What did Plato mean when in Timaeus he characterised his account of the created world as an εἰκὼς μῦθος? The phrase is typically translated ‘a probable story’, ‘a likely tale’. Connotations that modern empiricist philosophy of science might attach to those expressions are misleading. Careful attention to the two terms Plato uses, and their resonances in previous Greek literature and thought, suggests instead the strikingly oxymoronic: ‘a rational/reasonable myth’. This is not, however, the reasonableness of deduction or of inference to the best explanation, but of the practical reasoning in which a supremely good designer would probably engage, assuming that he wanted to make his product as like himself as possible, but from materials with their own properties not of his making. Practical wisdom cannot aspire to the same standards of rigour as theoretical wisdom can. It can attempt only the most reasonable option given such constraints – as could any account of why that choice was made. Hence the importance of the Timaeus’ initial reminder of Socrates’ construction of a political order (witness the Republic), and its address to a company competent in politics as well as mathematics, interested no less in κόσμος as political order than in cosmology.

In this chapter, the author discusses how speech is conceptualized using highly physical vocabulary. Words can be "hidden" in the mind, or "retracted" ("grasped back"). He then discusses how words can be injected directly into the mental apparatus of the listener ("take it to heart"), and notes that the conduit metaphor of communication described by Michael Reddy and prevalent in the modern languges does not appear to be prominent in the diction of the Iliad and Odyssey. The author further discusses the metaphor of words as arrows, and applies conceptual blending theory to the problematic phrase "winged words", arguing that the metaphor takes arrows rather than birds as the framing domain. He then surveys further metaphors for speech involving building and the crafts, before discussing the collection metaphors for speech and understanding in Homer. At the close of the chapter, the author suggests ways in which Homeric metaphors for speech may highlight or hide aspects of the target domain (speech), and argues that the polysemy of terms such as μῦθος and ἔπος arrises out of a metonymy that exists in English as well.