“[Wittgenstein] sketches two people, A and B, swordfighting, and explains how this sketch might assert ‘A is fencing with B’ by virtue of one stick-figure representing A and the other representing B. In this picture-writing form, the proposition can be true or false, and its sense is independent of its truth or falsehood. LW declares that ‘It must be possible to demonstrate everything essential by considering this case’.”
Lakoff illuminates some common metaphors — for example, a positive-valence mood in American English is often “up” and a negative-valence mood in American English is often “down.”
If you combine Lakoff and Wittgenstein, using an accepted metaphor from your culture (“How are you?” “I’m flying today”) makes the picture you paint for the other person correspond to your mood (they hear the emphasized “flying” and don’t imagine you literally flying, but rather in a high-positive valence mood) — then you’re in the realm of true.
There’s independently some value in investigating your metaphors, but if someone asks me “Hey how’d custom building project your neighbor was doing go?” and I answer “Man, it was a fuckin’ trainwreck” — you know what I’m saying: not only did the project fail, but it failed in a way that caused damage and hassle and was unaesthetic, even over and beyond what a normal “mere project failure” would be.
The value in metaphors, I think, is that you can get high information density with them. “Fuckin’ trainwreck” conveys a lot of information. The only more denser formulation might be “Disaster” — but that’s also a metaphor if it wasn’t literally a disaster. Metaphors are sneaky in that way, we often don’t notice them — but they seem like a valid high-accuracy usage of language if deployed carefully.
(Tangentially: Is “deployed” there a metaphor? Thinking… thinking… yup. Lakoff’s book is worth skimming, we use a lot more metaphors than we realize...)
Lots of great comments already so not sure if this will get seen, but a couple possibly useful points —
Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff is worth a skim — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphors_We_Live_By
Then I think Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is good, but his war diaries are even better — http://www.wittgensteinchronology.com/7.html
“[Wittgenstein] sketches two people, A and B, swordfighting, and explains how this sketch might assert ‘A is fencing with B’ by virtue of one stick-figure representing A and the other representing B. In this picture-writing form, the proposition can be true or false, and its sense is independent of its truth or falsehood. LW declares that ‘It must be possible to demonstrate everything essential by considering this case’.”
Lakoff illuminates some common metaphors — for example, a positive-valence mood in American English is often “up” and a negative-valence mood in American English is often “down.”
If you combine Lakoff and Wittgenstein, using an accepted metaphor from your culture (“How are you?” “I’m flying today”) makes the picture you paint for the other person correspond to your mood (they hear the emphasized “flying” and don’t imagine you literally flying, but rather in a high-positive valence mood) — then you’re in the realm of true.
There’s independently some value in investigating your metaphors, but if someone asks me “Hey how’d custom building project your neighbor was doing go?” and I answer “Man, it was a fuckin’ trainwreck” — you know what I’m saying: not only did the project fail, but it failed in a way that caused damage and hassle and was unaesthetic, even over and beyond what a normal “mere project failure” would be.
The value in metaphors, I think, is that you can get high information density with them. “Fuckin’ trainwreck” conveys a lot of information. The only more denser formulation might be “Disaster” — but that’s also a metaphor if it wasn’t literally a disaster. Metaphors are sneaky in that way, we often don’t notice them — but they seem like a valid high-accuracy usage of language if deployed carefully.
(Tangentially: Is “deployed” there a metaphor? Thinking… thinking… yup. Lakoff’s book is worth skimming, we use a lot more metaphors than we realize...)