Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Wed Feb 14, 2024 3:14 pm
Thanks. Yes, thoughts and thinking are metaphors for physical things and processes.
So, it doesn't really matter what substance we say those thoughts are.
In what way is the expression 'a dog is a quadripedal mammal' metaphorical?
What actually happens when we use a metaphor. We get an image of the dog in our brains, I guess, and this will be slightly different in each brain. We will imagine this 'dog' from a single perspective, as it would be seen by a primate. We will see it in a given moment (or perhaps a quick flash of film). IOW we see it in the ways human primate sort of record this dog's image. It's neither a timeless image or an image from various (let alone all) perspectives. The batch of experiences that get lumped into the fast shorthand of our mental processes is one created from what we sense (not what bat's would sense experiencing a dog). Then we really have to get into metaphysics.
We think of this dog as material or physical - though this is a trope, gathered out of experiences that in themselves are not fixed and hard, like we think of matter or used to when we made those words.
I'd also like to note that you used Quadruped and Mammal which are universals. That's a trope for what we have concluded we tend to experience when we encounter things we class as dogs.
Our dog description doesn't look like any dog. The words may get repeated, though very few humans will describe dogs like you did. But the actual what's going on when we think of dogs is not the same from person to person, nor does it match any individual dog.
Everything about what happens when we use that phrase is idiosyncratic, to varying degrees, individual to individual, and also is quite different from what another animal (a cat, say) would experience with dogs. And that's just a shift from one ground of animals to another.
Neither how a cat would think of that dog over there or what we think of when we think of that dog over there, the same one, is remotely literal. It's an ad hoc, later habitual complex/idea that we represent/remember dogs via.
It's certainly not objective and it's very much what we as primates (also not literal and also a universal) do when cognizing dogs.
The words, which themselves vary can fool us into thinking we mean the same thing, but the words are not really what's happening when we use them.
Spend some time with the phenomenology of both metaphors and then dead metaphors - metaphors we have gotten used to, like Lakoff's metaphors we live by - then with what happens when we engage in literal (thought I would say 'literal') thinking or speaking about things and it's not the neat somehow fixed, or literal thing we might think if we focus on the letters dog which, I believe according to you, is a universal and itself not literal.
If any use of language is metaphorical, the distinction between literal and metaphorical use vanishes.
We have metaphors and dead metaphors. Novel tropes and tropes we are used and take as literal.
I don't see why our being time-and-place-bound primates means our language must be metaphorical? Can you explain?
We cannot be objective. We can only try our best to signal what we will experience through primate senses and what others will experience through primate senses. What is literal about that?
Even literal is a metaphor and not one restricting itself to non-metaphors. It means 'has to do with letters.'
Irony:
Etymological note: literal comes from the Latin littera, 'a letter [of the alphabet]'. It uses the same figurative meaning as the English idiom of 'following instructions to the letter ', i.e. precisely and in detail.
I'm content if we see it as either/also
symbols for other things.