we cut the world into pieces with words, distinctions, categories. analogy and metaphor sews things back together, reminds us of the inherent sameness of everything
we cut the world into pieces with words, distinctions, categories. analogy and metaphor sews things back together, reminds us of the inherent sameness of everything
From the never-ceasing flux around us, we carve entities out of space and out of time: people, places, things, events. We freeze them, turn them into words and concepts. We change those moving things into static things so that we can act on them with our minds.
Barbara Tversky • Mind in Motion
Everything that is spoken and can be spoken is merely a figurative term we use to nominate the unnamable, an inventory of “metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms” that we have mistaken for the real and fixed. All we have is language and we cannot get beyond it.
Tan Tuck Ming • My Grandmother Glitches the Machine
The machines we need for making sense of this omnipresent, efflorescent and entangled world – where making sense is analogous, as Wittgenstein said of language, to joining in play – should not be more remote, more abstract, but more like the world.
James Bridle • Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence
The eerie certainty we have of existing as separate creatures in a world full of things that are not us, our ability to create abstract symbolic representations of our mental states and use language to communicate these interior states of mind—all
Abby Smith Rumsey • When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future
The world seeks to label us, categorize us and pack us neatly into boxes. But we are humans, not objects. We are viscous. We dance around the lines between solid and liquid. We change and evolve. We ebb and flow. We shrink and grow. Follow the rivers that flow within you. pic.twitter.com/bzI4mX8jku
The reason we’re able to relate ideas within different trains of thought is due, in part, to atomization, the practice of reducing ideas to their essential points.
Bob Doto • A System for Writing: How an Unconventional Approach to Note-Making Can Help You Capture Ideas, Think Wildly, and Write Constantly - A Zettelkasten Primer
As humans we like to put things into categories. It makes communicating and thinking easier. Scratch that. It makes communicating and thinking possible. Categories go hand in hand with words as providing us with crucial compression of reality.
Albert Wenger • Progress vs. Categories
“to categorize something is to render it meaningful.”