Rosé February 13, 2007
Posted by ocmpoma in : food & drink, language , trackbackOver at Knowledge Problem, Lynne Kiesling has a great post up about language, metaphor, Steven Pinker, and wine flavor.
As she sums up, she writes, “it is in the nature of human language to use metaphor as hooks into our shared knowledge when we are describing a personal, potentially unknown experience to someone else.”
Which is the essence of what, to me, is the gulf between objective (quantitative) language and subjective (qualitative) language. We can’t describe, really, what wine tastes like — we can only attempt to convey our subjective reaction to the flavor via abstract, qualitative language.
The map, especially the map of subjective experience, is not the territory.
Tags for this article: science , society , wine
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