Words&Dirt

“Never before had Norton felt so strongly his kinship with that long dead Egyptologist.  Not since Howard Carter had first peered into the tomb of Tutankhamen could any man have known a moment such as this––yet the comparison was almost laughably ludicrous.

Tutankhamen had been buried only yesterday––not even four thousand years ago; Rama might be older than mankind.  That little tomb in the Valley of the Kings could have been lost in the corridors through which they had already passed, yet the space that lay beyond this final seal was at least a million times greater.  And as for the treasure it might hold––that was beyond imagination.

No one had spoken over the radio circuits for at least five minutes; the well-trained team had not even reported verbally when all the checks were complete.  Mercer had simply given him the OK sign and waved him towards the open tunnel.  It was as if everyone realized that this was a moment for History, not to be spoiled by unnecessary small talk.  That suited Commander Norton, for at the moment he too had nothing to say.  He flicked on the beam of his flashlight, triggered his jets, and drifted slowly down the short corridor, trailing his safety line behind him.  Only seconds later, he was inside.”

––Rendezvous with Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke, loc. 342-9

“Lakoff, recall, suggests that our scientific knowledge, like all our knowledge, is limited by our metaphors, which can be more or less apt or useful, but not accurate descriptions of an objective truth.  The philosopher Richard Boyd draws the exact opposite moral.  He writes that ‘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.  By this I mean the task of introducing terminology, and modifying usage of existing terminology, so that linguistic categories are available which describe the causally and explanatorily significant features of the world.’

Metaphor in science, Boyd suggests, is a version of the everyday process in which a metaphor is pressed into service to fill gaps in a language’s vocabulary, like rabbit ears to refer to the antennas that used to sprout from the tops of television sets.  Scientists constantly discover new entities that lack an English name, so they often tap a metaphor to supply the needed label: selection in evolution, kettle pond in geology, linkage in genetics, and so on.  But they aren’t shackled by the content of the metaphor, because the word in its new scientific sense is distinct from the word in the vernacular (a kind of polysemy).  As scientists come to understand the target phenomenon in greater depth and detail, they highlight the aspects of the metaphor that ought to be taken seriously and pare away the aspects that should be ignored, as Dawkins did in the heater-cooler analogy.  The metaphor evolves into a technical term for an abstract concept that subsumes both the target phenomenon and the source phenomenon.  It’s an instance of something that every philosopher of science knows about scientific language and that most laypeople misunderstand: scientists don’t ‘carefully define their terms’ before beginning an investigation.  Instead they use words loosely to point to a phenomenon in the world, and the meanings of the words gradually become more precise as the scientists come to understand the phenomenon more thoroughly.”

––The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, by Steven Pinker, pg. 257-8