Blog 4

Metaphors are powerful tools of teaching and understanding that have helped people gain and spread knowledge since the dawn of recorded history, they help us understand by making connections between things but there is a significant danger when people fail to understand the exact nature of these connections. Many reputable linguists have given their two cents on the topic and have generally come to the agreement that the language used in metaphors can have major implications in the perceived meaning of a metaphor including Michael Erard who used the example of the metaphor “upstairs (logical) and downstairs (emotional) brain” inadvertently suggesting that the downstairs brain is “bad” in his publication See through words. It is important to see metaphors as they are to avoid finding false meaning in a metaphor, the previous example may not have seemed that scary but in reality that one metaphor attempting to explain how the brain works may have caused some amount of bias in the people who internalize it against the emotional part of themselves. To avoid getting the false meaning from metaphors one must first know what metaphors essentially are and why they work. Humans think in “straight lines”, this of course is a metaphor and also helps explain why metaphors work. what this metaphor essentially says is that human minds are designed so that they can only solve one problem or make one connection between ideas in their mind at once. Think for example how you would solve a the math equation like 34+12(11)-13, I bet that you didn’t just throw all those numbers in your head and do all the adding subtracting and multiplying at once you probably did the multiplication, than added 34 than subtracted 12 which is essentially what you do all the time piecing information together. All of what i just said can be summarized in the previously stated metaphor, humans think in straight lines, but what if I told you without the right context that metaphor may be dangerous. I have a question that can be asked in the context of the metaphor or the longer explanation “can people ever grasp a concept that is “curvy”, “nonlinear” or not “straightforward”. In the context of the metaphor the easy answer would be “no people think in straight lines so how can they grasp something with a “curve”” the diction relating to straight lines suggests that you can’t make curved lines out of straight lines because you literally can’t do that with literal straight lines but in reality we use simple connections to solve complex problems every day. This is why it is important to learn how to protect your self from being unintentionally misinformed by metaphors.

Metaphors have been used by the most brilliant minds all throughout history to make the abstract ideas they had more tangible to the common people. As tools of comparative understanding metaphors are the perfect tool to dumb down complex things by comparing them to more simple things. As geary remarked in his publication, most of the theories that einstein came up with were explained and conceptualized using metaphoric methods (a train moving thru a tunnel exc). How can deny the explanatory significance of metaphors when einstein himself was so keen on using them in his theories.