Meta-metaphoricity refers to the worhtless shite that human beings spout when they take a metaphor for reality- i.e. confuse a figure of speech for a fact about the world- and construct another metaphor on that basis which itself is taken to have equal alethic force.
Thus 'the mind'- which doesn't actually exist except as a figure of speech- is a metaphor for something that has salience in certain co-ordination games. If this metaphor is considered to be a concrete fact about the world then a second metaphor- viz that 'minds' are organs similar to hearts or livers and are contained in bodies- can burgeon such that worthless shite is talked about things like the interaction pseudo-problem.
Chomsky speaks of Newton as introducing mysterianism and rejecting Galileo's mechanistic philosophy by permitting some mysterious force called Gravity which acted at a distance rather than by means of some elaborate clockwork or Rube Goldberb machine. Thus Chomsky says 'Galileo insisted that theories are intelligible, in his words, only if we can “duplicate [their posits] by means of appropriate artificial devices.”
Descartes took a wrong turn, Chomsky claims, by thinking there were two different substances- that of Thought and that of Matter. With typical perversity, Chomsky thinks Cartesian 'res cogitans' has not been debunked unlike the 'res extensa' of Matter.
Thus he writes- 'The properties of matter, Newton showed, escape the bounds of the mechanical philosophy. To account for them it is necessary to resort to interaction without contact. Not surprisingly, Newton was condemned by the great physicists of the day for invoking the despised occult properties of the neo-scholastics. Newton largely agreed. He regarded action at a distance, in his words, as “so great an Absurdity, that I believe no Man who has in philosophical matters a competent Faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.” Newton however argued that these ideas, though absurd, were not “occult” in the traditional despised sense. Nevertheless, by invoking this absurdity, we concede that we do not understand the phenomena of the material world. To quote one standard scholarly source, “By `understand’ Newton still meant what his critics meant: `understand in mechanical terms of contact action’.”
Chomsky wrote this quite recently. He reads the newspapers. He must be aware that Scientists can create things- like the Higgs boson- with their sophisticated equipment. I don't know if 'gravitons'- i.e. something material which establishes the reign of Gravity by means of 'contact action'- can be created or destroyed in the laboratory and if 'anti-gravity' will give us 'Back to the Future' type hover-boards. I do know that photons exist and their power can be harnessed by ubiquitous household objects like my wristwatch and garden lights. What's more this is Common Knowledge for me, you, Chomsky and everybody that Chomsky knows. Yet Chomsky is pretending that Newton 'exorcised the machine, leaving the ghost intact'. In other words, the billions of pounds invested in the CERN laboratory represent nothing but superstition or a sinister boondoggle of some sort.
Far better that money were given to me to conduct research into 'Adi Vigyan'- the original science, which consists of throwing your ills onto your reflection in a mirror by chanting the appropriate mantra.
You see, Newton has exorcised machines- which is why they can't do anything useful. However, ghosts are intact and, as is well known, ghosts have a lot of super-powers and can be made to do stuff for you if you know the correct linguistic mantra.
Oh dear! I suddenly see why Chomsky is so popular. He is a practitioner of 'Adi Vigyan'. He takes Science as his mirror and casts his own ills onto that supposed reflection.
Like you and me he is a worthless shithead and knows he is a worthless shithead because he aint doing proper Science just indulging in that 'meta-metaphoricity' which, purely as a figure of speech, treats shitheads who teach Linguisitics, or Child Minders who try to keep Poli Sci, or Comp Lit majors from masturbating to death or eating each other, as doing something worthwhile- i.e. Scientific.
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