Abstract
My interest in scientific metaphor focuses on its role in charting our search for knowledge of a world not yet known. How else is one to seek understanding of the new, of the not yet intelligible, if not by comparison with what is already familiar? But comparison is hardly enough; a useful guide to the unknown must also keep us mindful of the strangeness, the incomparability, of novelty. Metaphor accrues its value in the instability it generates by confronting similarity with difference, insisting that man both is and is not a wolf. Lose this duality, and one loses the vitality of the metaphor. My question is almost mundane: how do the particular metaphors scientists invoke shape their view of the natural world? How would that knowledge be different had it been guided by different choices? Are there features made salient by one metaphor that lose significance in the framework invited by another? How is our scientific picture of the world shaped by the metaphors we choose to guide our search? To what other discoveries might different choices have led us?
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