Physics and Literature

Concepts – Transfer – Aestheticization

Aura Heydenreich, Klaus Mecke

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110481259
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

DIE REIHE: LITERATUR- UND NATURWISSENSCHAFTEN
entsteht unter Federführung des Erlanger Forschungszentrums für Literatur- und Naturwissenschaften (ELINAS). Experten unterschiedlicher Fachkulturen führen darin ihre Methoden zusammen und fragen sowohl nach den Funktionen der Sprache in der naturwissenschaftlichen Forschung als auch nach den Verfahren der Modellierung naturwissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisse in der Literatur. Die Reihe versteht sich als ein interdisziplinäres Forum zur Reflexion der kulturellen Bedeutung natur- und literaturwissenschaftlicher Forschung sowie zur Ethik und Rhetorik wissenschaftlicher Argumentation.

Part I: Epistemic Functions of Narration and Metaphor in Science

Insight by Metaphor – The Epistemic Role of Metaphor in Science

Nikola Kompa

Abstract

My aim in this paper is to investigate the epistemic functions metaphors might perform. According to a traditionally influential idea metaphors have, at best, ornamental value; they are poetic or rhetorical devices, used to please or even sway people. Current research in philosophy, linguistics and psychology shows the need for a refined picture of what purposes metaphors might serve. Expressions are commonly used metaphorically in order to conceptualize abstract and mental phenomena. The expressions thereby employed are often taken from the realm of sense experience; we feel blue, or complain about someone being cold, and so on. Yet even in the natural sciences metaphors have added epistemic value. They direct our attention to phenomena that we did not hitherto notice, make us think thoughts that we did not think before, etc. More specifically, I will claim that metaphors have heuristic, exploratory and explanatory value. Nonetheless, some metaphors are more successful than others. I will close by advancing various criteria for metaphorical success and failure.

Metaphor, it seems, is a matter of teaching an old word new tricks.

(Nelson Goodman)

1 What is metaphor?

In this paper¹ I am going to explore the epistemic function of metaphors: how they help us understand phenomena we didn’t understand before, how they make us notice things we didn’t notice before, etc. While traditionally it has often been claimed that metaphors have, at best, ornamental value, I will claim that they perform important epistemic functions. The considerations presented here are premised on the assumption that the epistemic function of metaphors will be most evident in contexts where epistemic goals are being pursued. I will, therefore, be particularly interested in the role metaphors play in scientific discourse. The broader project in the background is an epistemology of language; i.e., an investigation into the ways in which language mediates, directs or constrains our epistemic access to the world.

To begin with, let us look as some fairly uncontroversial, or at least popular, examples. Some of them are distinguished by their honorable pedigree; others are more mundane:

• All the world’s a stage.
• Juliet is the sun.
• Sally is a block of ice.
• The ship ploughed the sea.
• My lawyer is a shark.

Metaphors can take different syntactic forms. Yet in all those cases, we have an expression that – in the context of the whole sentence – is somehow displaced, inappropriate, alien. The displacement, i.e. the use of a word in a context where it is not at home, seems to be a characteristic feature of metaphors. The idea goes back at least to Aristotle; in the Poetics, for example, he spoke of a metaphor as the application (epiphorá) of an alien word (allotrion ónoma; cf. Aristotle, Poetics, Ch. 21, 1457b6−1457b9). And as Andreas Graeser explains, the word is alien in that it is at home in another context from which is has been displaced (cf. Graeser 1996, 44). It is transplanted into foreign soil, one might say. It should come as no surprise, then, that many very apt descriptions of the phenomenon of metaphor are themselves metaphorical. The following quote from Nelson Goodman is a case in point: “Briefly, a metaphor is an affair between a predicate with a past and an object that yields while protesting” (Goodman 1976, 69).

Contrary to received opinion, the displacement does not necessarily wreak semantic havoc. In other words, metaphors don’t always come out false if taken literally. Although there is often a category mistake in play, this need not be so. There are so called twice-true metaphors. Think of a mother saying to her little son, who is acting particularly infantile: “You are a baby” (cf. Carston 2002, 351). And there is also no denying the truth of John Donne’s famous line (and poem) “No man is an island.” Still, we can usually tell a metaphor when we see one, although not necessarily by its falsehood. But they somehow trip up our communicative expectations.² Whether they are amenable to consensual interpretation is an entirely different matter, though (cf. Fraser 1993).

In order to better grasp the phenomenon in question it may prove helpful to distinguish metaphor from other tropes (– the discussion of tropes provided here is not meant to be exhaustive, of course). Firstly then, metaphor ought to be distinguished from idiom; an example of the latter being to kick the bucket. In the case of idioms one may understand all the words in the phrase and the grammar completely, and still be at a loss as to what the whole phrase means. Consequently, idiomatic expressions have to be learned as a whole; there is no compositional route to their meaning. The idiomatic phrase has a conventional meaning that has to be learned in just the same way that the conventional meaning of any other basic linguistic expression has to be learned. That is not to deny that some idioms may have started out as metaphors; there may, therefore, be an etymological route to their meaning. But that is a route not many of us will be comfortable with (or capable of) travelling. Metaphors, on the other hand, don’t have to be learned en bloc. They ought to be interpretable at first encounter; context and background knowledge commonly play an important role, though.

Secondly, metaphor ought to be distinguished from metonymy. Quite often, a speaker uses an expression in order to refer not to its literal referent but to something that is saliently related to the literal referent. Imagine a nurse saying to another:

• The hernia in room 46c got angry when I brought his lunch (cf., e.g., Recanati 2004, 26; Borg 2004, 175; Nunberg 1993, 26; or Nunberg 1996 for further examples).

Presumably, the nurse didn’t complain about the hernia itself but the person suffering from it. Yet one may succeed in referring to an entity by using an expression for something only accidentally (but saliently) related to the entity. Nonetheless, there are constraints on which relations can be metonymically exploited. A speaker can felicitously say I am parked out back, but not My car-key is parked out back, although the key stands in a close relation to the car as well (cf. Nunberg 1996). Yet we commonly use a part for the whole (pars pro toto) or vice versa (totum pro parte), the raw material for the end product, an author for his/her oeuvre, or the container for the contents. We read George Eliot, for example. Or suppose you overhear someone say:

• They drank a whole bottle.

It is not too bold a guess that they did not drink the bottle, but its contents. Metonymy is a means of referring. The speaker tries to refer to an entity by using an expression that denotes something saliently related to the thing that, ultimately, she wants to talk about. Consequently, the conditions for success are easily specified: Metonymy is successful to the extent that the speaker manages to refer to the object to which she intends to refer. The conditions for success or failure of metaphor are much harder to specify (if there are any; Davidson famously claimed that “there are no unsuccessful metaphors, just as there are no unfunny jokes.” Davidson 1978, 31).

Metaphor ought to be distinguished, thirdly, from hyperbole. He is a saint may be slightly exaggerated; yet He is an angel is, for all we know, simply false. Hyperbolic utterances are false as things stand; but they could have been true. A metaphorical utterance, as we have seen before, need not be false. But if it is false then it could not even have been true, given the way the world is. Juliet could not have been the sun; nor an angel, for that matter.

Fourthly, metaphor is distinct from irony, although a metaphor can be used to make an ironic utterance. An ironic utterance is always false (or at least believed to be false by the speaker) when taken literally. But while in metaphor there is a tension between the words within the sentence – due to the displacement discussed above – in irony there is a tension between the proposition expressed by the ironic utterance and the beliefs of the speaker. That is also how we recognize irony in the first place. We realize that the speaker could not have meant what she said, given what we take her to believe.

Fifthly, metaphor ought to be distinguished from simile. A simile involves a comparison, as in “He is brave as a lion” or “He is like a lion – in that he is brave.” These are explicit comparisons in that the respect in which the two entities are to be compared is made explicit. Yet t...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Epistemic Functions of Narration and Metaphor in Science
• Part II: Concepts: Formation and Transfer
• Part III: Aestheticization and Literarization of Physics
• Attachment
• Index