame arguments using the metaphor of war and that frames how we think. The other party is an enemy that must be defeated, its bloody, and there is a loser. However we could frame it as a dance, in which case they are a partner, and for the outcome to succeed they must move together in harmony. That's just silly. The reason arguments are described metaphorically as wars is because arguments and wars serve the same function: they occur when we disagree about something and are means of settling the disagreement. Dances, meanwhile, have nothing to do with disagreement and they don't settle anything.

navane 2y ago
One way to see a negotiation is as a war, another way to see a negotiation is as a dance.
- slibhb 2y ago
  No -- we have wars, arguments, and negotiations when individuals or groups disagree about things. All of these things are human activities that we use to settle a disagreement. Dance, meanwhile, has nothing to do with disagreements or making a decision about how things will be. A dance resolves nothing; it's something people do for fun. It's silly to assert that we can simply "think of X as being like Y" and that will make it so. Sadly that is Lakoff's thesis.
  - elmomle 2y ago
    The suggestion of using metaphors for existential framing is nonsensical when one thinks of the ends of the activities, but it makes plenty of sense when one applies it to the process instead. In a negotiation, as long as I know my boundaries and my decision calculus, then approaching it playfully and in a way that brings the other person into the game is a very constructive (and frankly fun) route. This is what is meant by dance rather than fight.
    - slibhb 2y ago
      That's an improvement but is it what Lakoff meant? I don't know -- I read the book years ago but I very much got the sense that his argument was "words have no inherent meaning, essentially all meaning is circular, and so we can think of X as being like Y just as easily as Z".
      - stoperaticless 2y ago
        Imagine that you know you are the author of that, but also you just woke up with amnesia and are now trying to figure out why you wrote that book and what did you mean there. Which explanation would you lean on?