Chapter 11 -- "'On' Metaphor"
Series 121: thought and imagination
Appeal to reductive metaphors for resolving contradictions; reductive metaphors sacrifice anything like the apparent meaning of the term or phrase thus 'metaphorized'; still, if it's done fairly and the implications aren't shuffled around for convenience, real progress can be made in hashing out implications; some examples of use and abuse of reductive metaphorization; reduction is also
not the most common way we use metaphor; very commonly, we use metaphor to stand for (or 'mean')
more, not
less, than what imagery implies; thought is distinct from the imagination that accompanies it; sometimes that's true
without metaphor, too; an example without metaphor: epic music score playing in my head when I write apologetics; an example with metaphor: imagining spatial relations of Earth and Sun to each other; the imagery isn't accurate, and cannot possibly be accurate; but orbital calculations don't necessarily require the imagery to be fully (or even largely) accurate; only needs sufficient
adequacy, not total
accuracy; if I cannot express topic with total
accuracy even to myself, how much
less so can I express it to other persons; anyone who talks about things that cannot be sensory perceived, must inevitably talk
as if sensory perceived; we cannot even receive (much less convey) a fully accurate sensory impression of relationship between things that
can be perceived--much less things that
cannot be perceived; this applies to
everything in our experience; some examples based on appearance of a book; we cannot detect all the facts simultaneously and fully, nor even keep them all properly in our minds at once as abstract concepts; whether or not we know the extent to which we are being inaccurate, we still have to use extremely inaccurate sensory descriptions when communicating ideas to ourselves and to other people; other examples--a book can at least be partially perceived, but quantum physics particles cannot; one step further: understanding how inaccurate the words 'understand' and 'one step further' are to the mental events being currently expressed!; we never really see or hear or smell or taste or feel things in their completeness, but we must speak for convenience as if we do; we have no other way of communicating; not grounds for a complete philosophy of subjectivity or relativity--that would be self-refuting; neither can perfectly objective thought or perception be achieved (except perhaps by God, if the Independent Fact is God); God's knowledge and expressions may be perfectly 'literal' (speaking creation into existence?); but even God cannot communicate to not-God entities with perfect literalness; communication must be what we can relate to, or no communication will occur at all; to insist otherwise would require that we be God's equal in actuality, ability and independence; God's metaphorical expressions will be fully
adequate for whatever purposes He has in mind; then again, we might ought to be careful about concluding what purposes He has in mind.
Sword to the Heart (Full 3rd Edition).pdf
(wave at Jeff!); even simple math statements would be ultimately unreliable if infinite regression is true; reasons deploying or appealing to an infinite regression (such as against Christianity or atheism being true) would also be ultimately unreliable if infinite regression is true; also, inf-reg proposals end up necessarily implying a final explanatory fact after all; turtles all the way down (for example) must be turtles all the way down and not even possibly explainable in terms of something else more fundamentally basic; an infinite regress must be self-existently what it is and there is an end to it; but that's an Independent Fact, not an infinite regress; infinite regressors must make tacit exception 
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