Hermeneutic Heretic

Obama has the smarts, the plans and, yes, the charisma to capably lead and transform a nation that aches for a new direction.

Editorials & Opinion | Obama for the Democrats | Seattle Times Newspaper

My voice, particularly on this blog, with no readership is of no consequence. I have no vote in American elections although I’ve often felt that people around the world should have at least some delegates in the US nominating conventions. Nevertheless, I cannot but endorse Obama. I’ve reviewed Audacity of Hope (twice, once on the radio, once in Czech press) and I’ve watched quite a few of his speeches; and I cannot do a better job of summarizing my impressions than the Seattle Times above.

I thought, I might add another category for the new year. analogies. This springs from two separate and seemingly conflicting tendencies in my intellectual life. One is to expose potentially harmful and disparate analogies and the other is to create new analogies to illuminate similarities otherwise unnoticed. I use these strategies in teaching, popular writing and academic research possibly to slight excess but on balance there seems little doubt that, when used with a slight amount of reflective caution, analogies are useful both in their construction and desctruction ^[1] .

Now, analogies, in the sense I use them, are nothing more than elaborate metaphors. We could spend years trying to extricate one from the others in this tightly knit weave (spletenec) or family of tropes (irony, metaphor, analogy, etc. and possibly metonymy). We can look at them as either cognitive strategies, textual forms or means of interaction. As cognitive strategies they are a kind of conceptual integration (blending) as described by Fauconnier and Turner - and can be investigated as such. As textual forms, they can but rarely do a purely decorative function (sometimes in the service of so called elegant variation) but mostly they serve to maintain cohesive harmony and coherence of the text. A significant portion of their functionality is to invite some kind of an interaction from the recipient of the text. These three perspectives on analogies are partial and very difficult to separate from one another but they might provide a bit more clarity then the traditional division of these tropes.

These tropes always appear as part of cognitive models (frames, domains, scripts or paradigms). Slightly confusingly, they operate both within models (on submodels) as well as across models but their output is always a new model (a blended conceptual space). Whether we call them metaphors, analogies or by some other name depends on how closely they are integrated, how much is their integration elaborated and what is the nature of their integration. The analogies I will deal with in this category will mostly be explicit, elaborated in some detail, purposeful and project (usually two) complex domain onto one another. They will be fairly loosely integrated in the sense that the identity of the original domains will be preserved and the resulting new model will be a clearly recognizable if slightly modified version of the target domain which the source domain will remain largely (althought not completely) unchanged.
The posts in this category will mostly be random thoughts that come up in my intellectual work rather than discussions of specific texts. They will also always belong in another one or two categories.

I realized that I needed another category dealing with issues related to the position of women in society and cognition. I decided to call it feminism in protest against the frequent dilution of the concept by labeling it ‘gender studies’ or ‘women’s lib’. Now, I very much agree that to understand the way our brains and our society conceptualize and treat women it is important to study men. If only to avoid making assumptions about what is normal. Labels (or the possible constructions of meaning based on the overall semantic field of the word serving as the label) aren’t that important but the people associated with or promoting particular label (for whatever reason) are. And I usually find myself not liking the dilutions associated with the people who promote the idea of ‘gender studies’ as a way of making ‘feminism’ more palatable. And feminism doesn’t deserve that. One of its strong points is precisely because its ability to provoke change of perspective. Feminism is one of the most revolutionary intellectual movements ‘mankind’ has ever seen, transforming our view of society and cognition with such force and vigor that it can never be the same. It deserves recognition of this and not a shame.

Radical feminism (like anything radical) is ridicoulous in one extreme but some of its insights (and only the future will pronounce a judgement on their proportion) are so philosophically profound and groundbreaking that it deserves to be present in our consciousness.

I will use this category to try to outline my perspective on feminism but feminist thinking will be present in posts in other categories, as well. (I also added some of the earlier posts to this category.)

My Week in Thought has found a new home right here.

I am coorganizing a conference Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines (CADAAD) to be held at the University of East Anglia on June 29-30, 2006. The first call for papers goes out today. More on http://discourse.uea.ac.uk.

Anthropology.net | Beyond bones & stones
Anthropology is defined as the study of humankind and their origins throughout different places and times. The study focuses in detail on cultural, biological, linguistic, and archaeological research.

Anthropology.net’s mission statement is to expand understanding and appreciation of humanity by way of creating a cohesive online community of individuals interested in anthropology. This website intends to lead the anthropological community by primarily promoting and facilitating discussion, reviewing research, stewardship of resources, public and professional education, and the dissemination of knowledge for free.

A great site with a wiki component on Anthropology. I’m hoping to do something similar with metaphor and cognitive linguistics - time and good will permitting.

This is a blog (with the prospect of a podcast) that will track my thoughts on a variety of subjects as they come to me in my online life.