Iain Cameron's Diary
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2002-04-16 - 10:01 a.m.

Birmingham trip moved things on - quite a lot of new issues emerged but thats probably needed to shift me out of the mode of creating an abstract universe on paper. There is also a concensus on a lot of issues in terms of the basics of the new project.

The drive back from Birmingham was great - 6 - 8.30pm - setting sun. Especially the part from the Ridgeway south over the Kennet then east towards Basingstoke - very good views towards London, I must do some more detailed work on these. Must get round to writing about the beauties of the chalk landscape. Should also mention that Peter Ackroyd's newish book on London mentions the Tothill maze in the first chapter. Roughly his line is that the early foundation myths of London probably have something in them.

Too many meetings today. And the trains were typically chaotic to get the day off to a bad start. Tonight the group meets to consider the key chapter of the book on Discipline which I have been skimming in preparation.

Poems/statements etc. One tool in this arena which I worked on when I was a Research Fellow at Edinburgh university is metaphor. There is quite a decent body of opinion that goes for the idea that metaphor is not just an expressive device but can also be a cognitive one. So for example, scientific theories can have metaphors at the heart. Thus is we say hormones are chemical messengers then when we use the word messenger we are bringing in a theory about their function. This is an apt example because the discovery of hormones in the first decades of the twentieth century were a big factor in the outlook of those who felt science was killing poetry.

A metaphor is an act of violence on the semantic net. It picks up one node on the net and drags it over to frame an identity with another node. Adrenaline might be a node - with a chemical structure but unknown function - "mesenger" would be another node.

The interaction view of metaphor suggests that a metaphor is a proposed reconfiguration of the semantic net. But the important part is that a metaphor is an agenda for action - a what-if statement. It invites the reader to do the work rather than doing it for him/her - unlike a simile does.

It is a small step from this interaction theory of metaphor to the idea of scientific paradgim as set out by Thomas Kuhn. The paradigm structures a domain in a way which allows "problem solving" activity to proceed - you could say this is a matter of working out the details of the core metaphor.

A good phrase I picked up at Edinburgh is "metaphorical redescription" - we use a metaphor to describe something we already partly know - to enable us to move into the unknown.

Time for coffee and a flapjack.

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