T185 Practical Thinking: R2=A short history of metaphor

Since situations don't come with neat labels that say 'Eat me!' or 'Escape from me!', this implies some kind of pattern recognition, and hence some kind of comparison: 'Is this new situation that is emerging just now more like an 'edible' situation, like a 'dangerous' situation �' or whatever.

For simple organisms, this kind of categorisation may be little more than the ability to respond to a few chemical or physical triggers, but more complex organisms can make much 'cleverer' categorisations. For instance, the part of a frog's brain that analyses vision is organised in several layers. One responds to fixed patterns of light and shade � e.g. the fixed features of the frog's pond. Another responds to small, fast-moving, patterns of light and shade � e.g. flies that the frog eats. Another responds to large, slow-moving, patterns � e.g. larger animals that eat frogs. So frogs can 'compare' their views of a situation in terms of these three kinds of analysis specially evolved to meet the frog's key needs. As you go up the evolutionary tree, the pattern-handling gets cleverer and cleverer.

Another kind of 'comparison' that begins to appear in more complex animals is mimicry - e.g. young animals learn by mimicking older animals. There is growing evidence of brain mechanisms specifically concerned with 'mirroring' what others are doing (indeed it has been suggested that such mechanisms may be involved in human 'empathy').

These kinds of pre-human pattern recognition, categorisation, comparison, mimicry, and such like are not 'metaphor' or 'analogy' in the human sense. In any case, we don't yet understand enough of the brain mechanisms underlying human use of metaphor to make bold statements about 'where metaphor comes from'. But it is a plausible guess to suggest that human use of metaphor and analogy has evolved from pre-human capacities such as these, much transformed by being mediated through language.

However, by the time we get to chimpanzees, we do find concrete evidence of use of analogy in ways that do seem recognisably close to our own. Oden, Thompson and Premack (2001), working with a 39-year-old chimpanzee called 'Sarah', showed that she could make judgements about abstract comparisons between geometrical figures, for example that:

That is, she could see that the 'small/big' relationship between the triangles is the same as the 'small/big' relationship between the crescents. At a more concrete level, she could recognise that the relationship between, say, a key and a padlock 'is like' the relationship between a can-opener and a can. She also spontaneously created her own geometrical analogies, given the comparison board she had used for the geometrical comparisons, and a kit of suitable symbols.

The second is from clay tablet No. 8 of 'the oldest recorded story on Earth' - the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh (the mythical king of the ancient Sumerian city of Uruk, that gave its name to modern Iraq). After Enkidu, his friend and companion of many adventures, dies, Gilgamesh is distraught:

Perhaps these were just drawings for fun from the equivalent of a local artist's sketch pad (!), but it is normally assumed that they must have had symbolic or magical significance. This man-lion sculpture from the same period, in southern Germany is certainly a fantasy, and must surely have been more than just a bored doodle on a long winter's evening!

Given such deep roots in literature, art, 'Life, the Universe, and Everything', you might think that metaphor and analogy would always have been very important in our cultural life. There have, indeed, been periods when this has been true. For instance, in Elizabethan England, in the late 1500s and early 1600s, metaphor was regarded as an essential part of educated and literary language, and the use of metaphor in the great writers of the period (most obviously Shakespeare, of course) reached a remarkable level of sophistication.

But philosophers and scientists have tended to be unimpressed by metaphor. They have often dismissed this sort of language as the kind of flowery decoration used by what Professor Ramachadran, the neuro-scientist who gave the 2003 Reith Lectures on the BBC, described (with a twinkle in his eye) as: 'artists, poets, novelists �.you know � flaky types!'. Or they have dismissed it as 'mere rhetoric' - the kind of persuasive, manipulative, 'spin' used by politicians! After all, the definition of a metaphor is that it says that one thing is something else, and that seems at least misleading, and at worst dishonest.

All those Theories in Philosophy which are expressed only in metaphorical Termes, are not real Truths, but the meer products of Imagination, dress'd up (like Childrens babies) in a few spangled empty words .... Thus their wanton and luxuriant fancies climbing up into the Bed of Reason, do not only defile it by unchaste and illegitimate Embraces, but instead of real conceptions and notices of Things, impregnate the mind with nothing but Ayerie and Subventaneous Phantasmes.

� if we would speak of things as they are, we must allow that all the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness; all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgement; and so indeed are perfect cheats. And therefore, however laudable or allowable oratory may render them in harangues and popular addresses, they are certainly, in all discourses that pretend to inform or instruct, wholly to be avoided; and where truth and knowledge are concerned, cannot but be thought a great fault, either of the language or person that makes use of them. .... It is evident how much men love to deceive and be deceived, since rhetoric, that powerful instrument of error and deceit, has its established professors, is publicly taught, and has always been had in great reputation.

Adam Smith (1723-90), the great Scottish thinker whose book The Wealth of Nations is generally regarded as the foundation of modern economics, was a professor of Rhetoric in his day job when he wasn't inventing economics. His view about language is well expressed in one of his published lectures:

He took the 'tell it like it is' view very seriously, and his book is notable for its extraordinarily clear and objective language. Indeed he was so wary of explicit metaphor and analogy, that on the few occasions that he did use them, he invariably added a phrase such as: 'if one may say so' to signal this. He is so reliable in this habit that modern researchers (Thomas Rommel, 1997) can trace all his explicit metaphors by doing a computer search for these phrases!

But when we make judgements about this call for clarity, it is worth remembering that it wasn't just a bunch of armchair philosophers thinking that rational approaches would be nice. It was very much a reaction to the events of its time. This was a period when church and state were inextricably linked in ways that were often unjust and oppressive. For example:

In 1696 the Edinburgh student, Thomas Aitkenhead, claimed theology was a 'rhapsody of feigned and ill invented nonsense'. He was hanged for his trouble - just one victim of a repressive religious society called the Scottish Kirk. Yet within 60 years Scotland was transformed by the ideas sweeping the continent in what we call the Enlightenment.

So the call for thinkers to 'clean up their act' was as much a political response triggered by repression, superstition and the arbitrary abuse of power, as a philosophical one. Indeed, some of Locke's later writing was very influential in the American War of Independence and the French revolution, both of which happened in the late 1700s.

So it is hardly surprising that Enlightenment thinkers were zealous in their intellectual spring-cleaning. A consequence was that the rather subtle, 'magical', non-rational, subjective, world of metaphorical thinking got thrown out along with everything else that seemed 'unclear'.

For instance, by the late 1800s and early 1900s we find writers and artists increasingly exploring the murky depths of human motivation, and people like Sigmund Freud, working with psychiatric patients, trying to come up with theories to explain what they seemed to be finding. The Freudian 'Unconscious' was supposed to use 'Primary Thinking' which was largely metaphorical in nature, as in dreams. A mixture of metaphor, story-telling and hypnosis was used to extraordinary effect by the remarkable psychotherapist Milton Erickson, who was active mainly between the 1930s and 1960s, though his influence is still being felt 50 years later.

Another figure from this period is the English writer, Ivan A. Richards, one of the founders of modern, psychologically based, literary criticism. In 1936, he delivered a series of six lectures to Bryn Mawr College, in the USA, of which the last two are devoted to metaphor. He seems to have been well aware that his ideas were before their time. Near the start of the sixth lecture he says:

The neglect of the study of the modes of metaphor in the later 19th Century was due, I think, to a general feeling that those methods of inquiry were unprofitable, and the time was not ripe for a new attack. I am not sure that it is yet ripe in spite of all that Coleridge and Bentham did towards ripening it. Very likely a new attempt must again lead into artificialities and arbitrarinesses.

In this subject it is better to make a mistake that can be exposed than to do nothing, better to have any account of how metaphor works (or thought goes on) than to have none. Provided always that we do not suppose that our account really tells us what happens - provided, that is, we, do not mistake our theories for our skill, or our descriptive apparatus for what it describes.

Nevertheless, in spite of his self-disparaging tone, much of what he says in these two lectures has echoes of other uses of metaphor that were to come in the subsequent decades, and is indistinguishable in its basic appreciation of the role of metaphor in thinking from modern views of metaphor at the turn of the millennium. He predates Lakoff and Johnson by a good half century!

Read	Here is a short excerpt of Richard's 'fifth lecture' to show what I mean.

Richards saw all words as taking a large part of their meaning from the words around them and the general sense of the context. Metaphor is, then, just a special case of this general principle. So, in his view, 'my boss' changes its meaning in the context of the word 'dinosaur', in much the same way that 'T185' changes its meaning if the context is you talking about studying it, me talking about writing it, the project manager talking about scheduling the various production resources it needs, or some sceptic dismissing it as complete nonsense. Richards' definition of 'metaphor' reflects this:

Another use of metaphor began to emerge in the 1940s and 1950s, as people such as Alex Osborn (the inventor of 'brainstorming') and W. J. J. Gordon and George Prince (the inventors of the creativity approach known as 'Synectics') took another, very business-like, angle. Osborn in particular had been very impressed by seeing how US industry had dramatically increased its productivity for the 1939-45 'war effort' (a ferment of shop floor innovation that led, 30 years later, to the 'Japanese industrial revolution' of the 1980s). These early 'practical creativity' pioneers wanted to help people and organisations to be more imaginative. Analogy and metaphor began to be used as commercially valuable tools, not just as literary devices, or as explanations for mysterious psychological processes.

In 1951, as a result of becoming newly familiar with the work of Jung and Freud and thus with the principles of psychoanalysis, I became convinced that imagination and the creation of ideas could be stimulated by the proper use of repressed thoughts. An executive in an advertising and marketing company, I began experimenting with psychologists and creative people on everyday problems to find out if and how new ideas could be so generated.

In 1958 I met W. J. J. Gordon of the Invention Design Group of Arthur D. Little, an industrial-research company. Mr. Gordon not only agreed that ideas could be deliberately stimulated but also believed he knew the elements necessary to do so. Further, he had a system for producing these stimuli, which he called Operational Creativity. His system made use of certain psychological states that he believed were vital to creativity: detachment, deferment, and speculation, among others. This was a quantum jump beyond my own thinking. In addition, Gordon had conceived of using a tape recorder to examine how groups work, by discovering through replays what actually was said, done, and achieved � much as football coaches use slow-motion game films. I joined Mr. Gordon at Arthur D. Little as part of a group of eight men whose job it was to develop new or improved products, processes, and procedures for client companies.

Central to the Synectics method is the use of 'excursions' - in which remote analogies are used to develop new perspectives on a practical problem. Notice also the importance Prince places on his tape-recording of sessions. When you attend to how people actually think (as distinct from theories about how they ought to think) the importance of metaphor and analogy in normal thinking soon becomes obvious.

On the popular culture side came the explosion of psychedelic, guru-hunting, encounter-groupy, youth cultures. These introduced very large numbers of people to 'far out' experiences that seemed a long way from the old rational models, which had often seen thought just as some kind of internalised conversation.
On the scientific side, the rapid development, at about the same time, of computers and of techniques capable of recording neural activity, made it possible to 'think about thinking' in ways that had never been possible before. A loose patchwork of areas of enquiry to do with 'thinking' began to come together under the umbrella-label: 'Cognitive Science'. These include artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, linguistics, philosophy, neuro-science, psychiatric research, ideas from cybernetics, etc.
On the philosophical side, there was the growing awareness that our attempts to explain the world around us are often so incomplete and approximate that there is room for many different theories or explanations. Even apparently contradictory explanations may each have useful validity in their own context - a theory is as often as much a story, parable or metaphor as it is 'objective truth' . This idea became known as 'post-modernism' (to contrast it with 'modernism' - the belief in a unified, rational, scientific view of the world that had evolved from the Enlightenment).

As a result of these and many other threads of development, cognitive scientists began to come round to the view that metaphor and analogy are to do with the foundations of thinking, rather than being merely the superficial decorations on the cake. For instance, researcher and translator Douglas Hofstadter, writing in 2001, put it like this:

�reasoning and problem-solving have (at least I dearly hope!) been at long last recognised as lying far indeed from the core of human thought. If analogy were merely a special variety of something that in itself lies way out on the peripheries, then it would be but an itty-bitty blip in the broad blue sky of cognition. To me, however, analogy is anything but an itty blip � rather, it's the very blue that fills the whole sky of cognition � analogy is everything, or very nearly so, in my view.

These are wonderful human achievements. But when gymnasts or dancers are shopping in their local supermarket, they walk around pushing their trolleys like the rest of us. What Hofstadter and others are saying, is that metaphor and analogy are the mental equivalent of walking round a supermarket � they are important parts of the basic set of day-to-day mental equipment which on the one hand links back to the thinking of our animal forebears, but on the other can be adapted to support rational debate if you develop the relevant mental gymnastics.

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