Death of metaphors in life science?

Metaphors and analogies (the term “metaphors” will hence be used to cover all metaphors, analogies, and similes) can be used to relate something unknown to something more well-known. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have argued for the importance of metaphors for all kinds of understanding and meaning-making. According to them, the use of metaphor is central when learning abstract concepts, which can only be learned indirectly. Metaphors are ubiquitous in both written and spoken language.

We follow Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and other proponents of cognitive semantics in their claim that basic metaphors are established early in life when the human infant is exploring its environment. The infant notices that light usually comes from above and that there are many other good and rewarding things that come from above. The child is picked up and carried by its parents. When it is light, the world appears. When it is dark, the world disappears. We don’t have very good night vision (as opposed to cats and owls) so we are more vulnerable to predators at night. What we cannot see may potentially harm or destroy us.

These ontogenetically primary and phylogenetically primordial experiences lead to a system of associations where well-being and security are associated with light, and danger and destruction is associated with the dark. These networks of associations are later used to express more abstract notions such as moral good and evil, joy and grief, intelligence and stupidity, freedom and confinement, and understanding and lack of understanding.

The important difference between our approach to metaphor and Lakoff and Johnson and other cognitivists is that we see the metaphors as constituting what were called “common places” in traditional rhetorical theory (Lausberg, 1990 p. 38-39). These “common places” are occurrences or phenomena that a speaker can reasonably trust that his or her audience, who shares the same physical environment and cultural background, will have some experiential knowledge of and will therefore be able to utilize in order to establish a consensus of belief with the audience based on this common experience.

We want to claim that the metaphors we examine in this article are enacted and embodied in the sense described above (the analogical bases are formed by the individual actively exploring his or her environment with the given perceptual apparatus), but that they are also distributed in the sense that they are shared with others, and interacted, in the sense that they are introduced and utilized in communication with others (they are not private property, but public means of communication). That is, they are inter-subjectively grounded in common experiences. The metaphors rely on the fact that there are obvious actual worldly phenomena that the communicators (teachers and students) assume they all know about and can be used, introduced and tested, as analogical models for the not so obvious and well known biomolecular phenomena and events they are trying to understand in this investigation. Importantly, things that are used as metaphors are not primarily or solely in the communicators’ heads. These are things in the world that are good to use as models of other things, also in the world. What connect these things are the human communicators who are involved in a practice where certain things are being explored and described theoretically.