Uncontainable Metaphor: George F. Kennan’s ‘‘X’’ Article and Cold War Discourse1
Bibliographic record
Abstract
‘‘Unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere’’ .Robert Frost (39) ‘‘... the development of civilizations is essentially a progression of metaphors’’ .E. L. Doctorow (164) Emerson wrote, ‘‘Every word which is used to express a moral and intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance’’ (‘‘Nature’’ 911), so every word is a metaphor. Emerson repudiated those such as Hobbes and Locke, who saw metaphor as largely ornamental, and so incompatible with reason 2 to embrace the idea that language was radically metaphorical, saturated with figurative meaning. Yet one does not have to subscribe wholly to his perspective to recognize that metaphor enables us to formulate concepts and to map, ‘‘what is known about one domain onto a less structured domain’’ (Chilton 48). George Lakoff recognized long ago that metaphor has a cognitive dimension. It allows us to make sense of a complex world by letting us conceive of the world in terms structured according to pre-conceptual experiences derived from our having bodies that stand erect, move through space, feel sensation, and are separate from each other (14–7; 56). We might again turn to Emerson, who described ‘‘man [as] an analogist’’ (‘‘Nature’’ 911): we can understand a particular object, event, or idea because it is like another object, event, or idea—a notion that recalls Kenneth Burke’s point.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".