The Devious Logic of Metaphors

Опубликовано 6 сентября 2016, 5:23

If robots understood metaphors, would that make them poets? Should we be suspicious of anything metaphorical? Why are metaphors so messy and what makes them so neat? Philosophers since Plato have complained that metaphors are evasive and slippery at best; at worst perhaps nothing more than a device for telling lies and misleading and corrupting the mind.  After Plato, the same complaint shows up with Francis Bacon, with Rene Descartes, John Locke, David Hume, Rudolph Carnap, to name but a few.   But is the case so bad?  What would mathematics be if we could not assert that A=B, an expression that has the same schematic structure as metaphors.  This presentation will draw upon the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of philosophical pragmatism, to develop a view of metaphor as an essential tool of logic and a foundational element for reasoning.