Analogies for anti-representationalism and correlationism

Introduction

I've come to think that the drawing board analogy might be better suited to correlationism than to anti-representationalism.
The thing is, correlationism and anti-representationalism are so intimately connected that it's hard to talk about one without talking about the other. Anti-representationalism can be seen as a view of philosophy of language that ascribes to language and thought a nature that is, in a sense, less “ambitious” than the classical view, while correlationism can be seen as placing “limits” on our thought and knowledge (for example, that the “subjective” and the “objective” are inseparable).
Yet anti-representationalism, by attributing a different, less ambitious nature to language and thought, also places limits on our thought and knowledge. Similarly, correlationism, in placing limits on our thought and knowledge, often relies on attributing a less ambitious nature to language, or attributes this less ambitious nature to language as a result of the limits it places on our thought and knowledge.

Anyway, the two should not be confused; anti-representationalism is the attribution to language and thought of some less ambitious nature, while correlationism is the attribution to thought and knowledge of some limit. But the two remain intimately connected.
That said, in this article I'm going to propose two analogies for correlationism and/or anti-representationalism, in addition to the drawing board one.

Bottle of beer

Looking through an (empty) beer bottle, you'll see the world as brown and radially distorted. Obviously, you know that the world is not brown and radially distorted. Even if you'd been wearing beer bottles in front of your eyes all your life, you'd probably know that the world isn't brown and radial (it might perhaps be difficult to discover this, or hard to grasp what a non-brown and non-radial world means, but this difficulty doesn't seem insurmountable).
But now imagine that pieces of beer bottles are in every one of your concepts. Now, the problem is deeper; the problem is not “only” at the level of an “obstructed interaction” with the world, the problem is embedded in thought itself, such that a thought that the world is not brown and radial is incoherent, impossible, unintelligible, erroneous, illusory.

What this analogy is meant to express is that, generally speaking, correlationism/anti-representationalism identifies our limit at a deeper level than our “interaction” with reality; it's not “just” that reality is hidden behind a phenomenal veil, it's that the very constituents of our thought are “contaminated”. This “contamination” can be identified in several different ways, and it's controversial. Some speak of an inseparable connection between concepts and the phenomenal (such as an empiricist or embodied theory of concepts), an inseparable connection between concepts and action (such as a theory of concepts in terms of affordances with enactivism), a certain structure or nature of thought (such as Derrida's différances), Kantian forms, a subject-object structure, and so on.
In other words, it's not “just” that we see reality through something non-reality-like, but that we think reality through something non-reality-like.

The word “contamination” may not be appropriate; it's not as if concepts are “stained” and can be “cleaned”; it's simply their nature and that's the way it is. And this nature prevents us from thinking reality.

This analogy is perhaps best suited to correlationism.

Paint palette

On a paint palette, you can put colors and mix them to create new ones. Now, imagine you've been asked to create not a color, but a sound on your palette. The best you could do would be to create a color that evokes or is associated with that sound. That's not what you were asked to do, but it's not that bad.
But now imagine that no sound has ever been associated with a color, and that therefore, for humanity, no color evokes any sound. In this situation, you're asked to create a given sound on your palette (using only your palette). In this situation, you realize that not only can you not create the sound on your palette, but you can't create a color that evokes that sound either. You could try to create in humanity this association between a color and this sound yourself, but you've only been allowed to use your palette and mix paint; you can't create an association between a color and a sound by just mixing paint on your palette!

The point of this analogy is that our thought is of one kind, and reality is of another. Our thought cannot “contain” reality. Some people remain indifferent to this; “obviously our thought cannot contain reality, our thought refers to reality”. The problem is that for our thought to refer to reality, there needs to be a connection between our thought and reality, but as seen in this article, we can only use our thought, and thought cannot connect itself to reality.

This analogy is perhaps best suited to anti-representationalism.

Conclusion

Some, in reaction, might be tempted to embrace something like idealism. I think that would be misguided. Should realizing that our concepts are contaminated by pieces of beer bottles lead us to conclude that reality is brown and radial because the opposite is unintelligible? No. The real lesson is that any thought about reality in itself is absurd, that our thought is confined to reality for us.