logansrun,
Forget the rhetorics of my post. It was only used in reply to the amount of hot air (needless sarcasm) that I think your post produced.
The problem with language dictionaries (and making such dictionaries is one of my research areas) is that they provide popular definitions. Such definitions can be used as a starting point to debate concepts, but it'd be a fallacy to assume that dictionaries contain much more than the most popular definitions of concepts. If you need a technical definition of a concept, you usually distrust popular dictionaries (sometimes there are a few competing defintions of the same concept). So rather then try to ridicule my use of the concept of metaphor by showing how it's out of keeping with the Webster's one, you should have asked me first what I understand by a metaphor. And my understanding of the concept is similar to the understanding well established in many modern cognitive sciences.
In short:
Metaphors are not merely figures of speech. They are figures of thought. You can't say, or even conceive of anything abstract without using a metaphor. The metaphor may be implicit, but it's still there. An example:
Time. Can you produce two sentences about time without using a spacial metaphor? No. Even the basic prepositions such as "before", "after", "from", "to" which are used to describe temporal relations are primarily spacial prepositions.
So nearly all abstract thinking is metaphorical. Much of hard science is metaphorical. ("hard" science is another metaphor). Still, science is different from poetry since the former is based on some clearly defined methodology. So, while there's nothing wrong with using metaphors (in fact metaphorization is unavoidable when it comes to abstract thinking), there are more verifiable metaphors and less verifiable metaphors. Example: in astrophysics you talk about "dwarves and giants". In physics time is sometimes conceived as a "dimension". But at the end of the day, we can put a finger on the aspects of reality which such metaphors are supposed to describe and how they are insufficient for the purposes of descritption.
Of course there are branches of science where metaphors go more blurry (hello! another metaphor), but thanks to the metascience of methodology we can still show how these metaphors are only metaphors and that they are only to be used temporarily until more data is collected and framed into other metaphorical constructs. This is what I call the verifiablity of metaphors.
On the other hand, religious metaphors are usually perceived as eternal truths. There is no methodology to help verify them. Most of the time they are verified by other, equally insubstantieted religious metaphors. To give you an example from Christianity:
In explaining "the nature of God" some Christians like to claim that God is our loving father (an anthropomorphic metaphor). When asked why this loving father allows so much suffering, they try to verify this metaphor by saying we are his little children (another metaphor) and so as little children we can't and don't need to know all that our loving father knows. Therefore it makes perfect sense not only that God is our loving father, but also that we are his little children. So you can see that there is no attempt to verify the first metaphor by some independent methodology, or by sensory data. Rather the first metaphor is substantieted by another metaphor.
The tricky thing is, since all our cognition works in terms of metaphors and a few other cognitive mechanisms, most people fall for it, because they get "the pseudo rational feeling" it all makes perfect sense.
Of course you could argue that no metaphors are truly verifiable and you'd be right. But some metaphorical conceptual systems are more concerned with verifiablity than others. In the Western tradition there are different degrees of verifiability of metaphors as they get used in poetry, science, philosophy and religion.
:: By your phrase "unverifiable metaphors" you either are stating that all metaphors are unverifiable (which is true, but pointless in trying to denigrate Buddhism) or that some metaphors are verifiable (which is false, in which case you misunderstand the concept of metaphor).
Here is a review of a book which got many cognitive scientists to treat metaphors in a way similar to the way I see them: http://www.norvig.com/mwlb.html (BTW, I've used about a hundred metaphors in this post)
Cheers,
Pole (I'm off to Luxembourg for a week, but I'd like to read your comments when I'm back)
