Maria,
Right’ish and wrong’ish suggest to me a spectrum of possibility that might be free of the need for being exact. Not an estimate but a range of working possibilities.
Not knowing much about math doesn’t help me here, though I do sense within the logic of math is the permission to approach problems from different, but equally valid solution strategies. Not that any old thing is right only that “right” has some signature characteristics of being got to that a procedure was followed. Not necessarily the “proper” procedure—more like a defendable series of decisions that lead to the answer. For instance the “birds backyard” statement is arrived at by a repeatable process that might yield clues to its reason for being an answer that is legitimate? As might emergent artifacts leave evidence of how they came to be?
My definition of allegory would be a completed object of thought that has a point to make. An allegory is a completeness beginning with a rhetorical problem that is “solved” by a culturally biased correct answer. I think of it as a resolution pre-made to prove the point of itself that exists in a closed logic. Even though math seems to me to be closed into a world of rules and proper procedures it somehow allows itself to not pre-judge outcomes. I don’t know why that is beyond guessing that an open universe is more enticing to the intellect over a closed universe where everything has an unchanging final condition.
Do you think an analogy is more restrictive than a metaphor? That an analogy is an object of dominance, or at least an expected outcome that is correct at the level of approval by others over a metaphor being a raw outcome of the thinker’s mind? A decision unique to the thinker?
This is getting kind of ‘out there’ but thinking about it has brought up the realization (right, wrong or something else) that studying humans as individual processing units is not the path to understanding or explaining uniqueness. A social beings we have antenna finely tuned to a field of fertile suggestions evidenced somehow in our choice of what we mark as discovery or significance. We are referential, knowing and doing among the presence of others while also being consensual in having to convince ourselves to believe. As well as permitting or inviting others to teach us to the depth of our being.
Does any of this work? The idea of “the learner” is so complicated.