Metaphors Of Mind Research Articles

Metaphors of Mind in Fiction and Psychology. Michael S. Kearns

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsMetaphors of Mind in Fiction and Psychology. Michael S. KearnsMark TurnerMark Turner Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 87, Number 1Aug., 1989 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/391758 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 1989 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Word magic and the rhetoric of common sense: Erickson's metaphors for mind.

Abstract Milton Erickson did not produce a systematic theory of psychotherapy. His talent was as a storyteller, inventing metaphors and more extended healing fictions for his patients. A great many of Erickson's cases did not involve hypnosis in any conventional sense of the term. He used a wide range of persuasive rhetorical forms to encourage behavioral change in his patients. Nevertheless, taken together his work represents a significant shift in paradigm from prevailing schools of psychotherapy. Erickson captured the power of word magic in the language of common sense. This coupling of magical power with folk psychology accounts for much of his current popularity. Attempts to experimentally test his techniques are likely to be unsuccessful because these techniques were unique inventions tailored to the individual idiosyncrasies of patient and context. Although regularities in his work can be found, Erickson's most important contributions are not techniques but changes in the values or ethos under which psychotherapy is conducted.

Metaphors and the Humanizing of the Mind

Metaphors of mind were often acknowledged as problematic by 18th-century and earlier writers, but even as these writers called for a science of mind using language of mind, they continued to rely on physicalistic language. In fact, no nonmetaphorical representation of mental phenomena is possible; problem arises when people act as if metaphorical representations are literal. During 19th century mind was humanized by development of new metaphors of mental activity to complement mind-as-entity metaphor that served as primary representation in 18th century. Most important among new metaphors was the landscape of (briefly, c;soulscape), which responded to increasing emphasis on consciousness as totality of an individual's mental life. The mind-as-entity metaphor was also vitalized to meet same need. These changes were first instituted by novelists such as James and Eliot. Nineteenth-century psychologists such as Bain remained co...

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by Richard Rorty

494 BOOK REVIEWS Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. By RICHARD RoRTY: Princeton University Press, 1979. xv + 401 pp. $~0.00 cloth, $6.95 paper. The philosophical tradition is surely unique in the place its adherents have given to thinkers who reject not just reigning schools of thought but even the very enterprise commonly called philosophy. W0 have only to think of the influence of David Hume, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Martin Heidegger. Richard Ro1ty calls these thinkers " edifying philosophers "; and, although he asks no special status for his own work, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature qualifies as a major contribution to the literature of edification. Rorty sees philosophy as having been governed, particularly since Descartes , by a pre-occupation with discovering the foundations of knowledge and bewitched by the metaphor of mind as a mirror reflecting an autonomous nature. Insofar as philosophers have believed themselves to have a special mission to analyze, purify, and preserve the mirror, they have assumed for philosophy the position of a critic establishing principles for and setting limits to the sciences and other cultural enterprises. The position of this book is that the foundations cannot be found, that the mirror does not exist, and that philosophy has no rights to establish principles and set limits for human thought and activity. The great edifiers made it into the anthologies not by merely mocking the tradition, but by doing battle with the arguments of their more ambitious peers; and Rorty takes little time entering the fray with his predecessors and contemporaries. First he deals with the classical writers from Plato and Aristotle through Augustine and Aquinas to Locke and Kant and then moves on to the efforts of present-day analytic philosophers to put empirical psychology or language theory in the place of representational epistemology. There are no quick dismissals of any of these thinkers and movements. Rather they are handled carefully, respectfully and indeed laboriously with the result that the therapy for misgnided philosophy requires a great deal of intellectual effort on well-known philosophical puzzles. The attack on the mirror bewitchment leans heavily on the efforts of W.V.0. Quine against the language-fact distinction and of Wilfred Sellars against the myth of the given. With these important notions undermined, Rorty is ready to dismiss any correspondence theory of truth and any realist claims about objective readings of a world out-there-even if these come with Kantian provisos. When these old projects go, so does the pursuit of unified science. Rorty can, as a result, adopt a deterministic physicalism without a reductionism challenging treasured beliefs and practices in art, morality, or religion. Each can have its own historically conditioned, diverse , and changing method and structure. BOOK REVIEWS 495 What is left for philosophers if they, like everyone else, must give up the old hope for unadulterated truth and objectivity and if they can no longer play midwife to narrower enterprises? They can, in Michael Oakshott's expression, be simply but importantly " a voice in the conversation of mankind " without trying to stake out a secure fach for themselves. The principal models cited for this shift are Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and John Dewey, all of whom renounced knowledge as their aim for the sake of edification, "the project of finding new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking." What these ways were for them Rorty does not really say. The models he presents in detail are rather Hans-Georg Gadamer with his subtle negotiation of the hermeneutic circle and Jean-Paul Sartre with his insistence on being-for-itself as defining the world and its own place in it. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is one of the most interesting and challenging books which I have read in recent years. If for nothing else, it would be notable for combining a careful argument with an appreciative consideration of thinkers as diverse as Sellars and Quine on the one hand and Gadamer and Sartre on the other. No one who has witnessed the parochial quarrels among professional philosophers in the United States can fail to welcome this accomplishment. On the substantive level, Rorty disposes effectively of the imperial pretense...

A new multiplication algorithm: on the complexity of simplicity

It sometimes happens that by looking at the familiar or the dull from a new perspective we open up unusual horizons for ourselves and for our students as well. Though we may agree for a variety of reasons that much of the curriculum is in need of revision, it is shortsighted to conclude for any content area that it ought to be eliminated solely on the grounds that it is intrinsically dull and cannot generate worthwhile mathematical thought. What follows provides an example of how 1l ts poss ible, by examining some old and familiar multiplication facts with a new metaphor in mind, to uncover an entirely new algorithm for multiplication. (See Brown 1974 for additional educational discussion.) The “fallout” along the way also opens up many avenues for exploration that penetrate beyond the algorithm itself. There is much to be said for introducing the hand-held calculator in the elementary grades, but we hope to show why the elimination of a search for algorithms for the standard operations of arithmetic is not one of them.