I don't mean to deny the sagacity of the observations reproduced in the post, Lakoff & al. But it makes me uncomfortable that Lakoff's approach to metaphor may invite some to forget the primary existence of metaphor in discourse, as a communication device of huge power that needs to be kept in check.

To take an example of historical dimension, just 10 years ago the purely civilian devices (ab)used by the Atta commando were taken as a metaphor of equivalent military means. The enormous costs of the ensuing 2003 invasion of Iraq "justified" by imaginary WMDs should be proof enough that this was an abysmal equation.

(But it isn't even clear that the damage stops there. A curious side-effect of the promoted elliptic terminology of "Weapons of Mass Destruction" was to solidify the convention that there should be no overwhelming issue with any massive man-made destruction of the environment. What appears to be remain characteristic of the current opinions of many former supporters of the Bush administration.)

It seems to be a prediction of this idea...

Not quite. Different cultures can make slightly different metaphors. For example, there is at least one tribe that uses the metaphor of time as being a space in front of and behind the speaker, but while we think of the past as behind us and the future being in front of us, they think of the past in front of them (because they can "see" it) and the future behind them (because they can't see it).

where's my mountain of footnotes/citations???

I'm experimenting with a new style. I cite only three 'review' sources from the literature: or rather, I link directly to them in the text instead of writing references for them. Hundreds of studies are available if one checks those sources. This kind of post takes much less time to write, but may be less useful or impressive or something.

I have an issue with the drift of relocating metaphors from their home in discourse to some place in our deep selves: because I feel the aptitude to promote concerning metaphor is that to distinguish on a case by case basis, in discursive context, between rightful and misleading use of metaphor.

I beg forgiveness but I am taking advantage of an aggressive mood after reading a few pages of the "evolution" track, to state my criticisms with some punch - as I think there is some worth to letting punch go.

First, I find the views expressed around here somewhat ethnocentric : the battle between evolutionism and creationism is an alien story to me, and evolutionist rallying cries I tend to perceive as a disagreeable form of representation of creationism - comparable, say, to how the typical aggressive tone of US rappers doesn't translate to my distant ears as rebel or anti-establishment but as directly representative of generic US arrogance as expressed in finance or military matters for instance. Speaking of US military matters, an issue I have with the dominance of fitness coefficients over explanations of evolution, is that fitness coefficients refer to exactly the same abstraction that failed to be spotted while it meant observing as severely pathological the differential of mortality as a function of side in war at the moment victors made Broadway.

I mean, twenty some years ago, at the end of operation Desert Storm.

I beg forgiveness again, punch :)

What this means on the face of it is that US and allies harbor an extended school of scientific thought inspired by economics that finds good enough the huge simplification of believing in fitness coefficients when the purpose is to criticize (with an eye on usefully controlling) the marvelously creative process of evolution, but not good enough when the purpose is to criticize (with an eye on usefully controlling) the disgustingly destructive process of war. (Double standard !)

One obvious abstract feature of the most regular type of war is that it distributes casualties over sides, in the minimal case, two sides. This is formally the same thing as a locus with two alleles. The relative fitness coefficients express the skew in casualties depending on side or allele.

For the sake of completeness and courtesy, I'll complement the above with an independent criticism tabooing the notion of criticizing military behavior.

The way population genetics results get threaded into your (I guess standard) exposition of evolution quite mixes levels when it starts with assuming differential fitness coefficients as if they were objective and stable quantities generally measurable in the wild. They aren't. I do not deny that in extreme cases natural evolution processes are streamlined to the point that population genetics models become a fit and explain observed quirks of evolution, but in the general case if you tell me evolution needs be viewed as blind, slow and stupid because of what population genetics tells us about it, my reaction is that this appears to be an artifact of investigating the prowesses of evolution only downstream and not upstream of those fitness coefficients that supernaturally enter your models just like Adam and Eve supernaturally learn morals from the forbidden fruit.

Probably from being born twin I've long entertained a strong intuition that may be written down as "suppose is typical your choice together with what determines it, and take responsibility for the result". There is a temptation to relate it to Kant's imperative, but there are problems (typically) illustrated by the fact that is obvious the relationship of my version to the topic of this page, while not Kant's.

What I don't understand is so much insistence that Occam's Razor applies only to explanations you address to God. Or else how do you avoid the observation that the simplicity of an explanation is a function of whom you are explaining to ? In the post, you actually touch on the issue, only to observe that there are difficulties interpreting Occam's Razor in the frame of explaining things to humans (in their own natural language), so let's transpose to a situation where humans are completely removed from the picture. Curiously enough, where the same issue occurs in the context of machine languages it is quickly "solved". Makes one wonder what Occam - who had no access to Turing machines - himself had in might.

Also, if you deal in practice with shortening code length of actual programs, at some point you have exploited all the low lying fruit; further progress can come after a moment of contemplation made you observe that distinct paths of control through the code have "something in common" that you may try to enhance to the point where you can factor it out. This "enhancing" follows from the quest for minimal "complexity", but it drives you to do locally, on the code, just the contrary of what you did during the "low-lying fruit" phase, you "complexify" rather than "simplify" two distinct areas of the code to make them resemble each other (and the target result emerges during the process, fun). What I mean to say, I guess, is that even the frame proposed by Chaitin-Kolmogorov complexity gives only fake reasons to neglect bias (from shared background or the equivalent).

The introduction, choice of example case, and drift of this post, makes me recall my own "political cartooning" of Bush 10 years ago which is just perfect in this context. It takes the form of the claim that the Python computer language shell passed (a fascinating approximation to) the Turing test with the following patriotic responses to inquiries :

| >>> 'USA' in 'CRUSADE'

| True

| >>> filter(lambda W : W not in 'ILLITERATE','BULLSHIT')

| 'BUSH'

About thinking without words?

When I was 10 years old I had a habit of talking to myself. Gradually my self-talk got more and more non-standard to the point where it would be impossible for others to understand, as I realized I didn't need to clarify the thoughts I was trying to convey to myself. I would understand them anyway. I started using made-up words for certain concepts, just as a memory aid. Eventually words become exclusively a memory aid, something to help my short-term memory stay on track, and I would go for minutes at a time without ever using any words in my thought processes.

I think the reason I started narrating my thoughts again is because I found it really hard to communicate with people due to the habits I had built up during all those conversations with myself. I would forget to put in context, use words in unusual ways, and otherwise fail to consider how lost the listener might be. You can have great ideas, but if you can't communicate them they don't count for anything socially - that is the message from society. So I think there is effectively some social pressure to use natural languages (English, etc.) in your thought processes, obscuring the fact that it can all happen more efficiently with minimal verbal interference. I think words can be strong corrupting influence in the thought process in general, the short argument being that they are designed for the notoriously limited and linear process of mouth-to-ear communication. There is a lot more I could say about that, if anyone is interested.