Metaphor For Ideas Research Articles

A Marketplace for Honest Ideas

Abstract The marketplace of ideas is a colourful metaphor with a long history of being used to argue for freedom of speech. This paper draws on its historical antecedents to begin with an orthodox understanding of the metaphor whereby the absence of substantive regulation is taken to be conducive to the good functioning of both economic markets and public discourse. This anti-regulation reading is then challenged by analysing a series of legal cases showcasing prohibitions on misrepresentation and fraud. These speech regulations are explained by the economics literature on information asymmetry, which illustrates how honesty regulations maintain good market functioning by facilitating credible reliance by market participants on one another’s assertions. What is thereby proposed is a re-imagining of the marketplace of ideas metaphor which lends support to honesty regulations in the realm of public speech. One potential analogue for these legal and economic findings is identified in the work of Shiffrin and her arguments for deontological sincerity requirements in the public sphere.

Wrangling in the Marketplace or Bartering in the Bazaar? Adapting Metaphors for Public Relations’ Societal Role

ABSTRACT The marketplace of ideas metaphor has long influenced how scholars and practitioners understand public relations’ role in U.S. discourse and democratic society, yet it is rarely questioned. We argue that the unacknowledged aspirations and Western, capitalist values embedded in the marketplace of ideas could cloud understandings of public relations in society and absolve practitioners of certain consequences of the discourses they put forth due to the function of the invisible hand symbolism operating within it. This work draws mostly from rhetorical and marketplace theory in public relations, including fully functioning society, to present five central limitations of the marketplace metaphor. A case example of U.S. discourse about trans women in sports showcases the shortcomings of the marketplace metaphor in practice. We introduce the bazaar and other compatible metaphors to inspire alternative, figurative thinking about societal communication and address some of the limitations we present, though we also ask questions about the marketplace of ideas to improve its fit with contemporary public relations. This essay offers theoretical and practical contributions by extending metaphors to explain practitioner responsibility in societal discourse and outline the importance of suiting metaphors to particular public relations contexts.

Guidelines Without Lines, Communities Without Borders: The Marketplace of Ideas and Digital Manifest Destiny in Social Media Platform Policies

When faced with conflicts, social media platforms harken back to their front-facing, user-friendly documents. These documents, often called community standards, or something similar, lay out the practices allowed on their sites. It is well documented in legal scholarship how technology companies incorporate particular First Amendment jurisprudence into these community standards documents, and this work aims to empirically examine this claim. Specifically, we were interested in how the backbone of American free expression—the marketplace of ideas metaphor—was incorporated into these governing documents. We conducted a textual analysis of five US-based social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Tumblr) to analyze how the marketplace of ideas metaphor may be invoked. We found these documents do rely heavily on the metaphor for presenting governing strategies. They also rely heavily on an oft-referenced ambiguous moderation line and the idea of a singular, global, borderless community, both of which bolster the marketplace metaphor. Given this, US-based social media platforms are holding the rest of the world to US-based ideas of free expression, thus engaging in digital manifest destiny.

The Meaning of the “Marketplace of Ideas” in First Amendment Law

The 1919 First Amendment opinions of Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis comprise the seminal texts in the cannon that now includes hundreds of decisions by the Supreme Court of the United States interpreting the core of the American free speech tradition. The marketplace of ideas metaphor they developed has been invoked constantly by Supreme Court justices in First Amendment cases. It has achieved genuine load-bearing legal significance, particularly in certain arenas of free speech law, and over-arching significance in rendering the entire architecture of modern free speech law reasonably coherent and stable. This essay explores the importance of the marketplace metaphor in three discrete areas of modern free speech law: commercial speech, political campaign finance, and tort liability. While by no means the only arenas in which the marketplace metaphor has exerted important influence, these three exemplars are especially illuminating, exposing at once the strengths and weaknesses of the marketplace metaphor as a persuasive tool for ordering free speech doctrines. The essay then examines the marketplace metaphor from a wide-angle lens, making the argument that it operates to define two of the central continental divides of modern free speech law. The essay goes a long way toward providing a descriptively clear and normatively convincing account of free speech law as it currently stands.

Fake News, Internet and Metaphors (to Be Handled Carefully)

The metaphor of the free marketplace of ideas is frequently referred to as a crucial argument to support a liberal view of freedom of speech and contrast the enforcement of measures aimed at preventing fake news. This metaphor is subject to critical remarks for three different reasons. First of all, whilst it may be the case that the problem of scarcity of technical resources does not affect the Internet, our attention and time continue to be scarce “products”. Secondly, it is reasonable to ask whether the marketplace of ideas metaphor is well suited to the scope (and limits) of protection for free speech under the European constitutionalism paradigm. Thirdly, metaphorical language fits in very well with legal reasoning, but it should be handled properly (and with care).

Toward a discursive marketplace of ideas: Reimaging the marketplace metaphor in the era of social media, fake news, and artificial intelligence

ABSTRACTThe marketplace of ideas metaphor remains one of the Supreme Court’s most enduring tools for communicating understandings regarding freedom of expression. For nearly a century, justices from a variety of judicial philosophies, in several areas of First Amendment law, including commercial speech, defamation, and obscenity, have called upon the metaphor to help them convey what have ultimately become crucial interpretations regarding the Amendment’s protections. Metaphors, however, do not have static meanings. In light of the important considerations of paradigmatic social and technological changes that have substantially altered the very nature of the marketplace of ideas in society, particularly in the era of social media, fake news, and artificially intelligent communicators, this essay examines how the marketplace metaphor can be both reinterpreted and reimagined to account for a substantially different twenty-first-century information environment while remaining faithful to its author’s understandings about the nature of truth. To this end, this essay examines how Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes understood truth, considers differences between Enlightenment and discursive-based understandings regarding the flow of communication in democratic society, and explores how the Supreme Court has traditionally employed the metaphor. Finally, it proposes a revised conceptualization of the marketplace of ideas, ultimately labeled as the “discursive marketplace.”

Nobody's Fools: The Rational Audience as First Amendment Ideal

Assumptions about audiences shape the outcomes of First Amendment cases. Yet the Supreme Court rarely specifies what its assumptions about audiences are, much less attempts to justify them. Drawing on literary theory, this Article identifies and defends two critical assumptions that emerge from First Amendment cases involving so-called speech. The first is that audiences are capable of rationally assessing the truth, quality, and credibility of core speech. The second is that more speech is generally preferable to less. These assumptions, which I refer to collectively as the rational audience model, lie at the heart of the marketplace of ideas metaphor, which has long been a target of criticism amongst First Amendment scholars. Now, however, cognitive psychology and behavioral economics provide empirical evidence that the assumptions of the rational audience model are demonstrably false in some commonplace settings. This Article nonetheless contends that behavioral economics has not yet made the case for jettisoning the rational audience model in the realm of core speech. As the Supreme Court has recognized, a legal test that looks at the actual effects of speech would be cumbersome and expensive to apply, and would therefore chill speech. But there are even more compelling reasons to adhere to a test focused on the reasonable interpretation of core speech. Because speech and expression are closely linked to individual autonomy, government constriction of core speech-particularly political speech-undermines the foundation of a self-governing democracy. Moreover, the rational audience model prevents public discourse from being reduced to the level of the least educated or least sophisticated audience member. The model calls on citizens to raise their cognitive capacities to meet the demands of public discourse, and it serves as a check on the government's increasingly powerful ability to drown out other speakers in that discourse. This Article concludes that the rational audience model represents a flawed but worthy ideal.

Hellish Females: The Strange Woman of Septuagint Proverbs and 4QWiles of the Wicked Woman (4Q184)

AbstractThe Strange Woman of Proverbs can be understood as signifying a type of "real" woman who is immoral that the intended male addressees are taught to avoid. This is also the case in Septuagint Proverbs, but the LXX expands her ability to function as a metaphor for abstract ideas. 4Q184 creatively reworks the Strange Woman to describe a female who functions as a general symbol for wickedness. She is associated with Sheol to a greater extent than any figure from Proverbs. In their reception of the Strange Woman, the Septuagint and 4Q184 have interpretative traditions in common, or at least understand her in similar ways.

Gore, Gibson, and Goldsmith: The Evolution of Internet Metaphors in Law and Commentary

This paper addresses the evolution of metaphors for the Internet and shows how they have constrained and determined the development of cyberlaw. Within the law, metaphors mold the framework of discourse, determining the scope of appropriate questions about and answers to various social and legal problems. Courts and commentators employ metaphors as heuristics to generate hypotheses about the application of law to novel, unexplored domains. Metaphors structure the way lawyers conceptualize legal events, as they infiltrate, consciously and unconsciously, legal discourse. Under the classic formalist view of common law analogy as syllogism, analogical reasoning from precedent begins with the establishment of a rule behind a case or group of similar cases. Judges then apply the rule fairly mechanically to the case at hand to yield a result that is understood through the background of precedent. In contrast to figurative literary metaphors, highly structured analogical, metaphorical mappings may be used to make persuasive, logical arguments. Like all metaphors, however, legal metaphors possess a paradoxical quality, embodied in the constant tension between the legal metaphor's literal incongruence and metaphorical congruence with reality. Metaphors whose metaphorical congruence with reality is perceived as dominant, such as the marketplace of ideas metaphor in First Amendment jurisprudence and the bundle of sticks metaphor in Takings clause jurisprudence, will continue to have analogical value and will be perpetuated through judicial opinion and scholarly commentary. Conversely, legal metaphors erceived as having greater literal incongruence with reality, such as the slavery metaphor of African Americans as chattels, will lose their value and be discarded. While metaphors aid humans in comprehending abstract concepts and legal doctrines, they also may limit human understanding by selectively highlighting various aspects of an issue while suppressing and marginalizing others. Unreflective use of metaphors can lead lawyers to take for granted the realities that metaphors enable. A bad metaphor can also simply lead to bad decision making. For example, Cass Sunstein argues that the marketplace of ideas metaphor has turned the right to free expression into a degraded form of commerce. This paper seeks to explore the evolution of metaphorical inferences as applied to the Internet within legal commentary and judicial opinions. Three metaphors in particular will be examined: the information superhighway, cyberspace, and the Internet as real space. Given the Internet's ongoing evolution as an unstable and ever-changing technology, courts and commentators have faced perpetual difficulty in mapping metaphors to it. Changing social constructions of the Internet as necessitated by its evolving underlying technological architecture have supported, or conversely eroded, a particular metaphor's literal congruence with reality. The purpose of this paper to make transparent the different conceptions of the Internet courts and commentators are sub silentio employing, and the various sociological, technological, and ideological conceptions of the world that support them.

Assessing the Credibility of Computer-Assisted Reporting

This study finds stories using computer-assisted reporting are as credible as stories based on anecdotal evidence or authoritative sources. It is no longer enough to report fact truthfully. It is now necessay to report truth fact. - Robert Hutchins report on press freedom, 1947 Computer-assisted reporting, or CAR, began some 10 years ago and has been gaining acceptance and momentum ever since. Through database and statistical analysis, good CAR reporters use raw data to support their own conclusions. Many reporters find this development to be ideal - they do not have to be as dependent on official and expert sources, press releases, government statistics or anecdotal evidence to tell their stories. Now, in addition to such sources, reporters can rely on their own evidence from independent data analysis, allowing them to become more participants in news-making process rather than mere observers. This new approach is challenging traditional philosophy of detached, objective journalism. Indeed some scholars believe this transformation is a struggle about soul of journalism in 1990s.(1) If media in general act as a searchlight on society, then CAR gives individual reporter a high-powered, hand-held flashlight. Although these types of data-intense stories might have advantages from a journalist's perspective, very little research has considered effects this type of story might have on audience. Using an experimental design, this study seeks to measure readers' perceptions of computer-assisted stories, specifically those in which newspaper reporter independently analyzed data and drew conclusions based on such findings. Will a move away from traditional objective-style reporting strengthen or weaken credibility of journalism? In addition, this study will measure participants' story ratings of other outcomes important to journalists: newsworthiness, liking, quality, readability, and understanding of computer-assisted stories. Supporters of such techniques say that reporters can provide independent, outside viewpoints that are not vested in a particular controversy. Critics, on other hand, fear that journalism may be overstepping its bounds by advocating a position and discarding traditional objectivity. Thus, while some view such proactive journalism as a means to abate declining newspaper circulation, others suggest abandoning objectivity will further reduce newspaper credibility. Objective journalism Most media scholars point to beginnings of objectivity as a direct reaction to rampant factionalism of mid-1800s and subsequent advent of penny press.(2) Oliver Wendell Holmes popularized notion of free expression in his 1919 dissenting opinion where he borrowed John Milton's of ideas metaphor.(3) Milton argued that all sides of an issue must be heard in order to find truth because falsehoods will be exposed in marketplace.(4) Objective reporting, interpreted by publishers and editors as neutral, unbiased reporting, became norm by early 1900s.(5) Specific rules and conventions regarding journalism as a profession arose from principle of objectivity. Gaye Tuchman(6) described how journalists rely on objectivity as a strategic ritual and a defense against criticism. She also found that most news organizations strategically identify centralized sources that are accepted as appropriate sites at which information should be gathered.(7) Similarly, Herbert Gans(8) showed that journalists use a predictable set of criteria in deciding what is news by reporting facts as gathered from sources of recognized authority. Studying this system of newsgathering and how news content is structured, Michael Schudson argued that the process of news gathering itself constructs an image of reality that reinforces official viewpoints.(9) Many scholars have criticized objective journalism because it maintains status quo and encourages establishment to dominate marketplace of ideas. …

The marketplace of ideas metaphor in communications regulation

The “marketplace of ideas” metaphor has been interpreted from democratic and economic theory perspectives. These different interpretive approaches emphasize different policy objectives and have been associated with divergent regulatory philosophies. To reach a deeper understanding of how regulators have interpreted and applied the marketplace of ideas metaphor, I analyzed the use of the metaphor over the past 33 years by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). I conducted content analysis on each FCC decision, from mid-1965 through mid-1998, in which the “marketplace of ideas” terminology was used. The results suggest that the metaphor typically has been used within the context of deregulatory actions, and that, in recent years, the Commission increasingly has focused on the economic theory dimension of the metaphor. However, the results for the 33-year period indicate no significant relationship between the type of regulatory action taken and the theoretical interpretation of the marketplace of ideas metaphor employed.

The Marketplace of Ideas Metaphor In Communications Regulation

The ‘marketplace of ideas’ metaphor has been interpreted from democratic and economic theory perspectives. These different interpretive approaches emphasize different policy objectives and have been associated with divergent regulatory philosophies. To reach a deeper understanding of how regulators have interpreted and applied the marketplace of ideas metaphor, I analyzed the use of the metaphor over the past 33 years by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). I conducted content analysis on each FCC decision, from mid-1965 through mid-1998, in which the ‘marketplace of ideas’ terminology was used. The results suggest that the metaphor typically has been used within the context of deregulatory actions, and that, in recent years, the Commission increasingly has focused on the economic theory dimension of the metaphor. However, the results for the 33-year period indicate no significant relationship between the type of regulatory action taken and the theoretical interpretation of the marketplace of ideas metaphor employed.

ToonTalk TM—An Animated Programming Environment for Children

Seymour Papert once described the design of the Logo programming language as taking the best ideas in computer science about programming language design and ‘child engineering’ them. Twenty-five years after Logo's birth, there has been tremendous progress in programming language research and in computer-human interfaces. Programming languages exist now that are very expressive and mathematically very elegant and yet are difficult to learn and master. We believe the time is now ripe to attempt to repeat the success of the designers of Logo by child engineering one of these modern languages. When Logo was first built, a critical aspect was taking the computational constructs of the Lisp programming language and designing a child friendly syntax for them. Lisp's ‘CAR ’ was replaced by ‘FIRST’, ‘DEFUN’ by ‘TO’, parentheses were eliminated, and so on. Today there are totally visual languages in which programs exist as pictures and not as text. We believe this is a step in the right direction, but even better than visual programs are animated programs.Animation is much better suited for dealing with the dynamics of computer programs than static icons or diagrams. While there has been substantial progress in graphical user interfaces in the last twenty-five years, we chose to look not primarily at the desktop metaphor for ideas but instead at video games. Video games are typically more direct, more concrete, and easier to learn than other software. And more fun too. We have constructed a general-purpose concurrent programming system, ToonTalk, in which the source code is animated and the programming environment is a video game. Every abstract computational aspect is mapped into a concrete metaphor. For example, a computation is a city, an active object or agent is a house, birds carry messages between houses, a method or clause is a robot trained by the user and so on. The programmer controls a ‘programmer persona’ in this video world to construct, run, debug and modify programs. We believe that ToonTalk is especially well suited for giving children the opportunity to build real programs in a manner that is easy to learn and fun to do.

The Supreme Court Defines the Marketplace of Ideas

The marketplace of ideas metaphor is the model most called upon by the U.S. Supreme Court in the resolution of free-expression cases. Justices have used the theory in the adjudication of virtually every area of First Amendment law, despite increasing attacks on the theory. For the most part, however, the Court does not recognize a single, universal marketplace of ideas, but numerous mini-marketplaces, each with its own dynamics, parameters, regulatory scheme, and audience.