Metaphor and Analogy in the Sciences

248 Pages·2000·14.67 MB·English

by  Fernand Hallyn (ed.)

METAPHORAND ANALOGY IN THE SCIENCES
ORIGINS
Studies in the sources of scientific creativity
Volume 1
Managing Editor:
Fernand Hallyn, University ofGhent, Belgium
Editorial Board:
Gillian Beer, Cambridge University, UK.
James J. Bono, State University ofN ew York, Buffalo, USA.
Marc de Mey, University ofGhent, Belgium
Thomas Da Costa Kaufman, Princeton University, USA.
Peter Galison, Harvard University, USA.
Paolo Galluzzi, Istituto e Museo di Storia delle Science, Firenze, Italy
Rom Harre, Oxford University, UK.
Peter Machamer, University ofP ittsburgh, USA.
Arthur 1. Miller, University College London, UK.
William Shea, University ofStrasbourg, France
Gerard Simon, University ofL ille 111, France
Geert Vanpaemel, University ofL euven, Belgium
Peter Weingart, University ofB ielefeld, Germany
SCOPE
The aim of the series is to present historical and theoretical studies on the sources of
scientific creativity. The series provides a platform for various transdisciplinary
viewpoints.
Indeed, on the one hand, the origins of scientific creativity should be studied in the
light of its relations with sources of creativity in other disciplines (literary, artistic),
in order to illuminate the particular scientific element in the genesis of scientific in
novation.
On the other hand, the complexity of the topic necessitates a variety of approaches,
where logic, cognitive studies, poetics, rhetoric, history of ideas and other disciplines
meet in a common interrogation.
In short, the series welcomes studies which integrate philosophy and history of
science in a broad, diversified field of research, where there is room for a great va
riety of perspectives with different methodological and conceptual references and
where isolationism as weil as reductionism are avoided.
Metaphor and Analogy
in the Sciences
Edited by
FERNAND HALLYN
University ofGhent, Belgium
Springer-Science+Business Media, B.V.
A C.LP. Catalogue re cord for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Printed on acid-free paper
ISBN 978-90-481-5559-0 ISBN 978-94-015-9442-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-9442-4
All Rights Reserved
© 2000 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2000.
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 2000
No part ofthe material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
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retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE Vll
Rom HARRE, J.L. ARONSON & Eileen C. WAY
Apparatus as Models of Nature ............ . 1
Joke MEHEUS
Analogical Reasoning in Creative Problem Solving
Processes : Logico-Philosophical Perspectives .... ............ 17
Peter MACHAMER
The Nature of Metaphor and Scientific Description ........ 35
Femand HALL YN
Atoms and Letters ........................ 53
Gerard SIMON
Analogies and Metaphors in Kepler............................... 71
William SHEA
Looking at the Moon as another Earth. Terrestrial
Analogies and Seventeenth-Century Telescopes............. 83
Jean Paul V AN BENDEGEM
Analogy and Metaphor as Essential Tools for the
W orking Mathematician............................................... 105
Rafael E. NUNEZ
Conceptual Metaphor and the Embodied Mind : What
Makes Mathematics Possible ? ...................................... 125
Arthur 1. MILLER
Metaphor and Scientific Creativity ............................... 147
VI
Gustaaf C. CORNELIS
Analogical Reasoning in Modem Cosmological
Thinking................ .... ...... ...... ........ ... .... ..... .... ... ........ ... 165
Daniela M. BAILER-JONES
Scientific Models as Metaphors.................................... 181
Sabine MAASEN
Metaphors in the Social Sciences : Making Use and
Making Sense of Them ................................................ 199
PREFACE
"Science constructs its objects": is this a metaphor? It does
not necessarily mean anyway that the real does not pre-exist. Only
that in the final instance it is the Other, of which we know neither
the limits nor the figure and to which we only have access through
the constructions we make of it. Or, in semiotic terms borrowed
from Charles S. Peirce, the world is the 'dynamic object' that
intervenes in science only through the 'immediate objects' that
manifest themselves in signs. And even then the choice of the term
'immediate' is not entirely felicitous: it would be better to talk of
'mediated objects', since their conception is mediated by the
conditions from which perception as weIl as the language that
expresses it derive.
The preference bestowed on certain constructions over
others results from the slighter recalcitrance in imagining a
dynamic object through one or another mediated object. This
recalcitrance that prompts one to surrender constructions does not
come directly from the real, from the dynamic object, but from
other constructions. Again, this does not mean that reality does not
ex ist, but that it only 'speaks', confirms and objects, to the extent
that it is being questioned within a certain form, by certain
instruments, in a certain language. Even if it appears recalcitrant,
the dynamic object intervenes only through another construction.
Man, not nature, decides on the form to be considered, the
instruments and language to be adopted. What is more,
recalcitrances are not always considered: divergences, facts that
deviate from a construction, do not always suffice to make us give
it up. What is needed is that they can be integrated in a new
construction.
Metaphor corresponds to a procedure that the subject can
adopt in his conceptual transformations of conventional
representations. The theory of metaphor is a theory of the
abandonment of semantic convention and of the innovation of
representations. In this sense it is often supposed to be
generalisable, the more so since the construction of a scientific
Vl11
object often happens by way of analogy, and the analogical
construction is in turn associated as much with the notion of
'model' as with that of 'metaphor'. No doubt there are affinities
between the analogical model and the stringed metaphor in as
much as both presuppose the confrontation of two coherent sets of
features (qualities, relations) that refer to two different objects. But
is it possible to go any further ? Or does the assimilation of the
analogical model to the stringed metaphor itself derive from
metaphor - or from the analogical modelling of the very notion
of the analogical model?
The contributions that follow address different aspects of
these questions with respect to the heuristic function of metaphor
and of analogy. They have been presented at a conference
organised at the University of Ghent in November 1997. I will not
pretend to give them a unity or exhaustiveness here that on the
whole they do not aim to possess. The first three contributions
(Rom Harre with the collaboration of J.L. Aronson and Eileen C.
Way, Joke Meheus, Peter Machamer) present general reflections on
the presence, the working and the status of metaphor and analogy
in the sciences. The three following articles (Fernand Hallyn,
Gerard Simon, William Shea) focus on notable historical cases,
since historie al distance often produces a better insight into some
fundamental aspects of the problem. The next two contributions
(Jean Paul Van Bendegem, Raphael Nufiez) are devoted to the
intriguing presence of metaphor in that most abstract of sciences,
mathematics. Modern physics (Arthur I. Miller), cosmology
(Gustaaf Cornelis) and astronomy (Daniela Bailer-Jones) are dealt
with in the three subsequent chapters, and, finall y, a detailed case
study of the metaphorical links between the exact and the social
sciences (Sabine Maasen) conc1udes the volume. Within this
Iimited framework, the interest of the present volume resides in the
diversity of approaches, of options and themes that may be found
in it and that are intended as ever so many incitements for re
engaging in reflection and in a renewal of the topic, both with
regard to speeific issues in the history of science and to general
questions coneerning scientific creativity.
Fernand Hallyn
Rom HARRE, J.L. ARONSON & Eileen C. WA Y
AppA RATUS AS MODELS OF NATURE*
The idea that theories are intimately involved with models
has been a commonplace in the philosophy of science for
generations, though there have been logicist challenges from time
to time. But the application of the idea of modelling to the
understanding of experimental apparatus and its role in science is
relatively new.
1. A naturalistic analysis of scientific cognition showing the dual
role of models
As a preliminary characterisation of models we can use a simple
principle, that a model, M, of something S, its subject, is an entity
that bears some relevant similarity to S, but is not identical with it.
In science the root idea of 'model' is iconic or entitative. The term
is used in this sense in engineering, architecture and so on.
I shall beg in by abstracting a schema from actual cases of
scientific theorizing that highlights the place of models in the best
account we can give of the work of the theoretician. By 'best
account', I mean one which leaves the least in the phenomenon of
scientific thought unaccounted for. Because the schema is derived
from studies of real cases and not from a logicist apriori we can
call this analysis 'naturalistic' . In the development of the
* Acknowledgements: (1) Some of the material in this paper is drawn from J.
Aronson, R. Harre and E.C. Way, Realism Rescued, London, Duckworth, 1996.
(2) Some other material is drawn from R. Harre, 'Recovering the Experiment',
Philosophy, LXXIII (1998), pp. 353-377.
1
F Hallyn (ed.), Metaphor and Analogy in the Sciences, 1-16.
© 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
2 Rom HARRE, J.L. ARONSON & Eileen C. W AY
philosophical underpinnings of the analysis we shall eventually
show how the naturalistic analysis is sustained by a formal
structure, through which the content of a theory can be expressed
at the highest level of abstraction as a segment of a type hierarchy.
The structure revealed in a very large number of case studies
can be pictured in the following way:
Phenomena = 1 Descriptive - T - Explanatory =2 Generative
model model mechanism
where 'r is a theoretical discourse, mapping the two models on to
one another by linking descriptions of states of each by causal or
reductionist hypotheses. So the genetic code is linked causally to
somatic structures, while the mean kinetic energy of the molecules
is the temperature of the gas.
The relations '= l' and ' = 2' which express the model to
subject links, are idealization/abstraction and analogy respectively.
It should be emphasized that they are relations of degrees of
resemblance. The details in any particular case could be expressed
in terms of similarities and differences between the model and what
it represents. There is nothing mysterious ab out these relations
since models and what they are analogues of or abstractions from,
are entities of the same metaphysical status, namely, in a general
sense, things, occupants of space and time.
The relation between 'T', the theoretical discourse, and the
models it describes is 'interna!'. That is there is always a mutual
adjustment so that the models fit the descriptions in the theory and
the theory is modified so that it will always fit the models, as they
are adjusted to maintain their fit with the real world entities they
resemble.
According to the naturalistic account of 'model insertion',
descriptive models are used to simplify the phenomena.
Explanatory models are used to fill a gap in our knowledge. In
many cases the mechanisms that generate phenomena are not
observable by the same means as the phenomena they produce.
Explanatory models are introduced . as analogues of unknown
mechanisms and processes. The history of science shows that
technical advances have often made possible the examination of
both sides of the analogy, so to say, when some means has been
found for observing or manipulating the mechanism itself.
In this naturalistic treatment I have tried to remain faithful to
the practice of the scientific community, at least as it has developed