> It occurred to me earlier today what the grounds are for being
> apprehensive about misunderstanding of concepts such as "chaos" and
> "complexity". And they relate back to a much earlier thread about models
> and metaphors and images.
>
> A metaphor can express, vividly and unforgettably, some feature or
> features of a situation. It can do this best for people who are already
> independently familiar with the facts of the situation. Familiar by what
> Bertrand Russell once called "direct acquaintance" as opposed to
> "description". For example, I am directly familiar with my work
> environment; the people, the choices, the uncertainties, the daily
> context. If, at lunch with one of my colleagues, we contemplate the
> situation, it's likely that within ten or fifteen minutes of our
> conversation you'd be able to hear us use dozens of images, metaphors,
> figurative expressions of one sort or another to characterize our work
> situation and illuminate it for ourselves. That's really very common.
>
> But now consider those same images and metaphors if we try to use them to
> communicate information. Say to someone who is _not_ immediately
> acquainted with the environment whose content they so illuminate for me
> and my workmate. Clearly, in this case, they're playing a _very_
> different role. And it's not one for which they're well suited.
>
> Isn't the vocabulary from chaos and complexity and nonlinear systems like
> that? Within the domain of their original application, they illuminate
> and clarify. Outside it, cut off from their support, they have to live on
> their own as though they themselves represented some kind of information.
> And they don't.
>
> There's nothing wrong, obviously, with using the image of the Mandelbrot
> Set to illuminate features of my situation, or of our common experience.
> But it has to stand on its own two feet, as it were, in doing this. And
> what we have be particularly on guard against is the temptation to confuse
> its role here, as a clarifying metaphor, with its role in its original
> mathematical home. And the same goes for other fractals, and chaos, and
> so on.
>
> Regards
> jamzen@world.std.com
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------_-
> _ - _ If our software were _really_ hardware independent _ -
> - _ _ - we wouldn't need computers at all. - _ _ -
>
>
Re Jim's remark about the local utility of metaphors, versus their
degradation when exported, and re his quotation about hardware
independent software: if software companies would stop exporting their
mind-crushing metaphors and start using DeMorgan's relational concepts
(1845), the series for "dummies" wouldn't be so essential to the average
Ph. D. who tries to understand what software types are saying. It would
also help if some of them had to work a few boundary value problems, to
learn something about boundary conditions or initial conditions.
Thank Dieu not everyone insists that the entire universe respond to their
private metaphor dictionary!
From: "JOHN N. WARFIELD" <jwarfiel@osf1.gmu.edu>