Ameliorative and Prejorative Uses of Metaphor and their Functions

I usually check the philosophy of language section pretty regularly, but somehow I missed this post until now.

After consulting a dictionary several times, I tried to provide answers to the questions, but found it so exhausting to try and fully explain my opinion, that I gave up. Furthermore, it would just be my opinion anyway. Which led me to another question:

What difference does it make? (And I really don't mean that glibly.)

Wow, someone actually responded to the OP, woot!

The matter is that the metynomical use of emotionally charged terms have the ability to sway an otherwise straight forward argument one way or the other as an appeal to emotion.

Lets say I'm talking about why some guys says "no soup for you" and Seinfeld starts calling him the "soup nazi" that transforms the man from a regular jerk into either a comic farce or someone of genuine evil.

Or lets say I use the term "I am a slave to X" the metaphor is transcendental of the actual term slave. "I am a lsave to my art" has a positive often romantic spin generally, while "I am a slave to my job" doesn't.

None of the above examples, however, are true to the literal terms of the words nazi and slave yet they tend to minimize the literality of the word. Still, although the metaphorical and metynomical usages have alternative meanings or connotations, the original extremely prejorative sentiment one feels when exposed to the terms nazi and slave retain their full power.

In the realm of philosophy and philosophical argumentation does this minimalization of emotionally charged words and terms throw off the legiticmacy of an argument by imposing strong sentiment onto an abstract?

What are the pros and cons of such argumentation and what do you automatically infer about the character of the poster when they employ this sort of srgumentation.

If these questions and concerns matter or not, nah not really, I have my own opinions, I'm just interested in what people think about them.

Yes, I agree. Everyone has an agenda and emotional language is the easiest way of pushing it. I think even children somehow know this.



It really depends on the people involved in the argument, I'd say. The first Nazi example you use is my very own post. That same post could have instigated a knock-down-drag-out in other forums I've been associated with. As I recall here, it went virtually unnoticed.

I'm sorry. I'm posting from work and I keep getting interrupted, I've totally lost my train of thought. I'm trying not to be a slave to my work (he, he!)

Pejoratives are a problem in society.
When you can't use the word for its actual meaning due to it being offensive in some colloquial language, it becomes a problem. As for why someone would use these terms, it replaces "X is illogical because ..." with "X is !@#!$ stupid! I used a strong word, so you have the emotional obligation to react."

It seems as though this forum harshly discourages use of vulgar language, and when a ban for such language is warranted, it is always necessary to ban the member in question. I can't say the same for other forums, though. A popular video sharing site in particular holds a plethora of offensive words i've never heard of.
It is important to discourage offensive language as much as irrelevant language. The language people use in their posts speaks loudly. Even for something free of tone and things attached to spoken language, it is easy to tell from what is said how the person perceives your question. But to respond to the quotes from posts, it is only a problem when you use things out of context. Nonetheless, this language is not acceptable.

gosh-
i may not have posted, but i did subscribe to this thread and have been waiting for something to come up! but right now i am limited in my webtime, but i will be back. it's a complicated subject for me and answers dont come easily as they do on some other issues that i have already given decades of thought. this is a new idea to me...not to mention i never heard the word pejorative outside of this forum, and i would have guessed amelirative was some kind of alternative health care treatment...

I have always felt it important, as I make some claim to be a philosopher, or at least to one who wishes to make the attempt to become one, to distinguish propaganda from philosophical discourse, and opinions from warranted arguments, both in my reading of posts and my own contributions.

Among the practical maxims this seems to imply (at least for me) is to avoid making personal remarks, to avoid informal discourse, to avoid formal and informal fallacies, to provide---as the exigencies of space and time in forum discourse limiy---warrants for any conclusion I might suggest, and to write as clearly and distinctly as I can (something I usually fail completely to do, but it remains a goal).

Name-calling, the use of "loaded" words, and reductionist generalisations are not only informal fallacies, but at odds with these goals, and do not represent the clearest thinking to which I aim or, to my mind, the attempt to communicate philosophically.

It is all-too-easy to ignore the individual human being or his thinking by putting him in a box and labeling it something evil or fearful. Many today do this with "Muslims" or "Nazis," or "Neo-cons"---you fill in the blanks, there are certainly more than enough to thwart clear thinking.

In a larger sense, I respect this forum as a needed place that is uncommon in the modern world, a world of quick opinions, hype, propaganda, entertainment parading as something more noble,
mis-information, and anti-intellectualism.

I suppose that leaves the question, what is the role of metaphor, analogy etc... in philosophical argument? When explaining a position analogy is the bedrock of figurative explanation. Metaphor and such are the most effective ways of helping people understand your point in a real world sense. Many leading current cognitive scientists propose that language as a whole and much of our cognitive existence is based on metaphor, index, and analogy. In what way can we use metaphor without obscuring the abstracted argument?

i think it is possible to use metaphor and analogy, various forms of speech, to illustrate a point without bringing one's personal opinions into it. jg has a good plan-i also try to follow it, but sometimes in a rush things get past me. i always try to reread what i have written from an outside perspective to guess what kind of reaction it would provoke in readers.

there are times of course even in philosophy when one needs to express one's opinion, but at the same time without making judgments on others who disagree. i think i noticed from the beginning that you do that really well, gosh! you have a good command of the language and common sense and civility...

metonymy and synechdote....never heard of those guys, but i would guess they can be treated the same way.

In this thread I am not trying to make any sort of serious ethical judgment on the use of charged metaphor. I am trying to bring to the fore some things that I'm not sure everyone thinks about when communicating. Things that language accomplishes indirectly or rather accomplishes on a secondary or terciary level. In linguistics some of these functions are called pragmatics, in anthropology/sociology they can be called frameworks or cultural/cognitive models. The easiest way to explain is "what is the writer saying about himself, her situation, his ideology, her expectations that isn't in the actual semantic and syntactic presentation of the language?

Any contextualized metaphor or metynomy leaves holmesian trail to the core of the writer if one looks at it. It is not deconstruction per se, it is the application of what you know as the cultural framework to the expression. We do this everytime we read another's post. There is an intimacy between interlocutors within even the coldest of language. There is hopefully what they want you to understand, there is what you will understand in spite of what they want, there is what you understand about them that they may not know they are saying, and there is what they are expressing outside the actual language itself.

An example of this might be the folk model of the term 'technically'. It forms several epilinguistic functions in regards to its own utterance and the combinatorial semantics of its context. It hedges or insulates the speaker/writer from plausable responsibility for the utterance by removing him as the originator of the information and replacing some other, often nebulous source of the information. This makes it so that if the information is wrong the reprisals can only go so far as the third party, much the same as the hedge 'to the best of my knowledge'.

'techincally it was the etruscans who....'
'its technically illegal to ... but i don't mind'
'technically a torta is made with....'

The term also expresses an appeal to trusted sources which by extention is an appeal to trust the speaker/writer. Although it sounds pedantic, is is hardly ever used in peer to peer conversation/writing. It is normally used when a person regarded as having inferior status (not necessarily in the subject at hand) is correcting or attempting to gain status of some sort iwithout risking personal status if she is wrong.


Metaphor and analogy, much the same way can be analysed formally for its epilinguistic functions and manifestations. An example might be in a discussion revolving a topic concerning even minimal violence, an analogy using animals instead of trees or stones will evoke different emotions, although the tree or stone analogy might be just as informationally apt. An analogy about the violent formation of igneous rock will definitly be taken different than the process of training a fighting dog which will be taken differently from the process of building a ship out of lumber. All apt metaphors for anything that starts from raw materials and ends with an unflappable finished product. The anaology/metaphor a person chooses when put in context with the rest of the text and previous exposure to texts/conversation not only reveals much of what she he trying express, it also reveals their attitude towards life, the subject at hand, their audience, their status in life, their upbringing etc...

i agree that there is a lot to be learned from the way a person uses language, and i think most of us are not attuned to interpretting the nuances, though we may get an emotional reaction and not even realize that it also reflects on us.

interestingly enough, i dont use the term' technically' in the ways you mentioned, but i have used it profusely. when i do i am stating that my own description is not the usual accepted 'technical' description or process that would be found in whatever source material would be credible, such as dictionaries or user manuals, etc.

In the Republic, Plato makes use of a physical analogy when he discusses the divided line that illustrates the kinds of knowledge and being he proposes. To make this even clearer, the next book begins with one of the greatest extended analogies in philosophy, the Myth of the Cave, which every schoolboy remembers if nothing else. Adam Smith proposes an vast economic model, and summarises it with the phrase "the invisible hand."

Rhetorical devices as long as they remain ancillary to exposition of ideas and not their substitute, as long as they clarify or summarise an argument or put it another way, as long as they are argumentatively uncounterfeited, thus have a traditional and proper place in philosophy.

Not to derail the topic, but this is simply another way of establishing the solidity of your status while hedging the veracity of the claim. 'technically X but I prefer to think of it as Y' The distance that you set from the technical source shows that you are 'an independent thinker' that you have 'come to your own hard fought conclusion' but at the same time shows that you know what the technical norm is. I have transcended the technical norm and reached another level of X regarding the topic.


In no way am I saying any of this is wrong or in any way casting a moral or ethical judgment on it. I could also be wrong in any one person's specific case of use in terminology. I'm just employing cultural models and conversational analysis in an attempt to decipher the writer/speaker in context to the information being portrayed.

These types of conversational and argumentaive devices have always interested me and made me wonder what other people see when they see them being employed like in JGWeed's example of the alegory of the cave, I have a very difficult empathizing with the analogy because I am not privvy to the cultural models inherent to ancient greece. I am not familiar with ancient Greek as a language nor the various translations and methods for translations used, all of which hold definite sway on how a reader reads the analogy/metaphor. Not arguing that the cave analogy is not totally descriptivly apt for what the experts say that Plato was saying, only that much of the same intuition and instinct we read into a contemporary writer cannot be employed. I suppose the brilliance of Plato and other writers who choose metaphor and analogy that stands the test of time and the stresses of cross cultural examination is what makes them great.

So I suppose a different question to the readers of this thread other than those proposed in the OP is in order here.
What consciously goes through your minds when employing analogogies and metaphors?

I'm more interested in what unconsciously goes through our minds when employing analogies, metaphors, or any linguistic device for that matter! That's the stuff that you're speaking about here in your last two long posts (which brought up some great points, by the way): The unsaid that's said. The meaning that is hidden outside the syntactical construction, not in the actual language. And I don't think we're always conscious of this stuff - it's just part of our conventional association with language; how each of us uses the tool.

Great thread!

Yeah Zeth I think I am more interested in that too, but I don't know if I can expect someone to introspect so well that they can draw those intricate and intimate personal relationships between themselves the culture and the language to the fore

:lol:actually i do that a lot...being retired means lots of time to do the things you put off til later i guess. (:eek: now i am thinking of what that means, do i think retirees are wasting time doing silly things or is it just me doing that? or do i think they should be doing these things as well? have i offended anyone, have i given a wrong impression, etc etc...)

i think i spend more time analyzing what i say and what i mean and what i think because i am the only one i can hope to ever get to the bottom of as far as intent and motive, even though i may not even be sure i have.and it helps to have another person's reflections too, which is one of the great things about blogs. doing a whole piece on a particular subject and finding out how many people read different things into what you say and how many know what you mean or miss it entirely is a great self test as to expertise or failure in the use of language.

technically,
i suppose i would use that somewhat in the way you mention, but also to show that the terms i might have chosen are in wider use socially and have changed from prior definitions, etc. as far as hedging, i think i always do that-partly in support of the belief that no one really has the 'right' or 'perfect' answer to anything, and that absolute truth is not available to us, etc...and of course in the hopes that people reading will remember the phrase'don't kill the messenger'...
i always hope someone reading what i have said will be prompted to think objectively about the points i have tried to make rather than transferring them to me and forming an opinion or judgment on my ideas by what they think of me (whatever their conception is of me at the time). that is my conscious motive...the unconscious ones are various and often come out in other people's reactions and are usually not very admirable, but often extremely helpful to me.

and i also notice how my understanding of what someone says or what their motives are is conditioned by what category i have put them into-hate myself for doing that, but it still happens. it is always a shock to me to find out when someone isnt who i thought they were that suddenly their words take on different meaning and value to me. i think it is a fault of human nature that started out as a useful tool but has gone berserk.

In the rough and dirty sense, if we did not make these judgments we would likely not be alive very long. On a purely pragmatic plane we must make judgments about people very quickly to assess potentially dangerous or dubious situations and relationships. It is the natural way of things and I don't think something one should be too upset about doing. We are conditioned to read signs in pragmatic, prosodic, and semantic language that help us properly interact with others.

An extreme example might be, something about this guy creeps me out and I don't feel safe. A benign example might be that person really feels passionately about his dog. As people we do not have the time or the processing power to screen everyone we meet on a level that fits the current ethical/moral mandate of never judge a book by its cover'. As people we would be stupid to do so, our innate sense of detecting a lie and detecting manipulation instantly is much more accurate than a draw out interview would be. In reality we have made a judgment within five second of meeting a person, we have placed him is the categories we have in our mind that overlaps with other categories etc... but that starts getting into cognitive semantic modeling and prototype theories... a topic for another day i would think.

So everytime we interact with a person our fact base grows and changes and the various categories that person fits into shift, merge, and split like ameobic ven diagrams splitting and engulfing one another. the trick is like you hinted at, not making the original judgment so solid that it can't be changed, unless of course the original judgment screams danger or repulsion.

Why would one want to apply standards from other areas of life, or perhaps even other areas or types of communication, to "philosophical discourse"? Don't we normally apply different standards to the latter, and expect authors to use different rules and procedures?

i think not everyone here is actually thinking of their comments in the light of 'philosophical discourse'. but i dont see why the standards of philosophical discourse (whatever they may actually be) cannot be applied to everyday life. i try to communicate the same in the real world as i do on this forum.

and a lot of the everyday life behavior creeps into our interactions here unconsciously, at least it does for me even though i am consciously trying not to allow that to happen.

i feel it is a question of being 'mature' in one's communication. i see it the same whether it is artistic expression, formal debate, or conversation in the lounge. there is a sense of relaxing in the lounge, of allusion and metaphor in art, and strictness in formal debate. but in every type of communication, there are certain rules that can be observed across the board.

but i wouldnt expect authors or speakers to follow any particular rules, because many people dont realize there are any. once they are aware-for instance of the rules on this forum-i still dont expect them to follow the rules. but i do expect the moderators to throw them out! (and thank you for doing so!)