A metaphor lets us view something as something else. Thus it\u00c2\u00a0has creative potential: “a forest of legislation” lets us take the behaviours, meaning and ideas we normally associate with forests and apply them in a completely different context.<\/p>\n
But if no two situations in “reality” are the same – if Heraclitus is right that everything flows, nothing stays\u00c2\u00a0<\/em>– then merely calling a forest a forest would be something metaphorical. It would be setting up an equivalence or similarity between two things that are actually different: forests as you have seen them before, and the new forest that has just flowed to you as part of the stream of lived experience.<\/p>\n If this is correct, then merely\u00c2\u00a0naming<\/em> something, calling it what we perceive it to be, is somehow in part a metaphorical or creative action. And there would also be something metaphorical about applying\u00c2\u00a0equipment and tools to solve apparently identical problems – in identifying situation X as a context where tool Y should be applied.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A metaphor lets us view something as something else. Thus it\u00c2\u00a0has creative potential: “a forest of legislation” lets us take the behaviours, meaning and ideas we normally associate with forests and apply them in a completely different context. But if no two situations in “reality” are the same – if Heraclitus is right that everything […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[49],"tags":[122,38,64,167],"class_list":["post-1357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy","tag-equipment","tag-metaphors","tag-natural-language","tag-particularity"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/py2qT-lT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monomorphic.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monomorphic.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monomorphic.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monomorphic.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monomorphic.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1357"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.monomorphic.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1357\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1358,"href":"https:\/\/www.monomorphic.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1357\/revisions\/1358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monomorphic.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monomorphic.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monomorphic.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}