It discusses how metaphors in language fundamentally shape how we think and behave, even when we aren't aware of them. For example, in the second chapter they write about the concept "Time is money":
== (this is a quote, including the italics for emphasis)
TIME IS MONEY
You're wasting my time.
This gadget will save you hours.
I don't have the time to give you.
How do you spend your time these days?
That flat tire cost me an hour.
[...more examples omitted here for brevity]
Time in our culture is a valuable commodity. It is a limited resource that we use to accomplish our goals. Because of the way that the concept of work has developed in modern Western culture, where work is typically associated with the time it takes and time is precisely quantified, it has become customary to pay people by the hour, week, or year. In our culture TIME IS MONEY in many ways: telephone message units, hourly wages, hotel room rates, yearly budgets, interest on loans, and paying your debt to society by "serving time." These practices are relatively new in the history of the human race, and by no means do they exist in all cultures.
== (end quote)
Reading that passage, especially the last line, by no means do they exist in all cultures, really hit me. I never really realized how common these time=money metaphors really are, and I literally can't imagine a world where time is not money myself - the metaphor is that internalized.
I've now heard Maggie's talk and she seems reasonable. It's only the article's author that seems to be stretching it too far...
Metaphors are an interesting abstration because they are like a functor from one ontology to another.
I believe the goal of this blog post was a fun exploration to try to explicitly consider the ways we use these cognitive metaphors in our technical language, so as to be more aware of them and to able to use them more effectively in communication.
I also agree with you about the point of the blog post, it just wasn't very clear when I first posted. I see Julia has since re-written parts of it, for example removing Maggie's "frivolous" quote, which was a bit misleading for those of us who hadn't listened to her talk.
> And I definitely wonder this sometimes! I really like explaining things in straightforward ways.
Pollute, misleading, unrelated are not words I associate with merely "being aware". An overly charitable reading I think.
The author edited the article in the mean time. It was initially fairly negative towards metaphors, and now appears more neutral.
That's why it's important to examine these kinds of things as metaphors; it at once conveys that there's probably some 'meta-meaning' going on modeling discussion around one idea using the terminology and implied mechanism of another, and at the same time that these models may not be perfectly encapsulating, so reminding us to be careful assuming too much about the extent to which the metaphor maps.
>>> How else talk about
exactly! By being aware that they're metaphors, we can genuinely ask these questions, and wonder if there might be different, or even better, models. Metaphors are especially interesting where they break down, and deceive.
See also bobbiechen's comment about Lakoff's work.
Broadening a definition and a metaphor are not the same thing. Basically every "metaphor" mentioned is just a word that has more than one definition. Sure, the origin of the new definition was likely at first someone making a metaphor, but now they're just words.
It hurt its self in it's confusion dot jpg etc
So it can be interesting to see which metaphors we use. Do they say something about how we think about things? Do the metaphors we use effect what ideas we come up with? Would switching the metaphors up give us different ideas? Probably. Are the metaphors the same for all fields of discourse? Probably not, but only one way to find out. What does that tell us?
I think it's interesting. I think lots of metaphors become so 'trite' that we forget they are metaphors at all, but they are probably still having influence on how we conceptualize things.
(The 'processes [or other subsystems] as people' metaphor is one I (and I'm sure others) use intentionally and find useful; I think this is one of the more intentional ones; it's not meant to be bad to use metaphors; but the map still isn't the territory).
I've barely started reading Douglas Hofstadter, but isn't all language a heap of metaphors? I mean, in a man page, how could you talk about a program without using metaphors? The closest thing you could get is probably code or pseudo-code, and even that is just the top of a massive pile of metaphors all the way down to moving electrons around.
Maybe, thought it wasn't clear from her initial article. I see she's now re-worded it (she removed Maggie's quote about frivolity), which indeed makes it clearer it's not a criticism, just an exploration.
Indeed, language is a heap of metaphors and idioms. It's interesting to consider which ones occur in different languages and which ones don't (in Spanish you are not "moved" by an emotion, for example).
(Absurd, I know!)
Hmmm. Isn't "further" somewhat related to space or distance? And in any case, it doesn't convey the same meaning as "she ran out of ideas", which is quite definitive -- we're not unsure, we know there are no more ideas left in her mind.
I'm sure we all agree (even Julia and Maggie, it would seem) it's not practical or clearer to talk like this.
> I'm sure we all agree (even Julia and Maggie, it would seem) it's not practical or clearer to talk like this.
Yeah, I'm just having fun trying to play by rules I haven't fully grokked.
The author mentions a talk by Maggie Appleton (which I've not heard, so maybe she's being misrepresented [1]) where she asks "Aren’t metaphors just a frivolous distraction?". But it becomes impossible to talk about anything, software included, without using them. To the point where I question whether it's useful at all to think of them as metaphors.
How else talk about what a string or a file contains without using the word "contains"? Is "she had no more ideas" clearer than "she ran out of ideas"? (And wouldn't the former be a metaphor of possession, as if one could "have" ideas? Maybe it's better to say "she was idea-less"?)
How would you say "he reused this variable name" without a metaphor of resources? "He chose a variable name that was also the name of another variable"?
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[1] edit: I've now watched Maggie's talk, and her point is that metaphors are useful and indeed inescapable.