Aspects of Metaphor in Physics

Examples and Case Studies

Hanna Pulaczewska

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9783484304079
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110915938
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

With reference to copious case studies, this book attempts to give a broad and comprehensive view of the multiplicity of forms taken by metaphor in physics. A diachronic presentation of the views hitherto advanced on the role of metaphor in the natural sciences provides an introduction to the crucial issues. By means of a broad definition of metaphor as a lexical, semantic, and conceptual phenomenon, metaphor is identified at various levels of physics discourse: in metatheory and methodology; in the sociology of the origin and evolution of science; in theory and conceptualization, including physics models; in education; and finally in linguistic expression, including terminology. Whereas historians and theoreticians of science reduce the question of metaphor in physics to the question of the role of scientific models, where one area of physics provides concepts and structures for another area, the perspective adopted here is that of cognitive semantics. The study inquires into the way in which concept-formation and terminology in physics avails itself of the metaphoric bent immanent in everyday language, conceptualizing abstract ideas in spatial terms, inanimate things as intelligent, measurable phenomena in terms of the visual. Attention is also given to the way in which metaphoric processes make it possible to integrate new knowledge into old and sometimes obsolete structures rather than eliminating those structures altogether.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• Part One: The notion of metaphor and its relation to the discourse of physics
• 2. Approaches to metaphor: past and present
• 2.1. A short history of metaphor
• 2.2. Metaphor, an enemy of science: the early modern view
• 2.3. Metaphor, a friend of science: contemporary physicists on scientific language
• 2.4. Current paradigms in research on metaphor in science
• 3. Identifying metaphor in physical science: sorts, functions, and related concepts
• 3.1. Metaphor and related concepts
• 3.2. A working definition of metaphor
• 3.3. Sorts and functions of metaphor in physical discourse
• Part Two: Metaphors in physics
• 4. Underlying metaphors of everyday thought in meta-theory and the concept formation of physics
• 4.1. Hypostasis
• 4.2. Spatial metaphor
• 4.3. Animism and anthropomorphism
• 5. World theories in meta-theory and the concept formation
• 5.1. The notions “world theory” and “world model”
• 5.2. World machine
• 5.3. The world as a text
• 6. Stipulative reference extension
• 6.1. Stipulation of meaning: Huygens’ notion of sound wave
• 6.2. Invisible light and Roentgen’s “invisible rays”
• 7. Assimilative metaphor
• 7.1. “Fluid” electricity
• 7.2. The concept of wave
• 7.3. Life stories of metaphor: from metaphorical to literal and literal to metaphorical
• 8. Theory-constitutive and educational metaphors
• 8.1. Constitutive metaphor: waves of probability
• 8.2. Educational metaphor: curvature of space
• 8.3. From explanation to rhetoric
• 9. Metaphor and style: “figures of speech” in the language of physics
• 9.1. The position of “figures of speech” in the discourse of physics
• 9.2. The arrow of time
• 9.3. Heat death
• 9.4. Maxwell’s demon
• 10. Transfer of denotations in the terminology of physics
• 10.1. Metaphors in general language and in the terminology of physics: the general language basis for the transfer of denotations
• 10.2. Types of transfer of denotations
• 10.3. The terminology of physics and related disciplines
• 10.4. Fantasy-metaphor: the case of particle physics
• 10.5. “Mechanical work”: underlying metaphor, world theory, scientific analogy
• 10.6. Catachresis and satellite metaphors
• 10.7. Mathematical analogy
• 11. Thoughts and conclusions
• References