[MD] Dawkins a Materialist (is watching?)

[ian glendinning]

Case, (Mark, DMB and Marsha mentioned ...)

I can hear the shouts of obfuscation already ... I have another
excluded middle here ... but I've seen it like this.

At one extreme the view is "everything is metaphor" - nothing is
literally real or literal. In some sense I actually subscribe to that
view, but I'll need to elaborate, and suggest a stiff brandy at this
point.

One reason I latched onto the Johnson quote you brought up (or was it
Arlo) is because Lakoff & Johnson's "Metaphors We Live By" and "Fire,
Women and Dangerous Things" made a big impression on me.

Every piece of language is (or more precisely was) a metaphor, or
derived from one. A symbol of something else, a gesture, an
onomatopeic sound, whatever. "Was" is important. Gradually metaphors
die. (DMB had to point out the open-handshake gesture to us, because
in daily life the reason for the meaning is forgotten and irrelevant).
They actually die by the authority of social adoption (as Mark poined
out, the "accepted" meaning of word is a social phenomenon.). At some
point we (socially) accept a word's meaning directly from (sight and
sound of) the word, without thinking there is any metaphor to decode
first, in fact we positively forget it ever was a metaphor. And the
provenance of the word may thoroughly disguise the fact it ever had
any metaphorical connotation, thanks to translation, spread and
adoption of usage from culture to culture, language to language, and
don't forget the original languages and cutures that gave us the roots
of the words die too. (The Sanskrit "Rta" passages of Pirsig are my
favourites BTW) (Wow, I said all of that without the "m" word - meme
that is.)

Most words therefore do not seem to be metaphors to us. They are dead
metaphors. And most are so long dead, we may have no idea where the
metaphor lies buried, to ever be able to demonstrate its metaphorical
origins. (Lakoff and Johnson also deal with the invented -
deliberately meaningless tokens - neologisms that get attached to new
things too ..... there is always an element of either derivation or
connotation somewhere ...)

So here you have it. The difference between "metaphorical" and
"literal" is really just time ... or distance on the evolutionary
axis.

So if we're talking about our most fundamental (metaphysical) division
of reality, Quality in this case ... we're still at (haven't even
reached) base camp on the evolutionary axis. Everything evolves from
here. Quality is effectively both literal and metaphorical at the same
time, (possibly a duality ?). Alternatively you could say the
distinction becomes meaningless.

As Marsha points out quality is not so much undefined, and
undefinable, as a matter of principle, being the chosen origin for our
metaphysics. Worrying about defining the meaning of Quality is
lierally (hah!) pointless. It's simply the chosen (deemed) root of our
world-view, and a very effective one at that.

We can (must) use literal sounding talk about it without any care as
to whether there is anything under it on which it is metaphorically
based.

OK shoot.
Ian
PS BTW Case, when you say Pirsig was "talking nonsense" which bits of
the MoQ do you not buy ?

On 1/19/07, Case <Case at ispots.com> wrote:
> [IG] But Case, you explained this perfectly already when you said
> "Johnson's exposition is filled with anthropomorphic metaphors that
> make his meanings clear when understood as such. When taken literally
> they become gibberish. Understanding what he says requires the ability
> to translate his metaphorical language."
>
> I couldn't have said it better. It's about explanation and
> understanding, not literal meaning. If we choose to misunderstand, all
> language can be made to look like gibberish. Even mine ;-)
>
> [Case]
> Oddly enough the problem works both ways. I originally read Chapter 11 of
> Lila in this light. It was only after being called on it a couple of times
> and on rereading it twice that I finally got the message that he was not
> speaking metaphorically he really was saying nonsense.
>
> I would be especially happy to be proven wrong on this one.
>
>
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