Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [132]
When writers present a debatable premise as if it were self-evidently true, the conclusions built upon it cannot stand. At the least, the writer of Example II needs to recognize her debatable premise, articulate it, and make an argument in support of it. She might also precede her judgment about the show with more analysis. Before deciding that the show is “more positive than negative” and thus does not promote “wrong morals and values for our society,” she could analyze what the show says about marriage and how it goes about saying it.
Likewise, if the writer of Example I had further examined his own claims before rushing to argue an absolute position on censorship, he would have noticed how much of the thinking that underlies them remains unarticulated and thus unexamined. It would also allow him to sort out the logical contradiction with his opening claim that “there are many things shown on TV that are damaging for people to see.” If television networks will only broadcast what the public approves of, then apparently the public must approve of being damaged or fail to notice that it is being damaged. If the public either fails to notice it is being damaged or approves of it, aren’t these credible arguments for rather than against censorship?
FIGURATIVE LOGIC: REASONING WITH METAPHORS
To understand reasoning only in terms of propositional logic is to ignore how much of our day-to-day thinking is conducted indirectly, not in the form of explicit claims but in metaphors. Many people assume that figurative thinking—the kind conducted in metaphors and similes—is confined only to poems and that it is not really thinking but is instead primarily emotional and irrational.
There are some problems with these charges against figurative thinking that lie beyond the scope of this discussion—for example, that emotions are the enemy of rationality, an assumption that neuroscience researchers like Antonio Damasio have challenged. What is important for present purposes is to consider challenges that can reasonably be made to the assumption that one of our most common ways of thinking is not, in fact, a way of reasoning about evidence.
THE LOGIC OF METAPHOR
Metaphors pervade our ways of thinking
Metaphor is a way of thinking by analogy
The logic of metaphors is implicit
The implicit logic of metaphors can be made explicit by scrutinizing the language
We can recast figurative language to see and evaluate its arguments just as we recast language to examine its logic in syllogistic form
Everyday Thinking
Metaphors are deeply engrained in the language we use everyday; they are far from being solely the concern of poets. George Lakoff, professor of linguistics and cognitive science, and English professor Mark Turner, among others, have demonstrated that metaphors are built into the way we think. (See Lakoff and Turner’s book, More than Cool Reason, a Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor, University of Chicago Press, 1989.) As such, metaphors routinely constitute our assumptions about the world and our place in it. Life, for example, is a journey. To become successful, you climb a ladder. Being up is a good thing. To be down is to be unhappy and blue. These are all metaphors. If we accept their implicit arguments in an unexamined way, they call the shots in our lives more than we should allow them to.
Although figurative logic does not operate in the same way as claims-based (propositional) logic, it nevertheless produces arguments, the reasoning of which can be analyzed and evaluated. Let’s start with a definition. A metaphor works by analogy— a type of comparison that often finds similarities between things that are otherwise unlike. Consider the simile “My love is like a red red rose.” A simile, identifiable by its use of the words “like” or “as,” operates like a metaphor except that both sides of the