Comment by onthrowaway457
14 hours ago
Constructing explicit analogies for persuasion seems to be a bit of a different thing.
I’m not sure if Hofstadter puts it this way, but to me even the core aspects of your sentences in this post have roots in analogies. What does it mean to lose an argument or to spiral it to a different place? There is no place, there is no lost item, but we talk about these abstract ideas in ways that largely depend upon understanding things like physical objects and space and movement.
There are certainly a lot of analogies to be found in language - it would be interesting to know how much of this is cultural (e.g. business use of sports analogies) vs universal across cultures. Your "spiraling" example reminds me of one I recently came across as a roman coin collector - the origin of the word cataracts, and also portcullis (latin: cataracta) as being analogical to a waterfall (whose greek name gives us cataract), and the notion of something coming crashing down (even if only an eye covering).
Perhaps the common occurrence of analogies in language is because language is distinct from the things it is referencing, so some degree of abstraction is unavoidable?