More on metaphor and metatheory

Continuing from this post, Murray reiterates some of Edwards' et al. points. E.g., that categories often overlap and that categorizing too rigidly leads to miscategorizing certain things to fit into a one-size-fits-all schema. Hence Edwards' far broader lens categories usually missing from AQAL. And as I noted previously, Edwards admits that all those lenses seem as if to be inherent in ontology itself due to their continual recurrence. Indeed, image schema preposition those lenses.

Murray also addresses the crux of this thread in that too much metatheory can obstruct what is feels like to examine what's behind it. We need to critically examine our assumptions and epistemic drives, to explore the unconscious metaphors we use in support of it.

"This is not a purely intellectual exercise, but a phenomenological process of feeling into the movement of such drives as sensations within the body, as they arise in the moments of thought and discourse" (14).

I must take issue though with Murray in that he claims L&J do not address development (footnote 43, p. 16). As part of this thread's inquiry attests, one can display development without using the language of a metatheory about it. E.g., the whole edifice of abstract thought arising form image schema to basic categories to metaphor to proposition is indeed a developmental schema. So too is how philosophy is built on this developmental schema, with implicit claims to a more accurate and embodied philosophy taking account of this trajectory. It doesn't have to frame it in the language of development to be developmental.


Although on that same page and in the spirit of this thread, in discussing self and social emancipation he does note that individuals can indeed enact such principles but it "is not essential that individuals understand or use the principles and models in IT and CR." Also on p. 42 he does address one of the questions noted earlier in the thread, that to understand such constructs requires at least a meta-systemic cognitive development. But is such cognitive development needed to enact such principles, the prior quote seeming to suggest otherwise? 

E.g., we all use this thing called the internet while most of us have not a clue as to how it works. And yet by such use we are inculcated with an ethic of sharing information as well as enacting its structure via distributed networking. It's a point I've made repeatedly about the emerging collaborative commons, that via the tech most of us are enacting it without necessarily knowing any of its metatheoretical underpinnings. And in so doing we are enacting its ecological consciousness without necessarily knowing what the hell that means.