Colin Murray Turbayne

Colin Murray Turbayne(7 February1916-16 May2006) was an Australian-American philosopher who specialized in the writings of theEmpiricistGeorge Berkeleywhile lecturing for over three decades at theUniversity of Rochester.He is also noted for his research into the use and abuse of the linguisticmetaphorsin the historical writings of several other noted philosophers and scientists of the western tradition in his bookThe Myth of Metaphor.

Quotes

The Myth of Metaphor (1962)

• Themechanical philosophyis a case of being victimized by metaphor. I chooseDescartesandNewtonas excellent examples of metaphysicians of mechanismmalgré eux,that is to say, as unconscious victims of the metaphor of the great machine. Together they have founded a church, more powerful than that founded byPeterandPaul,whose dogmas are now so entrenched that anyone who tries to reallocate the facts is guilty of more than heresy.
  • Colin Murray Turbayne,The Myth of Metaphor(1962)[1]p. 5.

• There is a remedy against the domination imposed, not by generals, statesmen, and men of action, whose power dissolves when they retire, but by the great sort-crossers, whose power increases when they die- the remedy of becoming aware of metaphor...
  • Colin Murray Turbayne,The Myth of Metaphor(1962)[2]p. 5.

• The metaphysics that still dominatesscienceand enthralls the minds of men is nothing but a metaphor, and a limited one.
  • Colin Murray Turbayne,The Myth of Metaphor(1962)[3]p. 6.

• However appropriate in one sense a good metaphor may be, in another sense there is something inappropriate about it. This inappropriateness results from the use of a sign in a sense different from the usual...
  • Colin Murray Turbayne,The Myth of Metaphor(1962)[4]p. 11.

• In short, the use of metaphor involves both the awareness of duality of sense and the pretense that the two different senses are one.
  • Colin Murray Turbayne,The Myth of Metaphor(1962)[5]p. 17.

• Thus to the plain man there may be no metaphor in Aristotle's "substance", Descartes' "machine of nature," Newtonian "force" and "attraction," Thomas Young's "kinetic energy" and Michelangelo's figure of Leda. Placed in their customary contexts these present nothing to him but the face of literal truth. To the initiated, however, who are aware of the "gross original" senses as well as the now literal senses, they may become metaphors. There are no metaphorsper se....
  • Colin Murray Turbayne,The Myth of Metaphor(1962)[6]p. 18.

• Knowingthetheoryof anything is contrasted withknow-howin all the arts...Beethoven..Michelangelo..Shakespeare, all great exponents ofknow-how,probably knew how to manipulate their instruments to achieve the desired results long before they knew the theory of their art. Perhaps some of them never bothered to learn the theory. On the other hand, there are many who know the theory better than these, but who lackknow-how....Although we acquire the skill of understanding words by experience, so that we know the correlations between them and things, between words and other words, and between words and feelings and actions, we do not do it by inductive reasoning. Nor must we think that we do it by inductive reasoning... In the main, words arecuesrather thanclues.
  • Colin Murray Turbayne,The Myth of Metaphor(1962)[7]pp. 90-91.

External links

• Berkeley Prize Winners
• Colin Murray Turbayne's publications on JSTOR.org
• Colin Murray Turbayne's publications on Google Scholar
• Colin Murray Turbayne in the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• You may read Turbayne's "The Myth of Metaphor" (1962) online at hathitrust.org

Authority control:WorldCat search