Numbers and Metaphor

Morphology, Metaphor and Category

Ralph Chapman, Tiha von Ghyczy, Thomas P. Caudell,
Steve Smith

Wednesday, June 18, 6-8 PM

Blenders are a Wednesday night feature at Santa Fe Complex, located at 632 Agua Fria St. Entrance is on Romero St. Admission is free. Light refreshments will be served; donations to defray their costs are welcome.

Numbers are metaphor: they describe the world in an abstract manner that implies their object. They can tell us how much something weighs, how tall its is or how fast it is going. Or, they can delve deeper into their objects and help us understand them in an almost intuitive way.

When numbers are used to study variations in nature–and learn how natural processes influence organisms–they form the basis for the field of morpholoy, the study of changes in form. Morphology underlies much of our knowledge about the evolution of creatures over time, particularly in the fossil record. By studying how a line of fossils changes, for example, paleontologists can theorize about evolutionary forces that create species or variations within species long-since vanished from the planet.

This Wednesday’s Blender at Santa Fe Complex brings four national experts on the study of form through numbers in a a blend of morphology, metaphor and category. Ralph Chapman, Tiha von Ghyczy, Thomas P. Caudell, and Steve Smith will discuss their own research interests and their applications of morphology, metaphor and category in understanding complex problem spaces. It will be a wide-ranging talk, moving from paleographic fossils to modern business communications and neuroscience. Admission is free.

Steve Smith, founder of Los Alamos Visual Analytics (LAVA) and former Visualization Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, has nearly 30 years experience in helping scientists understand their data, models and theories through immersive perceptualization. Steve will guide the discussion of how the application of cognitive or conceptual metaphors and the structure-function duality can be used to aid in the exploration, discovery and analysis of complex problem spaces.

Ralph Chapman, a paleontologist by training and member of LAVA, is the former director of the National Museum of Natural History’s Applied Morphometrics Laboratory, the former director of the Idaho Virtualization Laboratory, and an instructor at the first NSF-funded workshop on evolutionary morphometrics.

Tiha von Ghyczy, a fellow at the Strategy Institute at the Boston Consulting Group, will describe the Strategy Institute’s Strategy Gallery, a collection of over 250 metaphors they have found useful for gaining insight into complex business strategies. Tiha studied philosophy and mathematics at the University of Amsterdam and earned his M.B.A. from IMEDE (now IMD), in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Dr. Tom Caudell, the director of the High Performance Computing Center at the University of New Mexico, is an astrophysicist by training and a pioneer in the development of augmented and virtual reality with specific application to understanding complex information spaces and processes. Dr. Caudell will discuss his work in the application of category theory to the understanding of complex systems ranging from decision and risk support systems to neural architectures.

The speakers will limit their formal presentations to 15 minutes each, leaving time for contributions from the audience and lots of discussion.

An Overview of Morphology

In 1966, Fritz Zwicky proposed a generalized form of morphological research now known as General Morphological Analysis:

“Attention has been called to the fact that the term morphology has long been used in many fields of science to designate research on structural interrelations – for instance in anatomy, geology, botany and biology. … I have proposed to generalize and systematize the concept of morphological research and include not only the study of the shapes of geometrical, geological, biological, and generally material structures, but also to study the more abstract structural interrelations among phenomena, concepts, and ideas, whatever their character might be.” (Zwicky, 1966, p. 34)

In ‘The Fruitful Flaws of Strategy Metaphors,’ Tiha von Ghyczy examines the power of both cognitive and rhetorical metaphors.

Such metaphors communicate and clarify complex ideas using seemingly disparate sources—and in so doing, spur creativity. In this piece, the author contends that cognitive metaphors can be a particularly effective means for generating innovative business strategies. Tiha von Ghyczy believes that by focusing on something unfamiliar (that is, the subject of the metaphor), a metaphor can spark creative thinking about something familiar (the object of the metaphor).

In the 1980 Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson introduced conceptual metaphor as referring to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain in terms of another, and being pervasive in everyday life and thinking.