For the past thirty years I have been intrigued by the processes of acceptance and integration of new and world changing concepts in the Arts; literature (new styles of unfolding narratives embedded in lyrics, poetry, fiction and journalism), music, dance and stage performance and visual arts and architecture. It is perplexing to see often on one hand generational rejection of new ideas, world views, approaches and limits to interpretation and on the other acceptance of complex concepts and revelations. 

At the UCUI University of Illinois I was involved in a research project, trying to find an understanding of the process by which, for example, Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, as well as Quantum Mechanics, the other major pillar of Modern Physics, was socialized into the mainframe of society. 

In the Arts, it is my father’s view in the fifties of Picasso’s work as that of a charlatan, shared by many otherwise well educated persons, and now, at every supermarket it is possible for Picasso prints to be sold, and persons find no intellectual or social barrier to buy a Picasso print to decorate their home. Did they take art history courses or painting courses? Most likely not. Still, there has been a major organic shift, in the understanding of the public as described by Malcolm Gladwell in his book “Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking.” The original question was framed by the research of Edward T. Hall, to which I was introduced by Professor Len Singer at the Institute of Design, when I became for a rather short time its director. The questions cross all kinds of professional boundaries. How did my grandfather, born in 1866, a church organist, deal with the many styles of music he encountered during his life?

I have never prescribed to the idea of the human genius. He/she may exist, but if, only in very small quantities. All others learn from those with greater capacities to accumulate knowledge and have unique skills to be able to organize and disseminate it. In the true reality, we all stand on shoulders of those before us, no matter what patents and corporate controllers want us to believe. 

For many centuries the church and nobility controlled what later through the Gutenberg press and through language translations and travel was harder to withhold. It is a fact that neither Bill Gates nor Steve Jobs could have achieved their successes without the work at Xerox-PARC they copied or in a tougher analysis plagiarized. 

Ask any art historian and most of the Chinese inventions when traders brought them to Europe, became the domain of Church and Nobility, guarded against the public, like for instance gunpowder, porcelain, paper-making, printing from movable letters, the compass, and many other objects and processes; the list is rather long. 

Also, before any member of any of the European craft-guilds were able to advance to the level of Master, they had to travel on foot through different countries for at least a year to work and explore, but most importantly, to bring back any new knowledge, especially about things that were unfamiliar in the journeyman’s home country. So much for the genius; hurray for the industrial spy. 

Another point, if US designers believe that they are unique, why did they for a short time copy the central European Internationalists Style, unaware that it was not generated by Swiss designers, but by a small group of European designers, including El Lissizky, Kurt Schwitters and Jan Tschichold; a graphic design style that emerged in Russia, the Netherlands, and Germany in the 1920s and was further developed by designers in Switzerland during the 1950s.

shiftingthinking.org

Fragments

In Metaphors We Live By George Lakoff, a linguist, and Mark Johnson, a philosopher, suggest that metaphors not only make our thoughts more vivid and interesting but that they actually structure our perceptions and understanding. Thinking of marriage as a ”contract agreement, for example, leads to one set of expectations, while thinking of it as ”team play,” ”a negotiated settlement,” ”Russian roulette,” ”an indissoluble merger,” or ”a religious sacrament” will carry different sets of expectations. When a government thinks of its enemies as ”turkeys” or ”clowns” it does not take them as serious threats, but if the are ”pawns” in the hands of the communists, they are taken seriously indeed. 

1
Denotation 

is a translation of a sign to its meaning, precisely to its literal meaning, more or less like dictionaries try to define it. Denotation is sometimes contrasted to connotation, which includes associated meanings. The denotational meaning of a word is perceived through visible concepts, whereas connotational meaning evokes sensible attitudes towards the phenomena.

2
Inferential role semantics 

(also conceptual role semantics, functional role semantics, procedural semantics, semantic inferentialism) is an approach to the theory of meaning that identifies the meaning of an expression with its relationship to other expressions (typically its inferential relations with other expressions), in contradistinction to denotationalism, according to which denotations are the primary sort of meaning.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is considered an early proponent of what is now called inferentialism. He believed that the ground for the axioms and the foundation for the validity of the inferences are the right consequences and that the axioms do not explain the consequence.

Contemporary proponents of semantic inferentialism include Robert Brandom, Gilbert Harman, Paul Horwich, and Ned Block. Inferential role semantics originated in the work of late Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Jerry Fodor coined the term “inferential role semantics” in order to criticise it as a holistic (i.e. essentially non-compositional) approach to the theory of meaning. Inferential role semantics is sometimes contrasted to truth-conditional semantics.

The approach is related to accounts of proof-theoretic semantics in the semantics of logic which associate meaning with the reasoning process.

Semantic inferentialism is related to logical expressivism and semantic anti-realism.

3
Robert Brandom

Investigations of linguistic meanings, or semantics, advocate the view that the meaning of an expression is fixed by how it is used in inferences. This project is developed at length in Robert Brandom’s influential 1994 book Making It Explicit, and more briefly in Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (2000); a chapter of that latter work, “Semantic Inferentialism and Logical Expressivism”, outlines the main themes of representationalism (the tradition of basing semantics on the concept of representation) vs. inferentialism (the conviction for an expression to be meaningful is has to be governed by a certain kind of inferential rules) and inferentialism’s relationship to logical expressivism (the conviction that “logic is expressive in the sense that it makes explicit or codifies certain aspects of the inferential structure of our discursive practice”).

4
Michael Dummett

Dummett espoused semantic anti-realism, a position suggesting that truth cannot serve as the central notion in the theory of meaning and must be replaced by verifiability. Semantic anti-realism is sometimes related to semantic inferentialism.

In his 1963 paper “Realism”, he popularized a controversial approach to understanding the historical dispute between realist and other non-realist philosophy such as idealism, nominalism, Irrealism. He characterized all of the latter as anti-realist and argued that the fundamental disagreement between realist and anti-realist was over the nature of truth. For Dummett, realism is best understood as semantic realism, i.e., as the view accepting that every declarative sentence of one’s language is bivalent (determinately true or false) and evidence-transcendent (independent of our means of coming to know which), while anti-realism rejects this view in favour of a concept of knowable (or assertible) truth.

Historically, these debates had been understood as disagreements about whether a certain type of entity objectively exists or not. Thus we may speak of (anti-)realism with respect to other minds, the past, the future, universals, mathematical entities (such as natural numbers), moral categories, the material world, or even thought. The novelty of Dummett’s approach consisted in seeing these disputes as at base, analogous to the dispute between intuitionism and Platonism in the philosophy of mathematics.

Franzane Abella commented that Dummett was really interested not in understanding problems via classical logic but via intutionistic logic, and Abella stated that “such mathematical entities are more likely to be an ontological myth for Dummett… because truth cannot be unidentified via intuition, and of course it will fall on the notion of logical opaqueness, which statements are not likely to be understood easily in the first place.”

Franzane Abella further added that “Dummett has an astounding influence when he brought forward the deep-order justificationist semantics; this influenced the theory of meaning and the classification of understanding via practices, whether the statement can be refuted or not based on its meaning.” Abella summed up by saying that Dummett refuted the theory brought forward by realism about the cognisence of meaning. For example, the psychological change in our conceptions of meaning of any statements should be properly grasped, because if not, there exists an alteration and confusion of meaning, and of course a failure in grasping truth-values.

5
Metaphor 

It is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another.[1] It may provide clarity or identify hidden similarities between two ideas. Antithesis, hyperbole, metonymy and simile are all types of metaphor. One of the most commonly cited examples of a metaphor in English literature is the “All the world’s a stage” monologue from “As You Like It” by William Shakespeare:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances …

This quotation expresses a metaphor because the world is not literally a stage. By asserting that the world is a stage, Shakespeare uses points of comparison between the world and a stage to convey an understanding about the mechanics of the world and the behavior of the people within it.

The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1937) by rhetorician I. A. Richards describes a metaphor as having two parts: the tenor and the vehicle. The tenor is the subject to which attributes are ascribed. The vehicle is the object whose attributes are borrowed. In the previous example, “the world” is compared to a stage, describing it with the attributes of “the stage”; “the world” is the tenor, and “a stage” is the vehicle; “men and women” is the secondary tenor, and “players” is the secondary vehicle.

Other writers employ the general terms ground and figure to denote the tenor and the vehicle. Cognitive linguistics uses the terms target and source, respectively. Psychologist Julian Jaynes contributed the terms metaphrand, metaphier, paraphrand, and paraphier to the understanding of how metaphors evoke meaning thereby adding two additional terms to the common set of two basic terms. 

a
Metaphrand is equivalent to metaphor theory terms tenor, target, and ground. 

b
Metaphier is equivalent to metaphor theory terms vehicle, figure, and source. 

c
Paraphier is any attribute, characteristics, or aspect of a metaphier, whereas any paraphrand is a selected paraphier which has conceptually become attached to a metaphrand through understanding or comprehending of a metaphor. 

For example, if a reader encounters this metaphor: “Pat is a tornado,” the metaphrand is “Pat,” the metaphier is “tornado.” The paraphiers, or characteristics, of the metaphier “tornado” would include: storm, power, wind, counterclockwise, danger, threat, destruction, etc. 

However, the metaphoric use of those attributes or characteristics of a tornado is not typically one-for-one; if Pat is said to be a “tornado” the metaphoric meaning is likely to focus on the paraphrands of power or destruction rather than on, say, the paraphier of counterclockwise movement of wind.

6
Nelson Goodman

Henry Nelson Goodman, 1906 – 1998, was an American philosopher, known for his work on counterfactuals, mereology, the problem of induction, irrealism, and aesthetics.

Thinking which involves the use of seen or visualized images, which may be static or moving, is widespread in mathematical practice. Such visual thinking may constitute a non-superfluous and non-replaceable part of thinking through a specific proof. But there is a real danger of over-generalisation when using images, which we need to guard against, and in some contexts, such as real and complex analysis, the apparent soundness of a diagrammatic inference is liable to be illusory.

Even when visual thinking does not contribute to proving a mathematical truth, it may enable one to discover a truth, where to discover a truth is to come to believe it in an independent, reliable and rational way. Visual thinking can also play a large role in discovering a central idea for a proof or a proof-strategy; and in discovering a kind of mathematical entity or a mathematical property.

The (non-superfluous) use of visual thinking in coming to know a mathematical truth does in some cases introduce an a posteriori element into the way one comes to know it, resulting in a posteriori mathematical knowledge. This is not as revolutionary as it may sound as a truth knowable a posteriori may also be knowable a priori. More interesting is the possibility that one can acquire some mathematical knowledge in a way in which visual thinking is essential but does not contribute evidence; in this case the role of the visual thinking may be to activate one’s prior cognitive resources. This opens the possibility that non-superfluous visual thinking may result in a priori knowledge of a mathematical truth.

Visual thinking may contribute to understanding in more than one way. Visual illustrations may be extremely useful in providing examples and non-examples of analytic concepts, thus helping to sharpen our grasp of those concepts. Also, visual thinking accompanying a proof may deepen our understanding of the proof, giving us an awareness of the direction of the proof so that, as Hermann Weyl put it, “we are not forced to traverse the steps blindly, link by link, feeling our way by touch.”

The symbolic function that is distinctive of pictures is denotation, hence pictures are labels and in that respect are analogous to linguistic predicates. The characteristics that distinguish pictorial systems from other denotational systems (e.g., from natural languages) make them the very opposite of a notation: pictorial systems are dense throughout and in that respect are similar to other analog systems, such as those of diagrams and maps.

“Denotation is the core of representation” means that pictures are pictorial labels for their subjects, individuals or sets of individuals, analogously to how names, or predicates, or verbal descriptions are linguistic labels for their denotata. Yet, not all pictures that have a subject – i.e., all pictures that are representational, versus images that are non-representational or abstract – have an actual individual as their subject. Some pictures have just a generic subject (say, a picture of a man, in the sense of a picture of no man in particular), others have a fictional subject (a picture of a unicorn, for example). Goodman’s account of such cases is in terms of multiple denotation for the former and null denotation for the latter. 

Some pictures – exemplary is an illustration of an eagle placed, in a dictionary, next to the definition of the word “eagle” – refer, severally, to all the members of a given set, such as the set of eagles. Other pictures, such as pictures of unicorns, refer to nothing, since there are no unicorns in reality: they have null denotation. Goodman insists that the existence of pictures with null denotation does not represent a problem for the view that claims that “denotation is the core of representation.” Such pictures are, of course, to be distinguished from other pictures with null denotation, such as pictures of Pegasus or of Pickwick. Yet, they are so distinguished in being pictures of a certain kind – unicorn-pictures – classified differently from pictures of other kinds, such as Pegasus-pictures or Pickwick-pictures.

Hence, Goodman appears to analyze pictorial representation as an ambiguous concept, ambiguous, that is, between a denotational sense (“is a picture of a so-and-so”) and a non-denotational sense (“is a so-and-so-picture”). This may be seen as a disadvantage vis-à-vis “perceptual” theories of depiction such as those proposed, for instance, by Richard Wollheim  and Kendall Walton. 

Yet concerns on Goodman’s treating the concept of depiction as ambiguous are misplaced, for the phrase “picture of” and its cognates can be easily shown to admit two different interpretations. What can be called the phrase’s relational sense has to do with what, if anything, a picture refers to; the non-relational sense, instead, has to do with, as Goodman would say, the sort of picture it is, or better with the picture’s depictive content. 

Indeed, Goodman is right in claiming that, with any picture, there are always two questions: one, what the picture represents, if anything; two, what kind of picture it is. Rather, a much more real problem with Goodman’s theory derives from his not addressing some of the most fundamental questions regarding depiction. Goodman articulates his account of relational depiction in some detail: pictures are symbols in symbol systems that are devoted to denotation (although their members may have individual, multiple, or null denotation) and that have certain (primarily) syntactic characteristics. Yet, Goodman has nothing to say on why certain pictures denote what they do. Lacking a theory of pictorial reference is no oversight on the part of the philosopher however. The fact is that Goodman is interested in investigating the “routes” of reference – how symbols can denote or exemplify or refer in more complex and indirect ways. 

He is not interested in the origins, or “roots,” of reference – hence, with regard to pictures, in how certain marks and not others have become commonly correlated with certain kinds of items in the world. This is as much true of what pictures are labels for as of which labels apply to pictures, that is, of how they are classified. Hence, it turns out, Goodman also has not much to say on the non-relational sense of depiction, i.e., with what makes a picture the sort of picture it is (e.g., a man-picture or a unicorn-picture or a so-and-so-picture). Why pictures are classified in certain ways – as unicorn-pictures, man-pictures, and so on – ultimately, is a matter of entrenchment of certain predicates out of the many predicates available. Given the actual history of the use of our symbols, certain pictorial labels (i.e., pictures) are projected rather than others, and certain verbal labels are projected over those pictorial labels. 

Accordingly, for the most part, Goodman’s theory of depiction is better seen for what it has to tell us on its own terms – in general, on what distinguishes pictorial symbols from symbols of other sorts.

Pictures are distinguished from symbols of other sorts in virtue of the distinguishing characteristics of pictorial symbol systems. In particular, pictorial symbol systems are syntactically and semantically dense. That is, given any two marks, no matter how small the difference between them, they could be instantiating two different characters, and given any two characters, no matter how small the difference between them, they may have different referents. Hence, pictures are grouped together with such things as diagrams, non-graduated instruments of measurement, and maps – with those symbols, that is, for which, in simpler words, any difference may make a difference: any difference in a mark may correspond to a different character, and any difference in the character may stand for a different correlation to the field of reference. Even a simple picture, for Goodman, is dense, in the sense that any, however small, mark on the canvas may turn out being relevant to pictorial meaning. Whatever the merits of, or problems with, Goodman’s technical analysis, the notion of density is certainly one way to account for what other thinkers – most notably Kendall Walton – have referred to as an “openendedness” in the investigation of pictures.

Of course, as pictures are likened to such things as diagrams, they also need to be distinguished from them. Goodman’s claim is that the difference between pictures and diagrams is syntactic, i.e., has to do with the composition of the characters or symbols. Pictorial symbol systems, when compared to diagrammatic systems, tend to be relatively replete. That is, to the interpretation of a picture typically a larger number of features is relevant than to the interpretation of a non-pictorial dense system. A drawing by Hokusai may be made of the same marks as an electrocardiogram. Yet, while in a linear diagram as the electrocardiogram only relative distances from the originating point of the line matter, in the drawing a higher number of features – color, thickness, intensity, contrast, etc. – are relevant . Diagrams typically are relatively “attenuated.” Accordingly, the difference between diagrams and pictures is only a matter of degree: typically, with a picture a smaller number of features can be dismissed as contingent or irrelevant.

There is indeed more that can be found in Languages of Art regarding depiction, and indirectly regarding the notion of being a so-and-so-picture or a such-and-such-picture. An important part of Goodman’s view on depiction is his critique of the idea that resemblance is the distinguishing feature of this sort of symbolization. While Goodman may appear to be, and is usually discussed as, criticizing the resemblance theory of pictorial representation – the “most naïve view of representation” – his real target is indeed much broader than that. After all, of the resemblance view he also claims that “vestiges” of it, “with assorted refinements, persist in most writing on representation”. What mainly concerns Goodman in Languages of Art is to establish the symbolic, and hence ultimately conventional, nature of pictorial representation – is to draw similarities between pictorial and nonpictorial forms of symbolization. With regard to resemblance, Languages of Art echoes the claim in Fact, Fiction, and Forecast with regard to regularities: resemblances can be found anywhere, for anything resembles anything else in some respect or other. Hence, Goodman does not deny the existence of resemblances between a picture and its subject, rather he claims that which resemblances are going to be noticed depends on what the system of correlation employed makes relevant. To Goodman, pictorial representation is always relative to the conceptual framework (that is, to the system of classification) within which a picture should be interpreted, in the same way in which vision is relative to the conceptual frameworks with which one approaches the visual world. On perception, Languages of Art echoes what Goodman had already claimed in his 1960 review of Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion: “That we know what we see is no truer than we see what we know. Perception depends heavily on conceptual schemata”. Thinking that vision may ever take place independently of all conceptualization is to rely on the “myth of the innocent eye”: “there is no innocent eye […]. Not only how but what [the eye] sees is regulated by need and prejudice. [The eye] selects, rejects, organizes, associates, classifies, analyzes, constructs”.

Accordingly, realism in pictorial representations is reduced to a matter of habit or familiarity, in contrast not only to a resemblance account of realism but to accounts in terms of amount or accuracy of conveyed information as well. Realistic pictures can include inaccuracies – indeed, those used in games of the type “find the n mistakes in the picture” include inaccuracies by definition. And the amount of information is not altered, for instance, by switching from the realistic mode of representation of conventional perspective to the non-realistic mode of, say, reverse perspective (Goodman 1976, 35). Goodman’s conventionalism is pervasive and uncompromising: even the rules of perspective in the representation of space, he claims, are conventionally established, and provide only a relative – i.e., relative to culturally established conceptual schemata – standard of fidelity. Realistic paintings, drawings, etc. are those that are painted or drawn in a familiar style, i.e., according to a familiar system of correlation. To put it metaphorically, for Goodman, you always need a key to read a picture – sometimes the key is more ready at hand, part of one’s cultural background, other times one must find it and learn how to use it.

There are claims, in Goodman’s account of depiction, that are left unexplained, especially with respect to pictures with indeterminate or fictional reference, that is, with pictures that Goodman would classify by predicates like “man-picture,” “unicorn-pictures,” etc. Of them, Goodman claims that they have “purported” denotation, yet without saying anything on how that should contribute to pictorial meaning. Furthermore, as the analysis progresses, and keeps facing the necessity to account for pictures with indeterminate or fictional reference, as well as with the notion of representation-as (as in a picture that represents Winston Churchill as a bulldog), a somewhat puzzling claim makes its way into Goodman’s account: that depiction in such cases is really a matter of exemplification – exemplification of labels such as “unicorn-picture,” “man-picture,” or “bulldog-picture”. The motivation for such a claim may be that of finding, after all, a mode of reference capable of explaining the way in which such pictures have meaning, i.e., of addressing the above-mentioned non-relational sense of depiction. Yet, Goodman provides no argument to support the claim that a picture representing, say, a unicorn is not just denoted by labels such as “unicorn-picture” but also refers back to those labels. Lack of actual or determinate reference cannot be sufficient to establish that an item denoted by a label refers back to that label. Furthermore, precisely because samples refer to the labels denoting them selectively, an argument would be needed to the effect that pictures of unicorns exemplify such labels as “of-a-unicorn,” rather than labels as, say, “picture” or even “painted by someone” or “painted canvas,” which after all are labels applying to such pictures.

In fact, in light of the above-mentioned ambiguity in the concept of depiction, hence of the fundamental distinction between a relational and a non-relational sense of “picture of,” we should emphasize how much is left out of Goodman’s attempted account of the concept. Notice how pictures may or may not represent something, i.e., relationally; yet, insofar as they have depicted content, they all are, non-relationally, O-pictures, or P-pictures, etc., that is, pictures with an O, or P, etc. content. Such non-relational sense of depiction is indeed the one a theory of depiction ought to investigate, and Goodman’s general claims on the syntactic and semantic characteristics of pictorial (vs. verbal, or musical, or diagrammatic, etc.) symbol systems do not seem able to encompass the fundamental question about such a notion, hence in a sense the fundamental question for any theory of pictorial representation. To illustrate, Goodman’s account offers suggestions on what makes a symbol a picture of a dog rather than a verbal description of a dog; at a very general level, the account has also something to say on what makes a symbol a dog-picture rather than a dog-description. Yet, the fundamental question for a theory of depiction is what it means that a picture is a dog-picture, i.e., a picture with a dog as its depictive content, a picture in which competent viewers see a dog, instead of, say, a cat-picture, i.e., a picture in which competent viewer see a cat. For better or worse, perceptual theories of depiction offer an answer to that question; yet, no real competing answer is to be found in Goodman. As mentioned, why some type of marks have become correlated with a certain kind of depictive content (hence presumably prompting a visual perception of such content when looking at the picture) is a matter of entrenchment; and that, in turn, is a question for the anthropologist and the historian, not the philosopher, according to Goodman.

Goodman explores Visual Thinking, Discovery, Proof

Visual thinking and discovery: propositional discovery, discovering a proof strategy, discovering properties and kinds

Roles of visual experience: evidential uses of visual experience, evidential use of visual experience in proving, non-evidential use of visual experience

7
Metaphors

Metaphors are most frequently compared with similes. It is said, for instance, that a metaphor is ‘a condensed analogy’ or ‘analogical fusion’ or that they ‘operate in a similar fashion’ or are ‘based on the same mental process’ or yet that ‘the basic processes of analogy are at work in metaphor’. It is also pointed out that ‘a border between metaphor and analogy is fuzzy’ and ‘the difference between them might be described (metaphorically) as the distance between things being compared’. A simile is a specific type of metaphor that uses the words “like” or “as” in comparing two objects. A metaphor asserts the objects in the comparison are identical on the point of comparison, while a simile merely asserts a similarity. For this reason a common-type metaphor is generally considered more forceful than a simile.

The metaphor category contains these specialized types:

a
Allegory: An extended metaphor wherein a story illustrates an important attribute of the subject.

b
Antithesis: A rhetorical contrast of ideas by means of parallel arrangements of words, clauses, or sentences.

c
Catachresis: A mixed metaphor, sometimes used by design and sometimes by accident (a rhetorical fault).

d
Hyperbole: Excessive exaggeration to illustrate a point.

e
Metonymy: A figure of speech using the name of one thing in reference to a different thing to which the first is associated. In the phrase “lands belonging to the crown”, the word “crown” is metonymy for ruler or monarch.

f
Parable: An extended metaphor told as an anecdote to illustrate or teach a moral or spiritual lesson, such as in Aesop’s fables or Jesus’ teaching method as told in the Bible.

g
Pun: Similar to a metaphor, a pun alludes to another term. However, the main difference is that a pun is a frivolous allusion between two different things whereas a metaphor is a purposeful allusion between two different things.

Metaphor, like other types of analogy, can be distinguished from metonymy as one of two fundamental modes of thought. Metaphor and analogy work by bringing together concepts from different conceptual domains, while metonymy uses one element from a given domain to refer to another closely related element. A metaphor creates new links between otherwise distinct conceptual domains, while a metonymy relies on the existing links within them.

7a
Subtypes

A dead metaphor is a metaphor in which the sense of a transferred image has become absent. The phrases “to grasp a concept” and “to gather what you’ve understood” use physical action as a metaphor for understanding. The audience does not need to visualize the action; dead metaphors normally go unnoticed. Some distinguish between a dead metaphor and a cliché. Others use “dead metaphor” to denote both.

A mixed metaphor is a metaphor that leaps from one identification to a second inconsistent with the first, e.g.:

I smell a rat […] but I’ll nip him in the bud” — Irish politician Boyle Roche

This form is often used as a parody of metaphor itself:

If we can hit that bull’s-eye then the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards… Checkmate.— Futurama character Zapp Brannigan.

An extended metaphor, or conceit, sets up a principal subject with several subsidiary subjects or comparisons. In the above quote from As You Like It, the world is first described as a stage and then the subsidiary subjects men and women are further described in the same context.

8
Visual language

Visual units in the form of lines and marks are constructed into meaningful shapes and structures or signs. Different areas of the cortex respond to different elements such as colour and form. Semir Zeki has shown the responses in the brain to the paintings of Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Magritte, Malevich and Picasso.

Imaging in the mind

What we have in our minds in a waking state and what we imagine in dreams is very much of the same nature. Dream images might be with or without spoken words, other sounds or colours. In the waking state there is usually, in the foreground, the buzz of immediate perception, feeling, mood and as well as fleeting memory images. In a mental state between dreaming and being fully awake is a state known as ‘day dreaming’ or a meditative state, during which “the things we see in the sky when the clouds are drifting, the centaurs and stags, antelopes and wolves” are projected from the imagination. 

Rudolf Arnheim has attempted to answer the question: what does a mental image look like? In Greek philosophy, the School of Leucippus and Democritus believed that a replica of an object enters the eye and remains in the soul as a memory as a complete image. Berkeley explained that parts, for example, a leg rather than the complete body, can be brought visually to the mind. Arnheim considers the psychologist, Edward B. Titchener’s account to be the breakthrough in understanding something of how the vague incomplete quality of the image is ‘impressionistic’ and carries meaning as well as form.

Meaning and expression

Abstract art has shown that the qualities of line and shape, proportion and colour convey meaning directly without the use of words or pictorial representation. Wassily Kandinsky showed how drawn lines and marks can be expressive without any association with a representational image. From the most ancient cultures and throughout history visual language has been used to encode meaning: “The Bronze Age Badger Stone on Ilkly Moor is covered in circles, lines, hollow cups,winged figures, a spread hand, an ancient swastika, an embryo, a shooting star? … It’s a story-telling rock, a message from a world before (written) words.” Richard Gregory suggests that, “Perhaps the ability to respond to absent imaginary situations,” as our early ancestors did with paintings on rock, “represents an essential step towards the development of abstract thought.”

Perception

The sense of sight operates selectively. Perception is not a passive recording of all that is in front of the eyes, but is a continuous judgement of scale and color relationships, and includes making categories of forms to classify images and shapes in the world. Children of six to twelve months are to be able through experience and learning to discriminate between circles, squares and triangles.The child from this age onwards learns to classify objects, abstracting essential qualities and comparing them to other similar objects. Before objects can be perceived and identified the child must be able to classify the different shapes and sizes that a single object may appear to have when it is seen in varying surroundings and from different aspects.

Innate structures in the brain

The perception of a shape requires the grasping of the essential structural features, to produce a “whole” or gestalt. The theory of the gestalt was proposed by Christian von Ehrenfels in 1890. He pointed out that a melody is still recognizable when played in different keys and argued that the whole is not simply the sum of its parts but a total structure. Max Wertheimer researched von Ehrenfels’ idea, and in his “Theory of Form” (1923) – nicknamed “the dot essay” because it was illustrated with abstract patterns of dots and lines – he concluded that the perceiving eye tends to bring together elements that look alike (similarity groupings) and will complete an incomplete form (object hypothesis). An array of random dots tends to form configurations (constellations). All these innate abilities demonstrate how the eye and the mind are seeking pattern and simple whole shapes. When we look at more complex visual images such as paintings we can see that art has been a continuous attempt to “notate” visual information.

Visual thinking

Thought processes are diffused and interconnected and are cognitive at a sensory level. The mind thinks at its deepest level in sense material, and the two hemispheres of the brain deal with different kinds of thought. The brain is divided into two hemispheres and a thick bundle of nerve fibres enable these two halves to communicate with each other. In most people the ability to organize and produce speech is predominantly located in the left side. Appreciating spatial perceptions depends more on the right hemisphere, although there is a left hemisphere contribution. In an attempt to understand how designers solve problems, L. Bruce Archer proposed “that the way designers (and everybody else, for that matter) form images in their mind’s eye, manipulating and evaluating ideas before, during and after externalizing them, constitutes a cognitive system comparable with but different from, the verbal language system. Indeed we believe that human beings have an innate capacity for cognitive modelling, and its expression through sketching, drawing, construction, acting out and so on, that is fundamental to human thought.”

Famous metaphors

“The Big Bang.”
—Fred Hoyle

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances.”
—William Shakespeare

“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”
—Pablo Picasso

“I am the good shepherd, … and I lay down my life for the sheep.”
—The Bible, John 10:14-15

“All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.”
—Albert Einstein

“Chaos is a friend of mine.”
—Bob Dylan

“All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.”
—Khalil Gibran

“If you want a love message to be heard, it has got to be sent out. To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.”
—Mother Teresa

“America has tossed its cap over the wall of space.”
—John F. Kennedy

“A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running.”
—Groucho Marx

“A good conscience is a continual Christmas.”
—Benjamin Franklin

“Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
—Marcel Proust

“And your very flesh shall be a great poem.”
—Walt Whitman

“Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.”
—George Orwell

“Dying is a wild night and a new road.”
—Emily Dickinson

“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”
—William Wordsworth

“Conscience is a man’s compass.”
—Vincent Van Gogh