virus: virus: true/false/meaningless

virus: true/false/meaningless

Eva-Lise Carlstrom (eva-lise@efn.org)
Mon, 8 Mar 1999 16:11:42 -0800 (PST)

Joe Dees:

Re your challenge a while back (I've only just caught up on my email, which has piled up alarmingly in the past several weeks, as anyone whose mail has bounced due to my being over quota is no doubt aware) about statements which are neither true, false, nor meaningless:

I very highly recommend George Lakoff and Mark Turner's book _More Than Cool Reason_. It's about the deep involvement of metaphor in how we think and communicate--metaphor is not just frosting, as people have often considered it. Anyone tempted to dismiss metaphors as an unimportant exception to the usual nature of language and thought would do well to read it, especially if they like to play with metaphor in poetry themselves. I almost bought you a copy, Joe; I think you'd enjoy it as well as find it useful. But I thought that might be a little over-pushy. I'll stick with highly recommending it. ;)

Lakoff has also written some other neat books, notably _Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things_, which is about how we categorize the world, and a good piece in a book called _Metaphor and Thought_ about a flawed perspective called the "conduit metaphor" that contributes to many misunderstandings.

Eva,
furthering the cause of multiple perspectives

PS--I'm an atheist pagan myself. Is a sentence such as "the power and beauty of the god/dess lives within me" true, false, meaningless...or a useful metaphor?

On Sun, 21 Feb 1999, joe dees wrote:

> OK, then, give me a statement which is neither true nor false nor
> meaningless, or admit that you can't; to falsify the syllogism, the
> onus is on you to provide a disproving counterexample to the
> conditional!