[MD] Analogues and metaphors, etc.

[david]

"In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our 
environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and 
heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy, 
engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And 
they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing 
that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into 
an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality. 
Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create 
the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it." -- Pirsig, ZAMM


It looks like there is empirical evidence to support Pirsig's assertion that we invent and use analogues, although these guys talk about it in terms of "metaphors". 


"...The hypothesis driving their work is that metaphor is central to 
language. Metaphor used to be thought of as merely poetic ornamentation,
 aesthetically pretty but otherwise irrelevant. ..For 
centuries, metaphor was just the place where poets went to show off.    But in their 1980 book, Metaphors We Live By, the linguist 
George Lakoff (at the University of California at Berkeley) and the 
philosopher Mark Johnson (now at the University of Oregon) 
revolutionized linguistics by showing that metaphor is actually a 
fundamental constituent of language. For example, they showed that in 
the seemingly literal statement "He’s out of sight," the visual field is
 metaphorized as a container that holds things. The visual field isn’t 
really a container, of course; one simply sees objects or not. But the 
container metaphor is so ubiquitous that it wasn’t even recognized as a 
metaphor until Lakoff and Johnson pointed it out.
>From such examples they argued that ordinary language is saturated with metaphors."


"The MOQ resolves the relationship between intellect and society, subject
and object, mind and matter, by embedding all of them in a larger system of
understanding. Objects are inorganic and biological values; subjects are
social and intellectual values. They are not two mysterious universes that
go floating around in some subject-object dream that allows them no real
contact with one another. They have a matter-of-fact evolutionary
relationship. That evolutionary relationship is also a moral one." -- Pirsig in Lila


I think their work might also support Pirsig's assertion that the levels have a matter-of-fact-evolutionary relationship, specifically the connections between the biological and social levels such that the structure of the body (matter) shapes the structures of thought (mind).


"Lakoff and Johnson’s program is as anti-Platonic as it’s possible to 
get. It undermines the argument that human minds can reveal transcendent
 truths about reality in transparent language. They argue instead that 
human cognition is embodied—that human concepts are shaped by the 
physical features of human brains and bodies. "Our physiology provides 
the concepts for our philosophy," Lakoff wrote in his introduction to 
Benjamin Bergen’s 2012 book, Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning.
 Marianna Bolognesi, a linguist at the International Center for 
Intercultural Exchange, in Siena, Italy, puts it this way: "The 
classical view of cognition is that language is an independent system 
made with abstract symbols that work independently from our bodies. This
 view has been challenged by the embodied account of cognition which 
states that language is tightly connected to our experience. Our bodily 
experience."


http://chronicle.com/article/Your-Brain-on-Metaphors/148495/