Managing to find some time to read Eco’s Kant and the Platypus at last. He is a big fan of Nietzshe’s Truth and Lies and quotes ” … truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms … that subsequently gel into knowledge.” That’s just about where I’m coming from. Eco goes on to say “… we become accustomed to lying according to convention …. placing our actions under the control of abstractions …. having reduced the metaphors to schemata and concepts. Thence a pyramidal order of castes and ranks ….. constructed entirely by language …. the graveyard of intuition.” Exactly, “reification kills knowledge” is my mantra, “lying by (western) convention” is Argyris’ thesis. This could almost be the last word on the matter of justifying why rational objective ontologies are the last thing a model of knowledge needs.
[Metonymy and other forms of rhetoric seem to be a flavour of the month on the web.]