Open Thinkering

Note: this is a post reflecting on one of the modules of my MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice. You can see all of the related posts in this category. 

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Here are the front pages of some newspapers published in England this morning, with most of them covering the 80th anniversary of ‘D-Day’:

As you can see, metaphorical language abounds: “grasp,” “flinch,” “ditches,” “bails out,” “pressure on,” and of course “going down of the sun.” As a football fan, the photo of a face next to the words “JACK OUT” conveys quickly and succinctly that Jack Grealish hasn’t made “the cut” for the England squad to play in the upcoming EURO 2024 Championships.

There are many metaphors that have evolved over time to become such a part of everyday language that the roots are lost. Some of these lost conceptual metaphors are deeply embedded in our embodied experiences. For instance, why do people talk of being ‘in’ time, ‘in’ position, ‘out of’ favour, ‘out of’ luck, or ‘in’ love? These all use what Lakoff and Johnson (1980) call the container metaphor. Love, luck, favour, and position in space or time are states, and states are often described as if they were, metaphorically speaking, containers which someone can be inside or outside. The very notion of ‘being inside’ or ‘being outside’ has potentially much deeper roots in our embodied experiences, such as that of being inside the womb rather than outside of it.

[…]

We live embodied lives and so metaphors that involve tangible objects can be quite helpful in making sense of that physicality.

[…]

However, for situations where information plays a significant but often unclear role in the ways that people think, feel, perceive and judge, it may be problematic to rely on physical metaphors. There are situations where perception, sense-making and emotion, and not physical movement, are of prime concern. And, following Gregory Bateson (1972)… not everything that we might want to communicate is accessible to the conscious mind. Is it possible that in such situations, physical metaphors may lack the variety to deal with the phenomenon of interest? Could they be misleading and sending people off, as it were, on the wrong plane?

(The Open University, 2020)

This is really interesting to me, especially as we start to interact with un-embodied ‘consciousnesses’ such as AI. Reflecting on my interactions with LLMs such as ChatGPT, when I ask for a metaphor the most common examples tend to be one of a garden, the solar system, or an orchestra. Even though LLMs are trained on data created by humans, because they are not embodied, I suppose they’re less likely to use physical metaphors.

Given the above quotation, I’m not sure if this will be more or less useful in terms of human development? If we use physical metaphors unthinkingly, then perhaps being more intentional about them could be useful. Or will using fewer physical metaphors make things feel less human?

References

• The Open University (2020) ‘P2.4.4 Covert nature of metaphor’, TB871 Block 2 People stream [Online]. Available at https://learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=2261482&section=5.4 (Accessed 7 June 2024).

Note: this is a post reflecting on one of the modules of my MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice. You can see all of the related posts in this category. 

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It was my dad who introduced me to the music of The Beatles. There was one song that I never really understood as a child, though, entitled Happiness Is a Warm Gun. Why was the gun warm, I wondered? Surely John Lennon isn’t suggesting that shooting things makes you happy?

Lennon derived the title of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” from an article in the May 1968 issue of American Rifleman. The magazine belonged to George Martin, the Beatles’ producer, who had brought it with him to the recording studio. Lennon recalled his reaction to the phrase: “I just thought it was a fantastic, insane thing to say. A warm gun means you just shot something.” Written by Warren W. Herlihy, the article told the story of how Herlihy had introduced his teenage son to shooting and how much the young man had come to enjoy the sport. The magazine had adapted the headline from the title of the bestselling book by Peanuts cartoonist Charles M. Schulz, Happiness is a Warm Puppy.

(Wikipedia)

As the module materials (The Open University, 2020) point out, there are some concepts that have a plurality of metaphors attached to them, such as happiness:

Like the module author, and I assume lots of people before hitting puberty, reading stories where people fall in love and use all kinds of metaphors seems completely unrelatable. That is, of course, until you have the experience yourself and then all of the song lyrics and descriptions in books start to make sense.

This is an important point when it comes to explaining things to other people. You can only use resonant metaphors if people have shared experiences. Otherwise, those metaphors are likely to be lost on them.

References

• The Open University (2020) ‘Hiding, revealing, plurality and radial metaphors’, TB871 Block 2 People stream [Online]. Available at https://learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=2261482&section=5.3 (Accessed 7 June 2024).

Note: this is a post reflecting on one of the modules of my MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice. You can see all of the related posts in this category. 

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I did a double-take when I saw this in the module materials:

If you draw on the world of frozen ice crystals and describe someone as a snowflake, then you can, over time, create a new category of ‘snowflake-like people’ – people who might see themselves as unique but can melt away when conditions do not suit them. With repeated use amongst a group of people, ‘snowflake’ stops being a novel metaphor and becomes a label. From that point, it is only a short habitual walk to finding its way into a dictionary as a phrase with its own established meaning.

Many ordinary words come from metaphors in this way – for example the local ‘branch’ of a society, the next ‘step’ in a process, ‘cultivating’ new business relationships, and so on. Some, like ‘filibuster’, ‘shambles’, and ‘bedlam’, have more exotic origins.

Words such as those mentioned above are sometimes called dead metaphors, but dead metaphors can sometimes come back to life.

For instance, targets are fashionable management tools these days, often justified by those taking a first-order cybernetic view of organisations. But the word ‘target’ is the diminutive of the medieval word ‘targe’; a targe was a small shield used by foot soldiers for protection in battle. So maybe it is not that surprising that in organisations composed of humans, managerial ‘target setting’ often has unexpected consequences. This is particularly true when the targets have been imposed or have been set without adequate consultations with the people who are expected to achieve them, and who are most likely to be affected by them too!

Some writers have argued that the brain treats metaphors and categories in much the same way. For ‘he is a plumber’ the brain just gathers up what it knows about plumbers and connects it to ‘he’. For ‘he is a snowflake’ it does just the same, but about snowflakes instead. The difference between fact and metaphor would turn out to be secondary.

(The Open University, 2020)

I haven’t seen the phrase ‘dead metaphors’ outside of my own work, and the very specific part of the world of Pragmatism that I studied as part of my doctoral thesis. The way that it’s discussed here makes it all-too-relevant to the world we live in at the moment, in an increasingly-tribal world of information where labels are applied to groups in an attempt to stifle conscious thought and reasoned debate.

More on all of this over at ambiguti.es

References

• The Open University (2020) ‘Relative level of source and target’, TB871 Block 2 People stream [Online]. Available at https://learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=2261482&section=5.2.2 (Accessed 7 June 2024).