Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 289.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Tue, 03 Oct 2000 07:55:57 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: metaphors
A more or less random quotation from Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence
(NY: Bantam, 1995): "The timid child enters adult life with neural
circuitry that...." Really?
My question: what freight does the metaphor of electrical circuitry carry?
What does this metaphor do for us, for the author? Context suggests that he
"means" something like this: "The timid child enters adult life with a
predisposition for...." Use of the former rather than the latter when the
physiology and neurology of the brain is *not* under discussion suggests
that the cultural assimilation of computing has gone rather far. Is it
becoming more and more difficult to get computing into perspective because
of such metaphors? It's not as if we can do much about this -- except in
the classroom, where I'd think it's rather important to point out that the
way computers process data is very different from however it is that we
think about artefacts, and that this difference is our real subject.
Comments?
Yours,
WM
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Dr. Willard McCarty, Senior Lecturer, King's College London
voice: +44 (0)20 7848 2784 fax: +44 (0)20 7848 5081
<Willard.McCarty@kcl.ac.uk> <http://ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/>
maui gratias agere
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