If I udnerstand what you mean, I used to see ‘metaphor blindness’ in a lot of people. But I think it’s more about how much people wall off the relevant bit of the metaphor/analogy from the general tone. I see this a lot in politics, on all sides, and I don’t think the ‘metaphor blind’ people are just deliberately misunderstanding to score points. It may be not being able to separate the two, or it may be a feeling on their part that the metaphor is smuggling in unfair implications.
For instance, on same sex marriage (a good case for me to observe this because I’m instinctively pro- and the cases I’m looking at are metaphor-blindness by people who are also pro-), two arguments come to mind
1) Pro-SSM argument ‘Marriage should be allowed as long as there is consent between the two people’. Counter-analogy ‘But on those grounds, incestuous marriage or polygamy should also be allowed’
2) Pro-SSM argument ‘If you don’t like gay marriage, don’t get gay married’. Counter-analogy: “Imagine for a moment that the Government had decided to legalise slavery but assured us that ’no one will be forced to keep a slave. Would such worthless assurances calm our fury? Would they justify dismantling a fundamental human right? Or would they simply amount to weasel words masking a great wrong?” (this one is a direct quote from a Cardinal)
In these cases, the general response from pro-SSM people has been ‘I can’t believe you’re comparing gay marriage to incest/slavery’. Because the toxicity of the comparison point overwhelms the quite focused analogy in both cases. People often feel the same when you try to convince them of something by analogy, particularly if they feel like you are trying to show that they are wrong by intellectual force rather than just taking them along with you. It took me awhile to adjust to this one: I just felt everyone else was [i]wrong[/i], and at a gut level I still do, and prefer arguing with people who take analogies in a narrow sense. But eventually, in line with the post above, you can’t repeatedly, reliably, have failed communications with the rest of society and consider everyone else to be the aberration.
On the other hand, using such “toxic” comparisons is valuable because due to their very toxicity, everyone believes the same thing about them. You can’t argue “but on those grounds, slurping your soup would be permissible”—after all, some people do think that slurping your soup is permissible, so on those people, the analogy would fail, and some other people have no opinion on soup-slurping and will insist that you prove that it’s not permissible before they’ll accept it in an analogy. Godwin’s Law, which is a variation on this, has a similar problem: often a Hitler comparison is the best kind of comparison to make because everyone agrees about Hitler.
Indeed. Which is why I like having discussions with people who follow the same ruleset as me and engages with metaphors in that pure, stripped-down way. It saves a hell of a lot of time. But there are lots of things that save time in communication that do not make for good communication in general.
If I udnerstand what you mean, I used to see ‘metaphor blindness’ in a lot of people. But I think it’s more about how much people wall off the relevant bit of the metaphor/analogy from the general tone. I see this a lot in politics, on all sides, and I don’t think the ‘metaphor blind’ people are just deliberately misunderstanding to score points. It may be not being able to separate the two, or it may be a feeling on their part that the metaphor is smuggling in unfair implications.
For instance, on same sex marriage (a good case for me to observe this because I’m instinctively pro- and the cases I’m looking at are metaphor-blindness by people who are also pro-), two arguments come to mind
1) Pro-SSM argument ‘Marriage should be allowed as long as there is consent between the two people’. Counter-analogy ‘But on those grounds, incestuous marriage or polygamy should also be allowed’ 2) Pro-SSM argument ‘If you don’t like gay marriage, don’t get gay married’. Counter-analogy: “Imagine for a moment that the Government had decided to legalise slavery but assured us that ’no one will be forced to keep a slave. Would such worthless assurances calm our fury? Would they justify dismantling a fundamental human right? Or would they simply amount to weasel words masking a great wrong?” (this one is a direct quote from a Cardinal)
In these cases, the general response from pro-SSM people has been ‘I can’t believe you’re comparing gay marriage to incest/slavery’. Because the toxicity of the comparison point overwhelms the quite focused analogy in both cases. People often feel the same when you try to convince them of something by analogy, particularly if they feel like you are trying to show that they are wrong by intellectual force rather than just taking them along with you. It took me awhile to adjust to this one: I just felt everyone else was [i]wrong[/i], and at a gut level I still do, and prefer arguing with people who take analogies in a narrow sense. But eventually, in line with the post above, you can’t repeatedly, reliably, have failed communications with the rest of society and consider everyone else to be the aberration.
On the other hand, using such “toxic” comparisons is valuable because due to their very toxicity, everyone believes the same thing about them. You can’t argue “but on those grounds, slurping your soup would be permissible”—after all, some people do think that slurping your soup is permissible, so on those people, the analogy would fail, and some other people have no opinion on soup-slurping and will insist that you prove that it’s not permissible before they’ll accept it in an analogy. Godwin’s Law, which is a variation on this, has a similar problem: often a Hitler comparison is the best kind of comparison to make because everyone agrees about Hitler.
Indeed. Which is why I like having discussions with people who follow the same ruleset as me and engages with metaphors in that pure, stripped-down way. It saves a hell of a lot of time. But there are lots of things that save time in communication that do not make for good communication in general.