Dade, on his lovely blog, has strayed into the dark realm of philosophy, epistemology, in fact. For me this is like a red flag to a bull. The essence of the post is that metaphor is more true than empirical knowledge, "metaphor is as close to eternal truths as humanity can conceive." This is supported by the claim that empirical knowledge is imperfect and incomplete because our brains are finite, yet because metaphor requires interpretation it evolves as knowledge advances.
It's pretty easy to destroy this right off the bat, the argument against empirical knowledge is that it is imperfect and changes over time, while the argument for metaphoric knowledge is that it changes over time based on the changing of our knowledge. I hope you can see that the argument against one form of knowledge is the same as the argument for the other form of knowledge.
However, I am sure that this refutation is unsatisfactory to many people who generally find scientific explanation incomprehensible (unless explained through metaphor), or not interesting, or doesn't speak to their heart.
Let's start this bit then with a definition of truth. I think it easy to sum up all of these relevant definitions as "in accordance with reality" something is true if it matches reality. Therefore, the more something matches with reality, the more true it is. This requires two parts, a statement that can be measured against reality, and a reality to measure it against.
What is metaphor? The essential nature of metaphor is to use one thing to represent a different thing. While saying something is like something, it requires that the thing that it is like is not completely like something. Metaphor requires dissimilarity. In Dade's blog it specifically says that " Metaphor, by its nature, must be interpreted." This means that a metaphorical truth, by Dade's definition, must be able to be thought of differently by different people.
What is empirical knowledge? Empirical knowledge is knowledge based on observation, and in the scientific arena knowledge that can be verified or disproved. Unless observation is false, the knowledge from empirical sources requires being entirely true or incomplete, you can't have bits of the observed entity be true sometimes, or bits of it not be true, or it wouldn't be empirical. Everyone must see the same thing.
It seems to me that both sorts of knowledge require observation. To claim that something is like something else you must at least observe what to what it is compared. So, we have two methods of describing truth, one that varies over time and according to the individual,and one that remains the same and is the same for all individuals. It seems to me that the second accords with reality to a much greater extent.
This might now seem much of anything, but there is a problem here of not knowing, not understanding, or simply rejecting scientific knowledge. Dade makes the claim that, "empirical truth is short-lived and imperfect" while one of the basic assumptions of science is actually that truth discovered empirically is consistent over time and space. It is assumed (and testable, and confirmed) that gravity worked the same way billions of years before humans understood anything through metaphor, and the way it worked (at least in everything between molecules and close to the speed of light) is precisely the way it works now. If humans know anything that is long-lived and perfectly understood, it is empirical truth.
Why is this a problem? It is a problem because people who think that scientific knowledge is generally wrong, and will be overturned at some point in the future, can then feel comfortable in the belief that their method of determining truth is superior to the results of actual data. This results in attempts to put creationism in science classes, the denial of climate change, the support of the success of "trickle down" economics, and on and on. Such a method of determining truth has very real, very dire consequences. It literally kills people. It is absolutely necessarily when trying to improve our lives on this planet to start with the best understanding of what actually exists and how it works. This way of thinking literally frightens me.
Why do people believe in their methods of knowledge over empirical knowledge? Why do people think that Shakespeare is more true about the motivations of people than cognitive scientists, or that God is good over the fact of childhood leukemia? The first reason is that all thought is based on metaphor (Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh) arising from basic biological functions, so we literally use the same processes of thinking about an argument as we do about a journey. So, to an extent, all our knowledge is metaphorical. We are more comfortable describing things in everyday metaphors than in deeply embedded metaphors (such as mathematics). The second reason is that we enormously prefer, and value, our areas of expertise over other areas. An artist will think that art tells us more about human nature than linguistics to a linguistics professor, and vice versa.
The assertion that metaphoric knowledge provides more eternal truth than scientific , empirical knowledge is the most pure example of "truthiness" that I have seen in a while. Truthiness is defined as, "a quality characterizing a "truth" that a person claims to know intuitively "from the gut" or because it "feels right" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.[1] "
Metaphor is a fabulous tool for communication, something basic to our way of understanding the world around us, perhaps the best tool for communication we have. But being a useful tool of communication doesn't make something more true, it makes it easier to explain.
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2 comments:
Good points, Dan.
But this...
" So, we have two methods of describing truth, one that varies over time and according to the individual,and one that remains the same and is the same for all individuals. It seems to me that the second accords with reality to a much greater extent."
The problem is that observation is never the same for two individuals. You and I have both been present at any number of events. But, were we to each recount our experiences at these events, I venture that our recollections would be vastly different. So, where is the truth?
I believe that truth is independent of accounts or recollection. All that we can do is try to do our best at faithfully describing what is the truth, which is different than our description. Empirical descriptions are specifically designed to remove as much of the problem that you describe as possible (which is why scientific description must be replicable.)
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