Arthur J. Boston

Author’s note: This post is the third part of a rough draft of an methods/approach section to an article that I am publicly writing on this blog. I’ve previously written and posted an Introduction section. As you may see in the author’s notes to the previous two parts of this section, I had a system in mind on how I would write this, but it became clear in the third week that that system isn’t… going to work. I don’t know, man, I’m just trying to get some stuff down on paper here.

Land-use Metaphor in Scholarly Communication (DRAFT)

METHOD / APPROACH, PT. 3  (PT. 1 here; PT. 2 here)

In conclusion of this section, I will summarize the major points discussed, distilling them into a guide for our method / approach.

The three most basic mechanics we will employ are

• identification of a metaphor (or conceptual metaphor) in circulation;
• case-making for its suitability; or
• case-making for its replacement;

along with a fourth mechanic, which is

• identification of potential metaphors for tangential areas.

Metaphors are figures of speech that allow us to refer to one thing in terms of another, and a conceptual metaphor is something that allows us to think about one conceptual domain in terms of another. A conceptual metaphor may gain circulation if it is catchy, vivid, or if the underlying mapping is clear or enticing. The wide circulation of a metaphor does not necessarily signal that the metaphor is actually sound. Further, even if a good number of metaphorical mappings are present, there may be other factors that make them unfit for beneficial use.

Deep consideration of a metaphor can solidify the case for a particular metaphor, present a case against one, and help uncover alternatives and related metaphors. To unpack a conceptual metaphor is to uncover the persuasive little story it may be conjuring in our thinking. Dennett coined the term intuition pumps to describe fable-like objects which raise an issue effectively, but does not settle it. As Hofstadter advised, we should consider the intuition pump to be a tool with many knobs we should turn in order to see if they still raise the same intuitions.

The particular ‘knobs’ we will repeatedly attempt to identify (if not all the way turn) are three we take from Lakoff and Johnson (1980). Lakoff and Johnson argued that conceptual metaphors structure thinking, and in doing so, they:

• highlight some aspects;
• hide others; and can lead to
• self-fulfilling prophecies which act as a guide for future actions.

In the next sections, before diving into land-use metaphors that are particular to scholarly communication, we will observe how the approach / methods described here have been enacted onto land-use metaphors in librarianship (weeding), and more broadly in the information fields (information ecology / ecosystem).

Author’s note: This post is the second half of a rough draft of an methods/approach section to an article that I am publicly writing on this blog. I’ve previously written and posted an Introduction section. The first ten posts on this blog are a series of ~15-minute daily writing exercises I conducted, and posted immediately after, in order to develop better writing habits. Mostly, the previous ten posts collect my thoughts in the moment as I overcome some of my writing myths and hurdles. This current post is the product of five days (Mon-Fri) writing, whose activity I reported on daily at twitter. I leave these drafts untouched over the weekend. The following Monday morning, I re-read the post quickly, allowing for minor tweaks, and then post them. I hope to continue writing one section of this paper per week until I have a full first draft, at which point I will submit it to a journal peer-review. From then, I will conduct my revisions privately.

Land-use Metaphor in Scholarly Communication (DRAFT)

METHOD / APPROACH, PT. 2  (PT. 1 here)

Plainly-speaking, metaphors are figures of speech that allow us to refer to one thing in terms of another. A conceptual metaphor differs slightly; there, we think about one conceptual domain in terms of another. In their influential book Metaphors We Live By (1980), linguists Lakoff and Johnson set out what it means for a concept to be metaphorical and how conceptual metaphors structure our perceptions of everyday activities. This structuring can have at least three particular effects which we will explore in our paper: highlighting, hiding, and self-fulfilling prophecies. Recognizing these effects, we can choose to flag language that is reflective of an underlying conceptual metaphor, draw the metaphor out, and treat it like a tool. A tool to better think about the discourse in which the flagged language appears. One particular thinking tool we will model after is what philosopher Daniel Dennett coined as intuition pumps. 

But to begin, we turn to Lakoff and Johnson (1980) who illustrate how a conceptual metaphor can be reflected in our everyday language. The conceptual metaphor they use as their example is argument is war. (In this case, it appears that Lakoff and Johnson mean debate in particular, and not just any old argument.)

ARGUMENT IS WAR:

Your claims are indefensible.

He attacked every weak point in my argument.

His criticisms were right on target. 

I demolished his argument.

I’ve never won an argument with him. 

You disagree? Okay, shoot!

If you use that strategy, he’ll wipe you out.

He shot down all of my arguments. (ch.1)

The above examples show how we often talk about argument in terms of war. For Lakoff and Johnson, we “don’t just talk about arguments in terms of war,” we structure our thinking about argument as we do wars. Therefore, we think in terms of winning or losing an argument, just as with wars. While thinking in terms of this particular conceptual domain is not a bad strategy if your ultimate goal is to win, this comes at the cost of pre-determining or limiting one’s own thinking, in this case, about the purpose of argument.

It may be useful to step back and consider what one hopes to achieve from an argument or debate. Do we hope for the best ideas to emerge (even when it might be considered a loss or compromise for our position), or simply just that we win? If we imagine a culture that viewed argument as dance, rather than war, their goal may be “to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way” (ch.3), rather than simply trying to win. In our culture, as Lakoff and Johnson put it, being “in the midst of a heated argument” may place us in a mindset where “we are intent on attacking our opponent’s position and defending our own.” In doing so, we may overlook the more “cooperative” aspects of argument, which might be more visible if ours were a culture that viewed argument as dance.

This is the nature of metaphorical concepts: they allow us to “focus on one aspect of a concept” and overlook “other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with the metaphor” (ch.3). The conceptual metaphor argument is war highlights the aspects of arguments which refer to winning or losing, and hides other cooperative aspects. The argument is dance metaphor may highlight and hide in just the opposite manner. To recall Lakens’ tweet, the underlying beef he had with the fishing expedition metaphor was that it served to highlight undue aspects in its target (exploratory analysis), while hiding aspects more in step with his opinion, which he found the shotgun approach metaphor (highlighting traits like haphazard and indiscriminate) to be more coherent with.

Highlighting and hiding are two ways that Lakoff and Johnson show metaphors structure our thinking about everyday activities. Building on these two, we turn to a third that we will refer to as self-fulfilling prophecy. Lakoff and Johnson reason that metaphors not only “create realities for us, especially social realities,” but that they act as a “guide for future actions,” actions that must be coherent with the metaphor, which in turn will reinforce the “power of the metaphor” (ch.23).

The example that Lakoff and Johnson use is President Carter’s declaration that the energy crisis was the “moral equivalent of war,” making the conceptual metaphor: energy crisis is war. Language reflective of this metaphor (“we must marshal forces to tackle the energy crisis) invites the listener to draw warlike inferences, and eventually come to accept that the issue is to be engaged in terms of war. To view an issue through the lens of war is to accept that an issue is a thing which may be either won or lost, as opposed to some other set of options. And in a literal war, a nation must win or risk its existential livelihood, so the listener begins to intuit that the war must be won. Thus, we should be wary that a metaphor we have internalized may be acting as a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

The term ‘open access’ can have several different meanings, and so different naming devices have emerged to define these (green, gold, bronze, platinum, etc.). In an essay on Diamond Open Access (the publishing arrangement where articles are made open access, without cost to the reader or author), Martin Paul Eve (2021) demonstrates how the very use of the word connotes rarity, scarcity, and refinement. Eve notes that “in some cases, diamond is a more apt metaphor than we might like,” considering how real-world diamond mining “is full of ethical pitfalls,” such as extensive environmental damage and exploitation of workers “in the service of global profit.” By naming this flavor of open access as diamond, we may ask if we are not setting our expectations in such a manner that these outcomes seem natural, even if that was not the intended plan.

We may also understand how self-fulfilling prophecy embedded into language can affect outcomes by considering how it works in reverse. Messaging intended to promote or persuade an audience about the virtues of open access can be self-sabotaged if the language constitutes a “patchy endorsement.” As Collister & Cantrell (2021) write, a patchy endorsement (based on a definition by Levy, 2015) is one that reasserts the status quo (in this case, being subscription publishing), or introduces “concepts that may exacerbate complexity and confusion,” and thus activates the status quo bias. Collister & Cantrell give an example of an open access advocate comparing “open access journals” with “traditional journals” which serves, unintentionally, of creating a “binary between open access and traditional,” with traditional, in this case, centering subscription fees. This is likely not what the advocate had planned, but this can be the effect.

To make a plan is to tell a story about how the future might unfold under certain conditions of our choosing. If our sense of reality is perceived through conceptual metaphors, which have the potential to lead us in a particular direction, then when our plans contain a conceptual metaphor, it may be that our plans are acting as an intuition pump. Intuition pumps are “little stories designed to provoke a heartfelt, table-thumping intuition […] about whatever thesis is being defended”(Dennett, 2014), according to philosopher Daniel Dennett, who dubbed the term in his 1991 book, Consciousness Explained. Intuition pumps are thinking tools, like fables (e.g. Aesop’s fables or Plato’s cave), that Dennett says may “raise an issue vividly,” but do not settle a matter.

We understand from Lakoff and Johnson that metaphors are able to highlight some aspects, hide others, and potentially drive us to self-fulfilling prophecies based on our primed intuitions. For the method / approach to this paper, I suggest that we flag metaphorical language in our field, and identify the underlying conceptual metaphors. By identifying that we are approaching objects and activities through a conceptual metaphor, we can begin to recognize our individual and collective storytelling toward that object or activity. These stories, we can treat like intuition pumps.

Dennett gives advice on how to approach an intuition pump:

“We need to become practiced in the art of treating such tools warily, watching where we step, and checking for pitfalls. If we think of an intuition pump as a carefully designed persuasion tool, we can see that it might repay us to reverse engineer the tool checking out all the moving parts to see what they are doing. When Doug Hofstadter and I composed The Mind’s I back in 1982, he came up with just the right advice on this score: consider the intuition pump to be a tool with many settings, and ‘turn all the knobs’ to see if the same intuitions still get pumped when you consider variations” (ch.1, Introduction: What is an intuition pump?). 

Based on advice from Dennett and Hofstadter about intuition pumps, we can think of highlighting, hiding, and self-fulfilling prophecies as the knobs we should be turning. If our community has accepted a conceptual metaphor, then we should be asking what entailments we commonly attribute to the source object or action. When primed by these concepts, what aspects are being either overrepresented and overlooked? What conclusions might that language be automatically driving us toward?

Next, we will summarize the main points from this section in order to develop a consistent plan of assessing land-use metaphors in scholarly communication.

_____________________

Collister, L.B. and Cantrell, M.H., 2021. From “Patchy Endorsements” to Intentional Advocacy: Deconstructing Bias in the Language of Open Access. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 9(1), p.eP2395. DOI: http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2395

Dennett, D. C. (2013). Intuition pumps and other tools for thinking. WW Norton & Company.

Eve, M. (2021, March). Diamond mining | plan s. SOApbox. https://www.coalition-s.org/blog/diamond-mining/

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2008). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago press.

Levy, N. (2015). Neither fish nor fowl: Implicit attitudes as patchy endorsements. Noûs, 49(4), 800–823. https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.12074

Author’s note: This post is a rough draft of an methods/approach section to an article that I am publicly writing on this blog. I’ve previously written and posted an Introduction section. The first ten posts on this blog are a series of ~15-minute daily writing exercises I conducted, and posted immediately after, in order to develop better writing habits. Mostly, the previous ten posts collect my thoughts in the moment as I overcome some of my writing myths and hurdles. This current post is the product of five days (Mon-Fri) writing, whose activity I reported on daily at twitter. I left the draft untouched over the weekend. The following Monday morning, I re-read the post quickly, allowing for minor tweaks, and then posted it. I hope to continue writing one section of this paper per week until I have a full first draft, at which point I will submit it to a journal peer-review. From then, I will conduct my revisions privately.

Land-use Metaphor in Scholarly Communication (DRAFT)

METHOD / APPROACH, PT. 1

“Why do we use ‘fishing expedition’ for exploratory analyses? A fishing expedition requires a huge amount of preparation and planning, and it has a clear goal. A ‘shotgun approach’ seems a much better metaphor.” -Daniël Lakens, tweet, Jan. 19, 2021.

A tweet from psychologist Daniël Lakens helps demonstrate, in brief, the mechanics of our approach in this paper. Lakens identifies that “fishing expedition” is a metaphor which is commonly used to describe exploratory analysis. He questions why this is the case and suggests an alternative. Whereas a (literal) fishing expedition requires a “huge amount of preparation and planning” and has “a clear goal,” Lakens implies these are not characteristics of an exploratory analysis. Therefore, the comparison between the two is unsuitable. To Lakens, a “shotgun approach” is a better match to characterize exploratory analysis. A shotgun approach, as Wiktionary defines it, is an approach “in which the subject is indiscriminate and haphazard, using breadth, spread, or quantity in lieu of accuracy, planning, etc.” 

To recap, this tweet exhibits three basic mechanics to be used in this paper: 

• identification of a metaphor in circulation; 
• case-making for why that metaphor is or is not suitable, and
• case-making for a replacement, if the prior metaphors are not suitable.

Replies to Lakens’ tweet exhibited occurrences to be expected when working with metaphors. Commenters offered humorous alternatives, such as the “dynamite fishing approach,” while others suggested alternatives, like trawl fishing, which appeared to contain sturdy mapping between the two concepts. Lakens agreed that trawling worked as a metaphor because, in both concepts, “you filter out everything that fits […] but also a lot of things you didn’t want.” And putting a finer point on it: “you have a net that will make sure you catch every small fish (every p < 0.05), even if they are worthless and you should have let them go.”

We can surmise from this that:

• a catchy metaphor may invite exploration on the extent of mapping between the two concept. 

One reply noted that the fishing expeditions metaphor actually comes from the legal domain. Per Wikipedia, a fishing expedition is an “informal, pejorative term for a non-specific search for information, especially incriminating information… most frequently organized by policing authorities.” Catchy metaphors can become commonplace to the point that they transcend their original context. However, catchiness does not fulfill what makes a metaphor a sound metaphor. If we consider Lakens’ original criticism to be valid–that fishing expeditions require much planning and have a specific target, and are thus a poor fit for exploratory analysis–then we can see that the fishing expedition is a wrong fit for pre-trial procedures as well.

This demonstrates that:

• vividness or catchiness can propel metaphors to wide-usage beyond their original context, but
• popular-usage of a metaphor does not necessarily signal the presence of a sound metaphor. 

[Sidebar: Covering similar territory, Jim Lumsden published a post on April Fool’s Day in 2019 for Prolific blog, in which he wrote a spoof product press release for something called the Prolific Fishing Tool. In it, Lumsden parodically wrote that the “new P-Fishing tool guarantees you a statistically significant result, whatever hypothesis you choose,” by selecting a study URL and choosing an effect size, after which the tool would launch “20 parallel studies, “recalculate your output variables after every submission,” and “hit the breaks” as soon as one study “crosses that famous 0.05 threshold.” If the P-Fishing tool failed to “result in the Nature paper you’ve always wanted,” then you could “supercharge your science with the AI-powered P-Trawlerfishing tool.”]

Finally, we can look at responses to Lakens’ assertion that a shotgun approach would make for a better metaphor. One user wrote that people “shooting with a shotgun still point it in the general direction of the target. It’s just more forgiving to inaccuracy.” It is slightly unclear if this point is being made in favor of the shotgun approach metaphor or not, but it did demonstrate how the shotgun approach metaphor would operate differently than the fishing expedition metaphor. 

Another reply said that the commenter was trying to “remove all gun-related metaphors from [their] vocabulary.” This commenter seemed to be expressing an intent to remove  casual normalization of unnecessary firearm language from conversations, which are a highly-pervasive feature in the English language. Whether the two concepts–exploratory analysis and shotgun approach–mapped well together was besides the point of this reply. Since this particular tweet-reply gained no engagement, we may look at another of Lakens’ tweets, which did receive much feedback, to demonstrate a final point about making useful metaphors. 

“The arc of the scientific universe is long, but it bends toward transparency.” -Daniël Lakens, tweet, Feb, 27 2021.

In this tweet, Lakens attempts to express a feeling that progress in open science (transparency) is slow but steady. He does so by interpolating a famous quote from Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1965 speech delivered on steps of the State Capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, in which the Civil Rights Leader said “How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Superficially, the open science movement (target) is the Civil Rights movement (source) is a logical conceptual metaphor, from the standpoint that both movements seek to improve society, and both push against the status quo to do so, which causes progress to be slow.  From a values-based standpoint, it is considered by some (myself included) to be too crass to draw these types of comparisons, because of its potential to lessen the weight of the source domain; in this case, the Civil Rights movement. Many commenters noted the inappropriateness of this analogy, while others defended it.

As a reductio ad absurdum, we could follow this further to say that because scholars labor without pay for organizations who profit from their work, that scholars are slaves. While there is a certain logic at play here, to actually make that comparison in a world where actual slavery still occurs and the effects of abolished slavery can still be felt, would do a special kind of disservice to slaves and slave-descendents. It diminishes and dismisses trauma, or at least can give that distinct impression. This is not to say that we should overlook how knowledge workers are routinely taken advantage of. Far from it. Instead, we could seek out better, more appropriate metaphors through which to express that idea. Or if we genuinely fear sacrificing intellectual insight from drawing such a comparison, we would do well to note that while X and Y may share space on a spectrum, that they are on far ends of it.

While some might find it unnecessary to allow a critical or moral analysis to stand in the way of otherwise logically-sound metaphors, it is intellectually dishonest to ignore the ways in which our words affect the world around us. When we find ourselves dismissing earnest, poorly-received reactions by a substantial portion of our audience, then we may question whether we are poorly communicating or not. And to think intelligently about the metaphors we use in our fields is to care about communicating well.

Perhaps the least controversial way to phrase the point here is to say that: 

• a metaphor is not useful if it evokes other thoughts to the point of distraction.

With Lakens’ tweet, we have drawn out several basic mechanics to consider when thinking about metaphors. We now direct our attention to slightly more sophisticated mechanics in this paper’s purview: highlighting, hiding, and self-fulfilling prophecies. 

[To be continued in a Part 2 of this section.]