Mike Stuart will be presenting a faculty colloquium paper on “Metaphor and Understanding".
Juliet is the sun and the market is governed by an invisible hand. We frequently come to understand new things by way of metaphors like these. But how? Despite a great deal of work done on metaphor in philosophy of language and mind, none of it connects to the explosion of recent work on the concept of understanding in epistemology. This talk pursues metaphorical understanding, literally. I will argue that metaphors facilitate understanding by making it easier to encode and process data about complex subjects. This is more than simply a practical crutch—it’s largely what it means to understand something genuinely.