Why is Conflation an Error?

The defining characteristic of metaphor is its conflation of two things. We think of one as the other. His career is flaming out. If we work hard, the project can hit its target. It was difficult, but I stood up to their criticisms. Careers, projects, self-regard understood as flames, arrows, standing up.

This is an act of conflation, or it is nothing. We think about one thing as if it were another. We understand this moment in a career in a very specific way: it is a flame about to end. To think metaphorically is to conflate things that are different, and different kinds of things. Careers are social things, and flames are chemical. His career is flaming out.

Conflation is an error in a deep sense: not only does it confuse different things. It reverses the very movement of rational, critical thought, which is in Plato's terms a matter of "collecting and dividing" things into their proper kinds. The work of thinking is to distinguish kinds from one another, to organize things into the many kinds of things that are. The act of conflation, however, reverses or undoes this work, seeking to merge or combine what must be kept separate. Conflation is in this sense not only a confusion among things but represents at a deeper level the undoing of thought itself. In this way, metaphor is deeply, dangerously irrational. Perhaps this explains why metaphor has been the subject of such intense and thorough rejection (and great indifference, the colder side of rejection).

But I ask: do you find such conflation to be problematic, irrational, confusing? Do you often stop when you confront a metaphor, a conflation, and demand to know what it means? Do these acts of conflation interfere with our lives in the way that they should if they are in fact violations of reason and sense? Does metaphor threaten your capacity to reason and think rationally?

Metaphors weave themselves seamlessly into our lives, so much so that we rarely notice them. If so, perhaps they are doing something right. Is it possible that they are even helpful, not an obstacle to be overcome? (I believe the notions of obstacles and overcoming in the previous sentence helped you understand my meaning.) What can they be helping us do, as we conflate things with one another? Clearly, they are not helping us collect and divide things into their proper kinds. We have concepts for that, and metaphors do the opposite.

If not its categorical and lawful meaning, what else do we need to understand about the world? What other kind of meaning beyond the categorical might metaphorical conflation, and conflation of any kind, help us secure? Metaphor seems to be a good error. What is good about it?

 Copyright © Tim Adamson, 2026. All Rights Reserved. Please do not distribute without the author’s permission.