The Devious Logic of Metaphors

March 8, 2005
Leroy Searle | University of Washington

If robots understood metaphors, would that make them poets?
Should we be suspicious of anything metaphorical?
Why are metaphors so messy and what makes them so neat?

Philosophers since Plato have complained that metaphors are evasive and slippery at best; at worst perhaps nothing more than a device for telling lies and misleading and corrupting the mind. After Plato, the same complaint shows up with Francis Bacon, with Rene Descartes, John Locke, David Hume, Rudolph Carnap, to name but a few.

But is the case so bad? What would mathematics be if we could not assert that A=B, an expression that has the same schematic structure as metaphors. This presentation will draw upon the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of philosophical pragmatism, to develop a view of metaphor as an essential tool of logic and a foundational element for reasoning.

Speaker Details

Professor Leroy Searle received his Ph.D. in English at the University of Rochester, and has taught at the University of Rochester, the SUNY Visual Studies Workshop, and is now Professor of English at the University of Washington. He was the founding director of the Humanities and Arts Computing Center at UW (now CARTAH), a project coordinator for the IBM Olympus Grant for computer applications in the humanities. Subsequently, he was the director of the College Studies Program, funded by the Ford Found and the past director of the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities. He was also one of the founders of Delphi Computers and Peripherals, and was active for many years as a Novell Netware Engineer.