Talk:Fallacy of misplaced concreteness
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Meaning of meaning
[edit]This idea is echoed in The Meaning of Meaning by Ogden and Richards and Language in Thought and Action by SI Hayakawa. Although they may overreach, their argument is that all abstractions inherently lose the characteristics of the concrete world they describe.
Example
[edit]How about a simple (concrete) example? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 211.225.32.226 (talk) 11:49, 2 May 2007 (UTC).
- Your question is well-taken and I should try to answer it. I encounter all the time reasoning that is flawed because the speaker takes literally a metaphor or other figure of speech. I have learned much here from reading Lakoff and Johnson, who show by many examples that discourse about human abstractions is rife with allusions to the body and its motions.
- For my part, I am unable to find any passage in Part III of Whitehead (1925) bearing on this fallacy.132.181.160.42 (talk) 23:08, 21 February 2008 (UTC)