On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: fourteen
[ by Charles Cameron — this one, on sacrament, symbol and such, winds up being an intro to #15, not yet written ]
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My last post On the felicities of graph-based game-board design drew forth a stunning tweeted response from JustKnecht, friend and fellow explorer or Hesse’s Glass Bead Game and the magic of ideas behind it:
Q: What might the upper (blue) and lower (green) levels signify, in terms of play?
A: Different subject areas being compared in the game.
Cf. metaphor/analogy maps, e.g. Gentner and Jeziorski’s representation of Boyle’s analogy between ants moving eggs and wind blowing leaves. pic.twitter.com/14fwxJjTwv
— just knecht (@justknecht) December 23, 2018
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That’s a fascinating graphical DoubleQuote, at first glance, so I dug into the two images, the left hand one coming from a Sembl post of mine in this series, On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: two dazzlers.
It’s the one on the right, however, that opened doors for me — one door being the article by Gentner and Jeziorski, the other being Richard Boyd‘s article that follows it in Andrew Ortony (ed), Metaphor and Thought, 2nd ed, CUP (1993):
Notice, incidentally, the beautiful ouroboros in Boyd‘s title!
Okay, that’s my Christmas reading.
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It seems I’m way behind, and it’s time maybe for the HipBone Games to enter the slipstream of Philosophy as she is practiced these days.
But first, and to put the good folks of Elizabeth Anscombe‘s discipline off the scent, there’s the question of Sacrament to consider. Sacrament, along with Entropy, is something Gregory Bateson instructed his medical students to comprehend if they are to be civilized in their discourse as future doctors and psychiatrists. In the first paragraph of the Introduction to his Mind and Nature, Bateson writes:
Even grown-up persons with children of their own cannot give a reasonable account of concepts such as entropy, sacrament, syntax, number, quantity, pattern, linear relation, name, class, relevance, energy, redundancy, force, probability, parts, whole, information, tautology, homology, mass (either Newtonian or Christian), explanation, description, rule of dimensions, logical type, metaphor, topology, and so on. What are butterflies? What are starfish? What are beauty and ugliness?
Note that the concept of “sacrament” occupies a place of honor second only to “entropy” in Bateson’s listing.
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Sacrament?
Sacrament?What does that have to do with the philosophy (and graphical rendering) of metaphor?
First, here’s a quick look at the notion of Sacrament, from the Introduction: Mapping Theologies of Sacraments (pp. 1-12) of Justin Holcomb and David Johnson’s Christian Theologies of the Sacraments: A Comparative Introduction:
In the prologue of the Gospel According to John the apostle writes about the incarnation of the Word of God, Jesus Christ, that “from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace” (1:16). One of the means by which Christians believe we receive the grace of God in Christ is the sacraments. But what are the sacraments? As many Christians know, Augustine of Hippo succinctly defined a sacrament as being “an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace.”
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