Log24

Max Black "notes, for instance, that in a study on wolves,
the implications of the metaphor 'Man is a wolf' will be
different than they might be in everyday discourse."

Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins
in "The Edge" (1997)

From an obituary in today's New York Times—

"His daughter Jessamyn West said he was driven 'to understand everything.'

'He knew a million things — it didn’t matter:
worms, plumbing, literature. He could give you
a discourse. It seemed like he could never rest
until he had a sense of control over the things around him.'"

From "Meet Joe Black" (1998)—

“Should I be afraid?”

“Not a man like you.”

From Models and Metaphors , by Max Black,
Cornell University Press, 1962 —

I do not recommend the work of Lewin, nor that of a later
science groupie, Keith Devlin. 

In September 2014, Devlin wrote an ignorant column about
a sort of bad mathematical joke based on a divergent infinite series.

He has now returned to the topic, this time writing more about
its proper mathematical background: analytic continuation .

Lewin is to Devlin as Lévi-Strauss is to Chomsky.
None of these four should be taken very seriously.

Max Black, however, should .

A  1960  analogy by Max Black —

"Those who see a model as a mere crutch
are like those who consider metaphor
a mere decoration or ornament."

This suggests a search for "Analogies between Analogies" —

“A mathematician is a person who can find analogies
between theorems; a better mathematician is one who
can see analogies between proofs and the best
mathematician can notice analogies between theories.
One can imagine that the ultimate mathematician is one
who can see analogies between analogies.”

— Stefan Banach, according to MacTutor.

In memory of Sir Andrew Huxley, OM, who died on May 30, 2012

C. P. Snow on G. H. Hardy at Trinity College, Cambridge—

He played his games and indulged his eccentricities.
He was living in some of the best intellectual company
in the world— G. E. Moore, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell,
Trevelyan, the high Trinity society  which was shortly to
find its artistic complement in Bloomsbury. (Hardy himself
had links with Bloomsbury, both of personal friendship
and of sympathy.)

See also "Max Black" + Trinity  in this journal.

… twó flocks, twó folds—black, white; ' right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind
But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these ' twó tell, each off the óther….

— "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves," by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Related material:

Max Black — "Beginners are taught that a set having three members is a single thing, wholly constituted by its members but distinct from them. After this, the theological doctrine of the Trinity as 'three in one' should be child's play." ("The Elusiveness of Sets," Review of Metaphysics, June 1971, p. 615– as quoted by Bill Vallicella)

 Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XXI —

Gibbon, discussing the theology of the Trinity, defines perichoresis as

“… the internal connection and spiritual penetration which indissolubly unites the divine persons⁵⁹ ….

⁵⁹ … The   or ‘circumincessio,’ is perhaps the deepest and darkest corner of the whole theological abyss.”

---

 ”Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.  And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 146, translated by Walter Kaufmann

Seven

“Research & Ideas” memo from Harvard Business School dated April 17, 2006:

“The word experience comes from the Latin words ex pericolo, which mean ‘from danger.'”

— Etymology by Professor Joseph Badaracco of Harvard University.  Badaracco gives no evidence for his dubious claim.

Related (if only temporally):
Easter Monday, April 17, 2006.

      — Online Etymology Dictionary

The title of this entry refers to the time it was posted. Related references to seven: April 7, 2003, and today’s previous entry.

See also an entry from 2/29, 2004
(Leap Day and Oscar Night):

Harvard persons from parts of the university that are more scholarly than the Business School may sneer at the above-quoted Online Etymology Dictionary.  They can consult the following:

On “experience”

From J.L. Austin, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play:

“Scholars, such as Julius Pokorny (Indogermanisches Etymolgisches Worterbuch, 1959), trace ‘experience’ right back to hypothetical Indo-European base or root *per-, ‘to attempt, venture, risk,’ whence the Greek peira,”experience,” the source of our word ’empirical.’ It is also the verbal root which derives the Germanic *feraz, giving rise to Old English faer, “danger, sudden calamity,” whence Modern English ‘fear.’ Already, we see the ‘cognitive’ directions taken by * per-, through the Greek route, and affective ones, through the Germanic — which would have interested Dilthey, one may be sure! But more directly ‘experience’ derives, via Middle English and Old French, from the Latin experientia, denoting ‘trial, proof, experiment,’ itself generated from experiens, the present participle of experiri, ‘to try, test,’ from from ex-, ‘out’ + base per as in peritus, ‘experienced,’ ‘having learned by trying.’ The suffixed extended form of *per is peri-tlo-, whence the Latin periclum, periculum, “trial, danger, peril. Once more, we find experience linked with risk, straining towards ‘drama,’ crisis, rather than bland cognitive learning!”

“… Finally, ‘experiment,’ like ‘experience,’ is derived from Latin experiri “to try or test.” If we put these various senses together we have a ‘laminated’ semantic system focused on ‘experience,’ which portrays it as a journey, a test (of self, of suppositions about others), a ritual passage, an exposure to peril or risk, a source of fear. By means of experience, we ‘fare’ ‘fearfully’ through ‘perils,’ taking ‘experimental’ steps. …” (17-18)

The above is taken from an anonymous weblog entry.  The author of the entry identified the source as From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play.  The author of the entry falsely stated that the author of this book was J. L. Austin.  In fact, the book was written by Victor Turner, apparently the same philosophical sociologist whom we encountered in the previous entry and in the Log24 entry for the recent feast of St. Max Black.  Turner may have been quoting Austin; pages from the book are not available online.  Another author, however, says the quotation is by Turner himself.  See Rena Fraden’s Imagining Medea, pp. 218-219.

Today’s previous entry is a sort of “ritual passage” for a Nobel Prize winner. For a ritual passage more directly related to Professor Badaracco, see the Brookline TAB obituary of his 23-year-old daughter, who died on Monday, August 21, 2006.  According to today’s online Harvard Crimson, “she was walking along Hammond Street in Newton [Mass.] when an 84-year-old driver jumped the curb and struck her.”

From her Brookline TAB obituary of Thursday, Aug. 24, 2006:

“Funeral services will be held Friday [Aug. 25, 2006] at 10 a.m. at St. Mary’s of the Assumption Church, at 67 Harvard St.

The family asks that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Centro Romero Community Center in Chicago: 6216 N. Clark St., Chicago, IL 60660.”