On Metaphors VII

"The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars." (Aristotle, "Poetics", cca. 335 BC)

"[Metaphor] is a loose word, at best, and we must beware of attributing to it stricter rules of usage than are usually found in practice." (Max Black, “Models and Metaphors”, 1962)

"Rationality consists [of] the continuous adaptation of our language to our continually expanding world, and metaphor is one of the chief means by which this is accomplished." (Mary B Hesse, "Models and Analogies in Science", 1966)

"The very nature of science is such that scientists need the metaphor as a bridge between old and new theories." (Earl R MacCormac, "Metaphor and Myth in Science and Religion", 1976)

“[…] the use of analogies, particularly with metaphor, adds richness and dimension to arguments and descriptions not possible with ordinary discourse or with propositional reasoning.” (Jeanette M Gallagher, “The Future of Formal Thought Research: The Study of Analogy and Metaphor”, 1978)

"The use of metaphor is one of many devices available to the scientific community to accomplish the task of accommodation of language to the causal structure of the world." (Richard Boyd, "Metaphor and theory change: what is ‘metaphor’ a metaphor for?", 1979)

"Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish - a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typieully viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature." (George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, "Metaphors we Live by", 1980)

"Metaphor plays an essential role in establishing a link between scientific language and the world. Those links are not, however, given once and for all. Theory change, in particular, is accompanied by a change in some of the relevant metaphors and in the corresponding parts of the network of similarities through which terms attach to nature." (Thomas S Kuhn, "Metaphor in science", 1993)

“Metaphorizing is a  manner of thinking, not a  property of thinking. It is a  capacity of thought, not its quality. It represents a mental operation by which a previously existing entity is described in the characteristics of another one on the basis of some similarity or by reasoning. When we say that something is (like) something else, we have already performed a mental operation. This operation includes elements such as comparison, paralleling and shaping of the new image by ignoring its less satisfactory traits in order that this image obtains an aesthetic value. By this process, for an instant we invent a device, which serves as the pole vault for the comparison’s jump. Once the jump is made the pole vault is removed. This device could be a lightning-speed logical syllogism, or a momentary created term, which successfully merges the traits of the compared objects.” (Ivan Mladenov, “Conceptualizing Metaphors: On Charles Peirce’s marginalia”, 2006)