Epilogue

This epilogue presents some conclusions, beginning with a comparison between Claude Lévi-Strauss's story of Amazonian natives who drown captives to see if they are human, and the story of hunters who journey to the pig village to probe their own humanity. The latter story is self-reflexive and thus perspectivist in a way the former one is not. Key to this perspectivism is the relationship between sign and thing. These are mimetic relations, in which one thing is similar but not identical to another. There is “slippage,” and this becomes a source of insight when comparing the self and the “other.” The mythic journey to the village of the pig people can be compared to the first trip into space and the view of Earth afforded thereby: the space trip does not actually distance us from ourselves as much as the mythic trip does. The journey from human reality to pig reality reprises an ancient “reversal” in roles, from hunter to hunted, which has been an important wellspring of metaphoric thinking. The universal human value of being able to look back at ourselves from a different place was noted by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who also noted the difficulty of doing so — a dilemma of the human consciousness, which the material in this book addresses.

Improving Students’ Writing Skills through the Application of Synectic Model of Teaching Using Audiovisual Media

Writing might be difficult for some people (Alwasilah, 2007). Some students can speak English fluently and confidently, although since they have difficulties in conveying their ideas in writing. Thus, it needs the effective and efficient model of teaching to improve the teaching learning process. Synectic model of teaching is a model applied to enhance students’ ability to write. This model combines various forms of metaphoric thinking to see old ideas in different ways. In this research, the researcher used audiovisual media to support learning. The purpose of this research is to find out students’ improvement in writing descriptive texts using synectic model of teaching. The sample of the research was 36 students of class IXD in MTsN 2 Pontianak. The research was Classroom Action Research using Kemmis and MC Taggart model with two cycles. The result shows that there is improvement in students writing skill. The mean score of pre-test is 56.01, posttest 1 is 66.5, and posttest 2 is 87.46. It means the application of synectic model of teaching using audiovisual media is able to increase students’ ability in writing descriptive text.

Peirce’s garden of forking metaphors

The philosophic system of the founder of pragmatism Charles Sanders Peirce is rarely grasped from the point of view of its metaphoric usage. However, some of his most original yet often misunderstood and contested ideas such as those of ‘matter as effete mind’ and ‘the play of musement’ are metaphoric representations. In the present paper I am offering a new way to discuss the role of metaphors in Peirce’s philosophy by taking a twofold approach to the problem. On the one hand, metaphor itself becomes an object of inquiry. I touch upon the appearances of metaphoric thinking at the level of his classes of signs and metaphor’s relation to abductive inference. I trace those appearances in the process of their becoming from the spontaneity of Firstness towards the actuality of Secondness via the generalizing effects of Thirdness. Then I propose a flexible graphic model of metaphor that is parallel to Peirce’s inherent evolutionism. This model is seen as a “gentle” methodological tool for deriving meaning. To illustrate its applicability I include a playful nod to the literary works of Jorge Luis Borges to show how hard logical thought and aesthetic beauty complement each other.

The Experimental Imagination

This book is about experimental imagination in the British Enlightenment. It tells the story of how literariness came to be distinguished from its epistemological sibling, science, as a source of truth about the natural and social worlds. Early scientists used metaphor to define the phenomena they studied. They likewise used metaphor to imagine themselves into their roles as experimentalists. Late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century British literature includes countless references to early science to make the case for the epistemological superiority of literary knowledge, whose truths challenge the dominant account of the scientific revolution as the sine qua non epistemological innovation of the long eighteenth century. The Experimental Imagination considers traditional scientific writings alongside poems, plays, and prose works by canonical and non-canonical authors to argue that ideas about science facilitated new forms of evidence and authority. The noisy satiric rancor and quiet concern that science generated among science advocates, dramatists, essayists, and poets reveal a doubled epistemological trajectory: experimental observation utilizes imaginative speculation and imaginative fancy enables new forms of understanding. Early scientific practice requires yet often obscures that imaginative impulse, which literary knowledge embraces as a way of understanding the world at large. Reciprocally, the period’s theory of aesthetics arises from the observational protocols of science, ultimately laying claim to literature as epistemologically superior. Early science finds its intellectual and conceptual footing in the metaphoric thinking available through literary knowledge, and literary writers wield science as a trope for the importance and unique insights of literary knowledge.

Text metaphtonymy

This article starts by looking at the various ways metonymic and metaphoric thinking, as independent phenomena, organize text at discourse level. The literature on metaphor in discourse is classified under three broad categories, ‘metaphor clusters’, ‘metaphor chains’ and ‘extended metaphor’, while the less extensive body of research on metonymy in discourse is analyzed into parallel categories, ‘metonymy clusters’, ‘metonymy chains’ and ‘extended metonymy’. The article goes on to look at the ways in which metonymy-in-discourse and metaphor-in-discourse phenomena combine in making meaning at text level. The interplay of metonymy and metaphor in discourse, referred to here as ‘text metaphtonymy’, is explored under headings adapted from Goossens (1990), namely, ‘metaphor within metonymy’ and ‘metonymy within metaphor’. The ways in which metonymy and metaphor combine at discourse level are shown to be varied and intricate. This has implications for applied linguists working with text. The direction further work in this area might take is indicated.

Metaphoric Confinement of Information

The aim of the paper is to determine how metaphors tackle the probable nature of information and uncertainty in the structure of the communication process. Since the cognitive theory of conceptual metaphors holds that metaphoric thinking and doing are unavoidable, they are employed often in explaining the communicating domains. The metaphorical conceptualizing is recognized in Shannon and Weaver’s Mathematical Theory of Communication where such abstract concepts as freedom of choice, choosing probabilities (possibilities), and uncertainty ware conceived in that way. It is described in accord with Reddy’s conduit metaphor and Ritchie’s toolmakers paradigm. In the paper the issue of both the advantages and disadvantages of metaphors is considered: mainly, how they can explain and predict ways in which people communicate their expectations or uncertainties as well as, more practically, how the probable/informational metaphors enable the management of knowledge in libraries or databases.