noise

no, the point is that metaphor is not restricted to language. we think in metaphors, and we cannot help but think in metaphors. our entire conceptual understanding of reality is based around a fairly limited set of base metaphors, upon which a basically limitless set of extended metaphors can be constructed.

it all boils down to a matter of truth, and to our ability to assess the truth of the claims we make about the world around us.

while the truth value of following sentences may be judged by an independent observer who understands the metaphors used in them, these sentences can never be said to be objectively true:

the dog is behind the tree.
i don't have enough time to make my flight.
she is in debt.
the day is far from over.
he fell into a coma.
the water went from hot to cold in under a minute.
the noise brought the old man out of his slumber.

our understanding of these sentences is not a mere matter of picking out words and finding out what each one means. take the first one for example. trees obviously have neither fronts nor backs, so the idea that something is behind a tree is only relationally true. in most cultures, this "front-back" orientation is metaphorically projected onto objects such that the object's front faces the observer.

there are some cultures, however, where this front-back orientation is reversed, and objects are conceived as standing in the same orientation as the observer. to a person from one of these cultures, the sentence "the dog is behind the tree" would mean something absolutely different.

all of the metaphors used in the above sentences rely on the reader's ability to relate to very specific kinds of experiences, many of which are only possible because of the nature of the world in which we live and the nature of our bodies.

like the basic metaphor MORE IS UP. to intelligent beings living in space without gravity, this concept would be meaningless.

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duga

i was totally agreeing with you. the point i was trying to make is that those metaphors are tied to a subconscious understanding of what that metaphor implies. though our expression "more is up", literally meaning something totally ambiguous, implies a meaning that would be tied to something universal. there is a popular theory that the fewer syllables it takes to convey a meaning that everyone in that species can understand, the more intelligent that species is. metaphor, implying so much vagueness, can still be understood by most of those in your society. it would also not take a lot of time for someone from a different society to pick up what certain metaphors might imply.

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Confusion will be my epitaph...

davidMC1982

The speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458m/s

The second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom

The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1⁄299 792 458 of a second


How do the above stack up? Certainly, the units of measurement may be man made, but the phenomenon they describe are very real. The planets will continue to orbit the sun whether we're here to observe them or not, for instance.

You seem to be attributing "sentences" to science that science would not use to describe the world. Sure, a scientist may state that something is hot or cold, but in the course of their experiments, if the temperature of an object were important to said experiment, it would be measured and not simply described. Your argument seems to boil down to the fact that humans use words to describe things in terms other humans can understand.

In your example of a dog being behind a tree, it is objectively true that, from the frame of reference of the observer, the dog is behind the tree. A third party could observe this by creating a coordinate system and plotting the positions of the relevant objects. Just because we describe things in terms relative to our own experience, this in no way inhibits the possibility to "describe" things in absolute terms. In fact, describing things in absolute terms is the very nature of science.