A metaphor can express, vividly and unforgettably, some feature or
features of a situation. It can do this best for people who are already
independently familiar with the facts of the situation. Familiar by what
Bertrand Russell once called "direct acquaintance" as opposed to
"description". For example, I am directly familiar with my work
environment; the people, the choices, the uncertainties, the daily
context. If, at lunch with one of my colleagues, we contemplate the
situation, it's likely that within ten or fifteen minutes of our
conversation you'd be able to hear us use dozens of images, metaphors,
figurative expressions of one sort or another to characterize our work
situation and illuminate it for ourselves. That's really very common.
But now consider those same images and metaphors if we try to use them to
communicate information. Say to someone who is _not_ immediately
acquainted with the environment whose content they so illuminate for me
and my workmate. Clearly, in this case, they're playing a _very_
different role. And it's not one for which they're well suited.
Isn't the vocabulary from chaos and complexity and nonlinear systems like
that? Within the domain of their original application, they illuminate
and clarify. Outside it, cut off from their support, they have to live on
their own as though they themselves represented some kind of information.
And they don't.
There's nothing wrong, obviously, with using the image of the Mandelbrot
Set to illuminate features of my situation, or of our common experience.
But it has to stand on its own two feet, as it were, in doing this. And
what we have be particularly on guard against is the temptation to confuse
its role here, as a clarifying metaphor, with its role in its original
mathematical home. And the same goes for other fractals, and chaos, and
so on.
Regards
jamzen@world.std.com
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