Haack on The Art of Scientific Metaphors @MiamiLawSchool

Susan Haack, University of Miami School of Law, University of Miami Department of Philosophy, has published The Art of Scientific Metaphors at 75 Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 2049 (2019). Here is the abstract.

Metaphor has no place in science, some claim; no, others argue, metaphor is crucial to science. Science is a rational enterprise with its own distinctive logical structure; no, it isn’t essentially different from literature, equally a kind of world-making. There is a distinctive metaphorical kind of meaning; no, metaphorical utterances have only their literal meanings, in which they are just plain false. Conspicuous by its absence is the reasonable middle ground Haack will be mapping here. Metaphor is useful, but not essential, to scientific work; metaphors don’t have a special kind of meaning, but they do have a special pragmatic role; scientific work and the writing of fiction do have important things in common, but there are also significant differences between the two enterprises. Once we understand how science works (§1), and then how metaphors work (§2), we can articulate the similarities, and differences, between scientific metaphors and literary ones (§3).

Download the article from SSRN at the link.