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Comment by wirthjason | Hacker News Reader

How could someone write a post like this and leave off the great book “Metaphors We Live By” by Lakoff and Johnson?

Is particularly found the part about how metaphors “hide and highlight” information. In other words the metaphor we use necessitates how we think. We often frame arguments using the metaphor of war and that frames how we think. The other party is an enemy that must be defeated, its bloody, and there is a loser. However we could frame it as a dance, in which case they are a partner, and for the outcome to succeed they must move together in harmony.

Lakoff has written other fascinating books like how metaphors are used in politics as well as math (“Where Mathematics Comes From”).

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I view it as a side effect of linguistic evolution. Sure you could have a bunch of complex rules to strictly type your nouns and limit the type of verbs that validly relate things in one type to another, but if you simply relax the constraint (or just not bother in the first place) metaphors fall out as a natural consequence. See, I just did it. "fall out". Words don't physically fall, but because there's no constraint on using this physical verb to relate non-physical concepts, I can make metaphorical expressions at no additional cost to grammatical complexity.

We do this all the time. We might say a certain fact or circumstance "tells us" something to mean its presence let us make a deduction. Eg "this equation tells us the flow is laminar in this regime". Examples of this sort of thing are abundant.

> Lakoff has written other fascinating books...

Favorite fascinating George Lakoff book: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind

The first part of Metaphors We Live By is fascinating. It describes how so much of language is made of dead metaphors. But then you get to stuff like:

> We often frame arguments using the metaphor of war and that frames how we think. The other party is an enemy that must be defeated, its bloody, and there is a loser. However we could frame it as a dance, in which case they are a partner, and for the outcome to succeed they must move together in harmony.

That's just silly. The reason arguments are described metaphorically as wars is because arguments and wars serve the same function: they occur when we disagree about something and are means of settling the disagreement. Dances, meanwhile, have nothing to do with disagreement and they don't settle anything.

Its not silly at all. First, we're discussing metaphors, and it's certainly possible to use different metaphors to describe or model the same situation.

There are dances that decide disagreements. Different cultures use dance for different purposes. What about dance contests? Break dancing? Krumping? People dance to attract partners, to establish social ranking, etc... all of which which are a forms of social contest.

> First, we're discussing metaphors, and it's certainly possible to use different metaphors to describe or model the same situation.

It's by no means obvious that "any metaphor will do," which seems to be your point.

And all cultures have war. There are zero cultures that have replaced war with dancing and there's no reason to think this is possible.

I didn't say or, I think, even imply that "any metaphor will do". And I'm also not saying that war doesn't exist, or that dancing will somehow replace war.

I said "it's certainly possible to use different metaphors to describe or model the same situation." Then I described some situations where dance, not war or physical conflict, is used to settle disagreements.

I agree, it is not silly at all. It is worse, it is pandering. It is selling an agenda.

Conflicts are part of social interactions. The fact we use war metaphors doesn't mean we use violence, it is the opposite, we are replacing old-fashioned violence with social interactions.

One way to see a negotiation is as a war, another way to see a negotiation is as a dance.

No -- we have wars, arguments, and negotiations when individuals or groups disagree about things. All of these things are human activities that we use to settle a disagreement.

Dance, meanwhile, has nothing to do with disagreements or making a decision about how things will be. A dance resolves nothing; it's something people do for fun. It's silly to assert that we can simply "think of X as being like Y" and that will make it so. Sadly that is Lakoff's thesis.

A dance is a kind of negotiation. The "decision about how things will be" is what move should be performed next. Success is achieved by both parties, or neither - never just one or the other - and may even entail a "surrender" on the part of one of them.

The entire point is that metaphors can emphasize different aspects. This metaphor emphasizes ideas like:

-disagreements are not zero sum

-coming to a consensus is more important than getting your way

-we are ultimately all on the same side

-be graceful - carefully choose your moment to assert yourself

The suggestion of using metaphors for existential framing is nonsensical when one thinks of the ends of the activities, but it makes plenty of sense when one applies it to the process instead.

In a negotiation, as long as I know my boundaries and my decision calculus, then approaching it playfully and in a way that brings the other person into the game is a very constructive (and frankly fun) route. This is what is meant by dance rather than fight.

That's an improvement but is it what Lakoff meant? I don't know -- I read the book years ago but I very much got the sense that his argument was "words have no inherent meaning, essentially all meaning is circular, and so we can think of X as being like Y just as easily as Z".

Imagine that you know you are the author of that, but also you just woke up with amnesia and are now trying to figure out why you wrote that book and what did you mean there.

Which explanation would you lean on?

I would repudiate my earlier, silly ideas.

If you can’t see how a negotiation is like a dance then I feel sorry for your significant other and your children. Not all interactions are zero-sum.

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