Events
Metaphors We Die By: How Patterns of Communication Can Become Deadly
Date and Time
Monday, September 19, 2016 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Description
SPEAKER: DR. JOHN LYNE, Department of Communication, University of Pittsburgh
The 6th Annual James W. Carey Memorial Lecture
Free and open to
the public!
A LIB 100 approved event
The language and idioms of information transmission pervade both academic and public discourse about communication. But the power of metaphors, and other configurations of meaning, is not measured by the information they impart. Rather, it lies in the way these enable or restrict engagement with the world. This implies that we should subject them to a critical eye, alert to the dangers as well as the enrichments brought by commonly reiterated metaphors. The lecture will examine cases of “metaphorical strangling”--in science, medicine, and public life--that can become deadening when misconstrued as information.
This event is sponsored by the Communication Studies Major Program, Institute for General Semantics, School of Communications, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of Philosophy, Department of English, Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, The Graduate School, and the Office of the Provost.
Dr. John Lyne studies philosophical and theoretical issues in rhetoric and communication, rhetoric of science, and argumentation. He has published work on evolutionary biology and “gene talk,” the intersections of science and common sense, and philosophically oriented work influenced by C.S. Peirce, Kenneth Burke, and Wittgenstein. He also teaches a graduate seminar on the rhetoric and philosophy of medicine in the M.A. program in Bioethics. He has team taught seminars with faculty from History and Philosophy of Science, Biology, Economics, and Political Science. His work appears in journals and edited volumes both inside and outside the field of communication, and he has been editor-in-chief of a book series on the rhetoric of inquiry with the University of Wisconsin Press. He has directed several national award-winning dissertations. Doctoral advisees have taken faculty positions at the University of Colorado, Marquette University, University of Alabama at Huntsville, Temple University, Tulane University, the Claremont Graduate University, and other universities. Professor Lyne is the recipient of the 2010 Provost's Award for Excellence in Mentoring, for his success at mentoring doctoral students, and the 2014 Donald Ecroyd Research and Scholarship Award of the Pennsylvania Communication Association. He is a past president of the Association for the Rhetoric of Science and Technology and a past chair of Communication departments at the University of Iowa and the University of Pittsburgh.
Contact
Dr. Valerie Peterson
[email protected]