Part 7: Knowledge as Metaphor

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Feb, 2017

How do we “know” what we know? What is the foundation that underlies our expressions of “truth”? It seems to me that the only way we as humans can conceptualize and communicate about intangible and ephemeral aspects of existence is to discuss them metaphorically, in terms of how this is like that. For instance, we may discuss knowledge in terms of sight (e.g. “how do you see it?” “Is it clear?”), ergo light as well (“the light just went on for him”, “he’s a bright boy!”). We discuss time in terms of movement (“time flies,” “where did the time go?”). We discuss love in terms of space (“they are inseparable,” “I am close to him”), and so forth. These are examples of ways in which knowledge is grasped and communicated through metaphor. But the importance of metaphor goes beyond convenient communication. Metaphors shape how we experience reality. They structure how we extract meaning from experience. Consequently, I believe they have enormous implications for how we understand both science and religion. In The Metaphors We Live By [1], George Lakoff, a Cognitive Linguist at Cal Berkeley, recalls an Iranian student who discovered the phrase “‘the solution of my problems,’ which he took to be a large volume of liquid solution, bubbling and smoking, containing all of your problems, either dissolved or in the form of precipitates, with catalysts constantly dissolving some problems (for the time being) and precipitating out others. He was terribly disillusioned to find that the residents of Berkeley had no such chemical metaphor in mind. And well he might be, for the chemical metaphor is both beautiful and insightful. …To live by the ‘Chemical’ metaphor would mean that a temporary solution would be an accomplishment rather than a failure. Problems would be part of the natural order of things rather than disorders to be ‘cured.’ …What the ‘Chemical’ metaphor reveals is that our current way of dealing with problems is according to what we might call the ‘Puzzle’ metaphor, in which problems are ‘Puzzles’ for which, typically, there is a correct solution—and, once solved, they are solved forever.” This is just one example of how metaphors intersect with our most basic worldview, and profoundly structure our experience of meaning in daily life.

In previous essays, I frequently described my views as provisional and fluid, however, I always imagined my provisional views as pertaining to literal truth. The essential point I am asserting in this essay is that all views, all knowledge, hence any assertion of truth, is fundamentally metaphorical. Claims of truth and knowledge are expressed in terms of a metaphorical relationship to a paradigmatic framework within which they are imagined to fit (and in the metaphorical language of that framework). In other words, we speak of the world as if an uncertain paradigm were, in fact, certain. When I say “paradigm” or “framework,” I am speaking of a worldview that tacitly underlies how we conceptualize experience. Perhaps a more insightful and evocative word for “paradigm” is “mythos,” defined as “a set of beliefs or assumptions about something.” The most common paradigm in western culture is reductionist materialism (often just called “Realism”) which proposes that matter/energy constitutes what reality is “made of.” Though often taken as a given, this paradigm is just a paradigm, and any given paradigm or mythos is fundamentally uncertain because we cannot know the ‘true’ ontological [2] or metaphysical [3] nature of experience. In other words, we cannot know what some subject-less reality is “really” like because we always experience reality subjectively through human senses and cognitive apparatus. We can only understand our experience in relation to our other experiences. Metaphysical uncertainty [4] is fundamental, but often goes unacknowledged, so we speak as if we know the nature of reality and describe experience in terms of the assumed paradigm. Practically speaking, that is good enough. It is good enough because the common metaphor of Realism as ‘objective reality’ is roughly correlative to experience and internally coherent enough to match and explain most experience perfectly well. It is an accurate enough metaphor to provide a sufficient framework for ‘knowledge.’ And a metaphor embedded that deeply permits knowledge to appear certain. However, it is the framework itself that provides essential structure to empirical ‘knowledge.’ Our belief in a particular paradigm expresses satisfaction with a particular metaphor. The downstream consequence is that the metaphors we use to describe reality are the essential building blocks for how we determine meaning.

The urgency of this idea first cropped up while finishing my Part 6 essay [5] on the “Self.” In writing it, I grew increasingly aware that the terms in which I conceived of “Self,” consciousness, and even physics were largely metaphorical. I evaluated Self as if it were an object that existed or not. The logic of the metaphor recursively shaped my conception of Self (e.g. as a self-contained unit). I wrote about how language recursively structures thought in a vague attempt to acknowledge this loop, but I knew that what I wrote was insufficient. I hoped that some additional thoughts early in my concluding essay could sufficiently address the topic. I soon realized they wouldn’t. The subject required a fully researched essay of its own. For the first time in the course of this multi-year essay project, an unforeseen question forced an entirely unexpected detour and unplanned essay topic. I take that as a good thing; a sign that my thinking remains flexible. In this essay, the key question is: how is knowledge framed and understood? I have said we think “metaphorically,” but what does it mean for thought to be metaphorical? It means, most simply, that we account for experience by framing knowledge in comparative terms of what things are like, not absolute terms involving metaphysical truth. Naturally, that’s because we cannot know the metaphysical framework of our experience. Furthermore, we cannot separate what and how we experience from how we think. This creates a deeply recursive and self-referential interplay between the nature of experience and the metaphorical terms in which we articulate abstract thoughts about experience. 

Distrust of Metaphor

There is a common view that metaphors are a communication crutch without any fundamental truth. In The God Problem [6], Howard Bloom traces the idea that metaphors shouldn’t be trusted back to Aristotle: “Aristotle not only dictated a method for science. He dictated one of our scientific prejudices. The prejudice against metaphor. “Metaphorical reasoning is unscientific,” he said in his Posterior Analytics, the book in which he laid out his procedure for science.” So, is metaphor unscientific? I’d contend just the opposite – that scientific reasoning is inherently metaphorical. Light is compared to waves and particles, spacetime is imagined as fabric, atoms as little solar systems or clouds, and so on. Even routine measurement entails redefining some physical phenomena in terms of an abstracted mathematized paradigm. Each of these comparisons is metaphorical, and this kind of comparative thinking is ubiquitous in science, which leads us to challenge Aristotle’s contention that metaphor is inherently unscientific. So let’s ask a different question: does saying something is “metaphorical” mean it is “not real”? For starters, “real” is itself a deeply ambiguous concept. For millennia, mankind thought the sun literally rose above the horizon of a stationary disc-shaped earth every morning. That’s how it looks. We now believe the earth is a sphere that spins and orbits around the sun, so we consider the phrase “the sun rises” to be strictly metaphorical. But we still consider it to express something “real” and true. “True” is another ambiguous word. There are many flavors of truth. Philosophy typically recognizes three kinds of truth: coherent truth (internally true based on logical relations between defined axioms), correlative truth (true relative to perceptual experience), and pragmatic truth (true as determined by practical need). Beyond that, we could talk about truth as perceptual, explanatory, predictive, and so forth. To say something is “true” always means it is true in one or more of these ways. However, I’d contend that a statement is never (seldom?) true in all possible ways. Math is often treated as the most fundamentally “true” way of symbolizing reality. When we speak of truth in the symbolic language of math, mathematician Bertrand Russell asserts [7], “pure mathematics consists of tautologies.” In other words, 1+1=2 just means that 1+1 is another way of saying 2. 1+1 and 2 define each other. Mathematical axioms are built around symbolic tautology. 1+1=2 is thus a coherent truth, but may be seen as correlatively false. For any physical application, whatever object we are calling (1) is subtly different than every other (1), even if only subatomically or temporally. Every resulting (2) is also subtly different. To say 1+1=2 requires that we ignore that every physical instance of (1) and (2) mean something subtly different in countless ways. We must abstract away all of the countless differences. Hence, (1) does not equal (1) except in abstraction. And what about pragmatic truth? It is commonly said that in marriage “the two become one.” In other words, 1+1=1. In The God Problem, Howard Bloom writes, “Us moderns forget that an inch, a foot, and a yard are based on metaphor and radical abstraction. We forget that they make an impossible claim—that squiggles on pulped tree stuff or on a computer screen equal farm fields and food. We forget the bizarre claims of the equal sign. The bizarre claims of equation.” However, even if our descriptions are “only” abstracted metaphors, describing the world as we do is not necessarily false or unreal. It is just not metaphysically literal. For practical purposes, metaphor communicates experience within a shared framework just fine. We trust the framework, even though it has no foundation outside of its own logic. It is strictly self-supported through faith in the framework, not unlike our fiat monetary system. In Philosophical Investigations [9], Ludwig Wittgenstein writes, “any interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support.” In Personal Knowledge [8], Michael Polanyi describes how self-referentiality in language can seem stable: “we may place a word in quotation marks, while using language confidently through the rest of a sentence. But we would never question each word at the same time, because to do so would reveal a comprehensive error which underlies our entire descriptive idiom.” In other words, even if we question one word, we would never question the meaning of every word in a sentence simultaneously, for to do so would leave us standing on exposed quicksand. So, quite simply, we never do it. Faith in language and our intuitive interpretation of meaning suffices, and for the most part, that is good enough.

Embodied Cognition

George Lakoff has been making the case that thought is metaphorical for over thirty years. In The Metaphors We Live By, he writes, “Metaphor is one of our most important tools for trying to comprehend partially what cannot be comprehended totally: our feelings, aesthetic experiences, moral practices, and spiritual awareness.” Lakoff asserts that we think of abstractions in the concrete terms of our physical experience. In Philosophy in the Flesh [10], Lakoff cites the findings of behavioral psychology for empirical support: “The mind is inherently embodied… Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. These are three major findings of cognitive science, and are inconsistent with central parts of western philosophy.” His comment summarizes the research of Daniel Kahneman and company detailed in my Part 6 essay, and dovetails with a view called Embodied Cognition. In Looking for Spinoza [11], neuroscientist Antonio Damasio lays out the basic case for this view: “representations of the body in action would offer a spatial and temporal framework, a metric on which other representations could be grounded. The representation of what we now construct as a space with three dimensions would be engendered in the brain, on the basis of the body’s anatomy and patterns of movement in the environment. While there is an external reality… We would never know how faithful our knowledge is to “absolute” reality. What we need to have, and I believe we do have, is a remarkable consistency in the constructions of reality that our brains make and share.” That “construction of reality” is itself, I would say, metaphorical, exactly because “we would never know how faithful our knowledge is to ‘absolute’ reality.” But I digress. For now, we’ll work with the common metaphor of “Realism.” Embodied Cognition generally assumes Realism and asserts that cognition is not authored by brain function in isolation (i.e. “brain in a vat”), but by an interplay involving the entire organism and environment. In Waking, Dreaming, Being [12], consciousness researcher Evan Thompson writes, “The brain is always embodied, and its functioning as a support for consciousness can’t be understood apart from its place in a relational system involving the rest of the body and the environment. The physical substrate of mind is this embodied, embedded, and relational network, not the brain as an isolated system.” Reason is not an autonomous ruler of the mind. Emotion is necessary for reason. George Lakoff points out, “We know that reason and emotion go hand in hand, with reason possible only if emotion is present. But most people still believe that emotion disrupts reason.”  The neuroscientist most responsible for showing the link between emotion and reason is the aforementioned Antonio Damasio, who writes, “Body, brain, and mind are manifestations of a single organism. Although we can dissect them under the microscope, for scientific purposes, they are in effect inseparable under normal operating circumstances.” Even kinds of thoughts and emotions seem to be functionally linked. Obviously, sad thoughts elicit feelings of sadness, but Damasio observes that the inverse is true as well. Paraphrasing, he writes, “When the emotion sadness is deployed, the brain also brings forth the kind of thoughts that normally cause the emotion sadness and feelings of sadness. This is because associative learning has linked emotions with thoughts in a rich two-way network. Certain thoughts evoke certain emotions and vice versa.” Emotion plays a critical role in guiding rationality through feelings. If I ask, “what is 2+2”? You’d say, “4.” Why? Most simply, it is a feeling that 4 is the correct answer. You might contend that the answer is tautological, or that you can use fingers to add it up, but what makes you trust your memory or think fingers are an accurate representation of numbers? At bottom, every conviction, every “proof,” involves a feeling that our conclusion is reliable. Whether relying on axiomatic rules to work through a problem or validating a memorized answer, we rely on a feeling of confidence to confirm our beliefs. Ever forget how to spell a common word? The feeling that a certain spelling is correct or incorrect is absent, and we are left wondering how to proceed. Damasio writes, “Emotion achieves this marking quite overtly, as in a “gut feeling,” or covertly, via signals occurring below the radar of our awareness. Intuition is simply rapid cognition with the required knowledge partially swept under the carpet, all courtesy of emotion and much past practice.”  In Descartes’ Error [13], Damasio writes, “When emotion is entirely left out of the reasoning picture, as happens in certain neurological conditions, reason turns out to be even more flawed than when emotion plays bad tricks on our decisions.” We cannot separate the conjoined nature of reason and emotion; they appear in tandem. Our abstract thoughts and intuitions are intertwined with the embodied structure of experience.

Metaphors of Mind

Embodied Cognition suggests that our spatio-temporal experience extends to concepts that have no inherent spatio-temporal component, like when we “gain” or “find” or “reach” an understanding. Lakoff writes, “Our language is structured roughly by the following complex metaphor: Ideas (or meanings) are objects, linguistic expressions are containers, communication is sending. The speaker puts ideas (objects) into words (containers) and sends them (along a conduit) to a hearer who takes the idea/objects out of the word/containers.” He calls complex metaphors that apply to broad concepts “primary complex metaphors.” An example of a primary complex metaphor is Mind as Machine, in which “the mind is a machine, ideas are products of the machine, thinking is the automated step-by-step assembly of thoughts, normal thought is the normal operation of the machine, inability to think is a failure of the machine to function.” This is just one of many metaphors we use for the mind. The word “mind” is itself profoundly ambiguous (notice a pattern with language and ambiguity?), only ever taking shape via metaphor. To conceptualize mind, we use metaphors like Mind as Body, Mind as Computer, Mind as Container, and so on. Each metaphor is extensive enough to supply some useful associative truths about the nature of mind, but incomplete enough to also require additional metaphors. Lakoff writes, “We have no single, consistent, univocal set of non-metaphoric concepts for mental operations and ideas. Independent of these metaphors, we have no conception of how the mind works. Even the notion ‘works’ derives from the Mind As Machine metaphor. Even to get some grasp of what ideas in themselves might be, we have to conceptualize ideas as graspable objects.” He notes that in the “faculty psychology” metaphor of mind assumed by most western philosophy (mind contains different domains or “faculties”), the hierarchical structure of society is applied to mind as a sort of morality tale. He writes, “Since society is structured hierarchically with an executive giving orders, so too the mind has a hierarchical structure and an executive in control. Just as a society has unruly and uncontrollable individuals, so there are specific isolatable faculties of the mind that can be unruly and uncontrollable. Just as a well-ordered society should not be governed by people out of control, so a properly functioning mind should be governed in a calm, rational, methodical manner.” Lakoff concludes, “Though we now have overwhelming evidence that the mind does not work like this, the model is still used.” 

Rather than working top-down, the mind appears to work in recursive, self-referential, radial loops. Lakoff writes, “Because we are neural beings, we categorize. Because neural systems optimize, we extend categories radially, adding minimal extensions to the central category structures that we already have. Because children’s earliest categories are perceptual-motor categories, we all have a central category of bounded physical objects that is extended as we grow older. The result is a radial category centered around bounded physical objects (persons, places, and things) that extends to metaphorical persons, places, and things like: states (metaphorical locations), activities (metaphorical objects, locations, or paths), ideas (metaphorical objects or locations), institutions (metaphorical persons), and other metaphorically comprehended abstract concepts.” The close bond between physical experience and abstract conceptualization becomes hard-wired in the brain. As an example, Lakoff proposes that “the metaphor Affection Is Warmth (as in, “He’s a warm person” or “She’s a block of ice”) arises from the common experience of a child being held affectionately by a parent; here, affection occurs together with warmth. They are conflated. There is neural activation occurring simultaneously in two separate parts of the brain: those devoted to emotions and those devoted to temperature. As the saying goes in neuroscience, ‘Neurons that fire together wire together.’” Lakoff asserts that as we learn concepts, the abstract associations become neurally linked with physical experiences that serve as the source metaphor. This neural connection between experiences and ideas shows itself in various ways. The same “mirror” neurons appear to fire when watching an action as when doing it ourselves [14]. Also, many of the same neurons fire for both physical pain and social pain [15]. Many advocates of embodied cognition (like Lakoff) assert that this is a one-way street from physical embodiment to abstract metaphor. However, there is evidence that this may be a two-way feedback loop wherein psychological belief affects physical experience as well. For instance, there is a litany of research supporting the role of mindful attention in altering brain patterns [16]. The “Placebo Effect” also provides strong evidence for psyche-led physiological changes [17]. There is even evidence that abstract metaphors can affect physical experience. Michael Slepian [18] describes an experiment in which “participants were exposed to novel metaphors regarding time and weight. If exposed to the metaphor that the past is heavy, a physical object seemingly from the past was perceived as heavier. Yet, precisely the opposite occurred for those exposed to the metaphor that the present is heavy, whereby a book seemingly from the present was perceived as heavier—when the book across all conditions was the same weight.” This experiment provides compelling evidence that cognized metaphors may have a rich, reciprocal two-way relationship with embodied experience. I would suggest to Lakoff that his own physicalist paradigm of traditional Realism is itself a metaphor, which sets the stage for why I contend that all knowledge is metaphorical.

“The Map is Not the Territory.” – Alfred Korzybski

We’ve seen how metaphors structure higher abstract concepts like mind, but I would like to suggest that metaphor goes all the way to the ground floor, to the very foundations of knowledge. One of the first modern philosophers to assert the metaphorical nature of knowledge was Friedrich Nietzsche. In On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense [19], he writes, “we believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things–metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.” In no way? That seems way too extreme. But consider that nothing in physics suggests a first person experience of the color of green or the smell of roses or the feeling of warmth. This is what philosopher David Chalmers calls “the hard problem” of consciousness. In physics, the wavelength of light that we see as “red” is not inherently red. Rather, the qualia we call “red” is how human consciousness symbolizes a range of frequencies for a photon. It might just as easily be represented by the color green, the sound of coughing, or not represented at all (as is the case with 99% of the electromagnetic spectrum). The selectively representative nature of consciousness was explored at great length in the previous essay. Our sense of “knowing” takes shape through representation, whether that’s cognitive representation through perception or symbolic representation as in math and language. Language can conform and constrict our representations to align with established metaphorical paradigms. In other words, symbolic representation and cognitive representation are entangled. By adulthood, common phenomena are generally objectified and reduced to their defined role in language, which necessarily includes certain concepts and excludes others. For instance, I see a car as a vehicle, not a weapon; grass as landscape, not food. Education seems to play a large role in limiting our ability to “think outside the box,” or use “divergent thinking” as it is called. There is a longitudinal study of possible paperclip usages cited by education lecturer Sir Ken Robinson [20] wherein preschoolers could dream up exponentially more uses for a paperclip than grad students. Most simply, they had not yet been “educated” to restrict their ideas to “correct” answers. The point is that thinking is structured by things like education, experience, and language. Language helps shape our conception of reality, since language is the toolset we use to build our representation of reality. But this creates a problem because the domain of language is utterly unlike the domain of experience. Or, as linguist Alfred Korzybski put it: “The map is not the territory.” The map of language is not the territory of experience. It is not even of the same nature. We imagine language refers to objects and concepts and things out there, but language refers only to a system of concepts and definitions expressed by language itself. It is fundamentally self-referential and can only be self-referential.  In other words, language is defined in terms of language. This leads to a trap. It is difficult to not mistake something that is logically true based on the rules of language within an established descriptive metaphor for something that is Absolutely true of reality itself. We can easily mistake rules of language for rules of reality. For instance, “something cannot come from nothing” is often cited as a basic rule of causality. It may or may not be (quantum vacuum energy experiments would suggest “something” can indeed come from “nothing” [21]), but either way, to say “something cannot come from nothing” is a tautological assertion. It is the definition of “nothing” that “something” cannot emerge from it. Our deep familiarity with language and reliance upon it can lead us to trust that words convey correlative truth completely. Unfortunately, language invariably falls short of thorough, accurate representation. For example, every tree is different in size, shape, age, species, so forth, yet we use the same word: “tree.” Though we can use more precise language, we can never use comprehensively precise or accurate language. We don’t mind because, in general, close enough is good enough! As Friedrich Nietzsche put it, “a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases–which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things.” He continues, “What then is truth? Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.” 

The recursive relationship between metaphysical assumption and propositional knowledge is key to why I view all expressions of knowledge as fundamentally metaphorical. Our knowledge is grounded through language in metaphysical assumption. Is the “stuff” of reality matter/energy or information or consciousness or spirit or something else? Each paradigmatic premise is the seed for its own supporting conclusion. Empirical observation is interpreted through the lens of a theory that invariably makes certain metaphysical assumptions. The assumptions are not arbitrary. They are typically the result of intuition, rationality, perhaps even extensive research and rigorous “proof,” but at bottom, assumption is always lurking somewhere in the foundation of any proof. It can be as mundane as faith in my senses, my memory, my logic, the history recorded by others and conveyed to me, and so on. We build these edifices of knowledge based on faith in a great many seemingly very reasonable assumptions. Knowledge is understood as if the assumed axioms were certainties. In Meaning [22], Michael Polanyi writes, “we cannot ultimately specify the grounds (either metaphysical or logical or empirical) upon which we hold that our knowledge is true. …We cannot look at them (our premises) since are looking with them. They therefore must remain indeterminate.” As James Everett, originator of “multiverse” theory put it, “When one is using a theory, one naturally pretends that the constructs of the theory are “real” or “exist.” If the theory is highly successful (i.e. correctly predicts the sense perceptions of the user of the theory) then the confidence in the theory is built up and its constructs tend to be identified with elements of the real physical world.” It is easy to forget that “pretending” is the basis of our confidence. Nobel prize-winning physicist and mathematician Eugene Wigner writes [23], “fundamentally, we do not know why our theories work so well. Hence, their accuracy may not prove their truth and consistency.” Mathematician Stephen Wolfram adds [24], “There’s a certain set of axioms that essentially all the mathematics that’s done today is based on. But they’re certainly not the only possible axioms. Out in the space of all possible axiom systems, there are infinitely many other ones. So why do we pick the particular axiom systems we have for mathematics? …it’s not even, for example, that these axiom systems are somehow relevant to the physical universe. They just describe particular corners of it. What I’ve concluded is that actually the mathematics we have today is really just a historical accident: the direct generalization of the arithmetic and geometry that happened to be used in ancient Babylon.” As axioms are trusted in mathematics, so too they are trusted in matters of language and general knowledge. As I noted earlier, we must assume some set of empirically reasonable axioms to construct a paradigm of reality, so assumption itself isn’t the culprit. Though we cannot examine the world in itself, we can explore the world as it seems in relation to other experiences. In this way, we can construct a paradigm, and compare our experiences to the root paradigmatic claims in our preferred metaphor. Our beliefs needn’t be metaphysically “true” so long as they sufficiently correlate to our experience, and are internally coherent within the assumed and expressed paradigm. If our metaphor is correlative and coherent, that is “true” enough. 

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