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metaphors and their dissed contents
Apr. 21st, 2012 10:40 amI have been reflecting again on the easy rejection by the literal-minded of the frequent misuses of such metaphors from physics as "uncertainty" and "entanglement."
If I recall what Werner Heisenberg wrote many decades ago about uncertainty in everyday life, he described quite valid functions of uncertainty in interpretation theory and the social sciences, even though these functions had nothing to do with his own Uncertainty Principle. Likewise, "entanglement" is one of those potent metaphors that allows people to describe operative principles in any number of complex systems, even though those systems are socially determined for the most part and have nothing at all to do with quantum entanglement.
What intrigues me is that no one seems to have been using the metaphor to perform perfectly valid conceptual work in the other intellectual disciplines until they had the opportunity to borrow the metaphor for their own purposes of productive misprision or simple misunderstanding.
This has all been dealt with by any number of theorists already, but in spite of that, folks still satisfy themselves with sneering "that's not what entanglement means," instead of noticing that valid intellectual work is getting done that was not getting done before the misunderstanding or deliberate misuse of the term occurred.
Problems only arise when the use of the metaphor is taken to imply some actual measurable correlation between the behavior of subatomic particles and the behavior of complex social and cultural systems. The two may somehow be related by virtue of being part of the same universe or corner of the multiverse, but one is mathematically describable, the other is not, in spite of the futile efforts to undo sociology's physics envy (cf. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/opinion/sunday/the-social-sciences-physics-envy.html ) by trying to render the discipline mathematical in ways that the interaction of complex systems and individual methods of investigation simply doesn't permit. Anthropologists know far better what the epistemological limitations of their discipline are; economists don't seem to know this at all.
Anthropologists have their own epistemological problems when it comes to going beyond phenomenological description of the functions of opinions held by different communities. Obviously it matters what kind of correspondence to physical reality the opinions have (if nothing else, some of them get the holders of the opinions killed more rapidly than others) but correlating all the variables is singularly challenging without imposing the grid of pre-existing ideologies imported to the situation by the anthropologist. How to wear our analytical grids lightly, and to consider that they may be as wrong as anything else even as we make use of them, is a paramount difficulty that takes us back to the functions of metaphor, if not to some updated and more analytically articulated version of Philip Wheelwright's "assertorial lightness." I am quite certain that such analytical articulations exist, and have been applied to the relevant disciplines, but most of the writers I find in present-day op-ed writing seem not to have read these updates, either.
What all this relates to in the practical ramifications of my own present-day intellectual life, I'll leave unsaid.
If I recall what Werner Heisenberg wrote many decades ago about uncertainty in everyday life, he described quite valid functions of uncertainty in interpretation theory and the social sciences, even though these functions had nothing to do with his own Uncertainty Principle. Likewise, "entanglement" is one of those potent metaphors that allows people to describe operative principles in any number of complex systems, even though those systems are socially determined for the most part and have nothing at all to do with quantum entanglement.
What intrigues me is that no one seems to have been using the metaphor to perform perfectly valid conceptual work in the other intellectual disciplines until they had the opportunity to borrow the metaphor for their own purposes of productive misprision or simple misunderstanding.
This has all been dealt with by any number of theorists already, but in spite of that, folks still satisfy themselves with sneering "that's not what entanglement means," instead of noticing that valid intellectual work is getting done that was not getting done before the misunderstanding or deliberate misuse of the term occurred.
Problems only arise when the use of the metaphor is taken to imply some actual measurable correlation between the behavior of subatomic particles and the behavior of complex social and cultural systems. The two may somehow be related by virtue of being part of the same universe or corner of the multiverse, but one is mathematically describable, the other is not, in spite of the futile efforts to undo sociology's physics envy (cf. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/opinion/sunday/the-social-sciences-physics-envy.html ) by trying to render the discipline mathematical in ways that the interaction of complex systems and individual methods of investigation simply doesn't permit. Anthropologists know far better what the epistemological limitations of their discipline are; economists don't seem to know this at all.
Anthropologists have their own epistemological problems when it comes to going beyond phenomenological description of the functions of opinions held by different communities. Obviously it matters what kind of correspondence to physical reality the opinions have (if nothing else, some of them get the holders of the opinions killed more rapidly than others) but correlating all the variables is singularly challenging without imposing the grid of pre-existing ideologies imported to the situation by the anthropologist. How to wear our analytical grids lightly, and to consider that they may be as wrong as anything else even as we make use of them, is a paramount difficulty that takes us back to the functions of metaphor, if not to some updated and more analytically articulated version of Philip Wheelwright's "assertorial lightness." I am quite certain that such analytical articulations exist, and have been applied to the relevant disciplines, but most of the writers I find in present-day op-ed writing seem not to have read these updates, either.
What all this relates to in the practical ramifications of my own present-day intellectual life, I'll leave unsaid.
