Last updated: Sat, Aug 31, 2024
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to be free
(Some material taken from my essays on conservatism.)
Metaphor is the use of a word or phrase to apply to something other than its literal meaning. An effective metaphor will link the subject of conversation to its metaphoric substitute by some common trait, in this case, blackness. In the Lennon/McCartney lyric above, "blackbird" is slang for a "black" person, or as we say today in the US, a person of color. The lyric unwinds the racial slang and has us envision a black bird, creating a new metaphor from it. The bird is singing in the dead night, an image which the song turns into a freedom cry. The bird uses his broken wings to fly and his sunken eyes to see, weaving further metaphors of freedom, hope, and empowerment.
McCartney created a beautiful message through his clever manipulation of language, an effect not attainable using more literal language. The lyric must be followed carefully to find its meaning, a signature technique of the Beatles. That is art.
I use the term "metaphor" here to mean applying some name ("blackbird") to something it is not (a Black person). A metaphor is made up of two terms, a tenor and a vehicle. In my example, the Black person is the tenor and the blackbird is the vehicle. (The term "metaphor" has more-specific and different meanings when discussed by linguists or rhetoricians, but for my purposes, it is a general term.)
Metaphor is meant to transfer qualities of the vehicle to the tenor. Thus, the Black person has wings and can fly with its broken wings. Metaphor can be used in many ways, including in advertisements and political discourse. It can make a message more compelling, engage the hearer's imagination, and make the meaning less specific and less every-day. Political rhetoric has no rules of usage nor indeed few rules of any sort, so metaphor can be used in political rhetoric in the worst possible ways. The same can be said of adverts.Linguistic scientists have found convincing evidence that metaphor is an intrinsic part of the way we think, even about rather mundane mechanical things. A thought or a problem (tenors) can be heavy, not just rocks or logs (vehicles). One thing can be after another in time, in space, or in importance. We use metaphor naturally and without awareness.
This makes us, you might say, susceptible to metaphors. When we first hear a novel metaphor, we search for the commonality between the subject and the metaphor. When we find it, we go on from there. But as a metaphor becomes more commonplace we notice it less and less. We accept the metaphor, and all the characteristics that belong to the vehicle might be transferred to its tenor. If someone refers to an event as a "car crash," for example, we know that the event was something bad. But a "car crash" is different from a "problem" or a "mistake." How many of the implications of "car crash" do our minds transfer to the event when we encounter the metaphor? How many were intended by the speaker? This is how metaphor can lead to misunderstanding.
Transferring characteristics (from the vehicle to the tenor) is part of the normal use of metaphor. Metaphor transfers characteristics from one class of things to another in an unspecified and often un-noticed way.
Language is certainly how we communicate complex ideas, and there is evidence that language is basic to our ability to think about complex things. When we use language to reason, we are making a linguistic model of concrete or abstract things, and using the characteristics that we associate with their linguistic labels to make predictions or inferences about the concrete or abstract things. Thus, characteristics that are assigned to things via metaphor enter into our understanding and discussion of reality.
An analogy is different from a metaphor in that the analog is presented as "like" another thing for the purpose of explaining or modeling the other thing. If I say that "Pain is like a dripping faucet; the effects accumulate," I make an explicit analogy and I limit the scope of the analogy at the same time.
The distinction between metaphor and analogy is a little fuzzy (metaphor). Once the metaphor or analogy has been made, even if the creator attempts to limit the scope of the likeness, characteristics can bleed (metaphor) from the vehicle to the tenor or from the subject to its analog within the minds of those who encounter the terms. This phenomenon is called "conceptual blending" or "conceptual bleeding."
While there is room for some debate about how fundamental metaphors are in human cognition, it is indisputable that categories are fundamental. Categories form groups of objects, concrete or abstract, on the basis of shared features. Our core intuitions are based on categories--inert objects, animals, plants, humans, and others. (Core Intuitions and Core Behaviors.) Categories allow us to apply a set of attributes to objects based on their membership in categories.
Categories are a cognitive shortcut. Using them, we can know a lot about an object by knowing its category. One set of rules applies in general to all members of the category. When there are exceptions, those exceptions can be learned, as a sort of cognitive footnote. (Mammals bear live young except for the platypus.) Hence, you need fewer cognitive understandings to deal with a category than you'd need to deal separately with each object.
In fact, the scientific project can be seen as the search for rules that apply to categories.
The lever was one of the first useful categories that was identified at the beginning of the Scientific Revoution. The lever itself is easily described. It is a beam with a fulcrum or pivot point. Force can be applied to the beam at two or more positions. It obeys a simple rule: In the case of a lever operating in a gravitational field, the product of the mass of the first object and its displacement along the lines of gravity (i.e., up or down) is equal to the product of mass and displacement for the second object.
(The lever rules are stated only a little differently when force is applied rather than weight.)
The category here is "lever" and the common characteristic is the relation between displacement and force (or weight). This rule is still taught in introductory physics and again in engineering schools. It allows us to use levers in engineered ways to transfer force and movement.
You can pass introductory physics using only the definitions and rules stated above, but to design real-world machines you must use a much-more-complex set of rules. For example, the pivot point or fulcrum must operate with no friction or with neglible friction. If the weights or the forces are not applied in parallel to each other, the simple product must be modified to account for the angle of force. If the beam is not weightless, that must be considered. If a weight is applied, the center-of-gravity of the weight must not shift during movement of the beam. And so on. This is why it takes patience and effort to become an engineer.
If, as is common in medical training materials, you consider the joints in the body to be levers, you run into additional problems. For example, joints are not frictionless pivots, and in fact some joints don't merely pivot, they also glide. In many practical situations, the pivots themselves are not fixed in space, but are moving around as a movement develops.
Metaphors, analogies, and categories like "lever" have similar pitfalls (metaphor). They are useful, perhaps essential, in that they associate characteristics and behaviors with categories. But they carry the same risk of mis-applying generalizations when either of two errors occur: 1) When the definition of what belongs and what doesn't belong in a category is unclear; 2) When the shared characteristics and behaviors aren't clearly understood.
The term "stereotype" was coined in the early 20th century to describe oversimplified or exaggerated conceptions about a category, particularly about categories of people. Logically, a stereotype is an error of the same type that metaphor, analogy, and categories can lead to.
Stereotypes have been the subject of a lot of investigation, and many of the characteristics of stereotypes are likely present in the use of categories themselves. For example, it is difficult to set aside stereotypes when judging people. It requires conscious and deliberate reasoning.1 Stereotypes are least accurate when they are about groups that are seen as having interests that aren't congruent with one's own.2 This is consistent with social understandings that I presented in Human Nature and Folk or Cultural Understandings.
If it takes conscious and deliberate reasoning to transcend accepted generalizations, we should expect to find that people prefer to use more-intuitive understandings to deal with complex or socially-charged situations. That seems to be what happens, and that is what is meant by characterizing us as "cognitive misers."
When the adjective "fuzzy" is applied to a term or a concept, it means vague or imprecise. This is not necessarily a pejorative term, because there are legitimate and truth-respecting uses for fuzzy terms. The phenomena that I discussed above, metaphor, analogy, catetories, and so forth, all allow fuzziness to invade discourse, whether deliberately or inadvertently. Hence, much opportunity for fuzziness to affect our thinking is built into language, the tool we use to understand and to communicate.