In addition to serving a rhetorical and heuristic role, metaphors play a cognitively significant role in scientific reasoning as well. Theories and theoretical explanation are shot through and through with metaphors. The view that scientific theories must be literal accounts in order to do their job, I argue, rests on a mistaken picture of the nature of reality and the relation of our theories to it.
Quoth Michael Bradie (in an oldish (1998) essay called “Models and Metaphors in Science”).
0 Responses to “Science and Metaphor”