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The Role of the Metaphorical in Scientific Process Jun Xu A Where Knowledge Thrives: The Role of the Metaphorical in Scientific Process Jun Xu A dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2012 Committee: Dr. George Dillon, Chair Dr. Herbert Blau Dr. Gail Stygall Dr. Leah Ceccarelli Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One More than Words: Metaphor Theories 24 Chapter Two From the Surprising to the Unsurprising: Metaphors and the Production of Knowledge 56 Chapter Three The Word PHLOGISTON Had to Die: A Quasi-metaphors and a Scientific Revolution 91 Chapter Four Part I: GENE, Survival of the Materialized: Before a Quasi-metaphor Met a Chemical 125 Part II: Fruits of the Gene: Productivity of a Quasi-metaphor 166 Chapter Five At the Edge of Knowledge: Scientific Revolutions through the Lens of the Quasi-Metaphor 216 Chapter Six On Precision and Vagueness: Quasi-Metaphors and Reference 239 Reference List 264 1 Introduction My Ph. D. dissertation concerns one of the major issues in the rhetoric of science, the function of metaphors in scientific discourse. It explores the relation between knowledge production and a metaphorical kind of language that posits, specifies, and guides research on what is as yet unknown. An appropriate term for this kind of language is quasi-metaphor; its special function is to project the characteristics of a known referent within an established epistemic category to a virtual referent in a known or unknown epistemic category. My goal is to unite two opposite views about scientific language: one held by positivists and scientists, that scientific language must be clear, brief, and trope-free; the other held by post-structuralists and epistemologists, that scientific language is ultimately metaphorical, and it thus never has had the precision claimed by the positivists. I argue that scientific language is and must be simultaneously precise and open-ended in order to articulate knowledge as well as accommodate the unceasing production of knowledge. My methodology is to establish a theoretical frame in negotiation with metaphor theories and then apply it to case studies. The initiating question of my dissertation is: What do metaphors have to do with scientific discourse? By scientific discourse, I mean the texts written by scientists and published in scientific periodicals, journals and books. I understand the important roles of metaphors in the discourse of scientific education and popularization. I have had serious doubts, however, that there could be metaphors in the discourse, because as a former scientist, I believe in the precision of scientific language, which is exactly what metaphors do not possess. Soon I realized that my idea about the precision of scientific language is the product of a positivist tradition running since Bacon and very much in question today. Current thinkers, like Burke, Foucault, Kuhn, and Derrida, basically made their names by emphasizing the metaphorical property of language, 2 hence the scandalous status of all knowledge including the scientific. It has been hard to accept that what I learned about science and what I did as a scientist are nothing more than what a member of a black magic society does. As my distance from scientific discourse increased, however, I started to recognize that some borrowed and coined terms in science, such as the gene, are not as precise as I thought; especially in a historical scale, their present definitions are totally different from the ones initially proposed. Still, I cannot ignore the changes that science has brought into the world. As someone who studied antibiotics and the drug-resistance of antibiotics, I believed and still believe that knowledge is not scandalous, for antibiotics save lives, including my own. In treating knowledge as a scandal, the risk is undermining important discoveries like antibiotics. Such negation makes it impossible to grasp the connection between science and the humanities, and in consequence, humanists become irrelevant to science. Hence, the goal of my project is to investigate the relation between linguistic imprecision (or metaphors) and knowledge. If it is neither positivist nor scandalous, then what is the relation? When I took a careful look at metaphor theories and terms like the gene, I found that those terms do not fit any metaphor theories, although they do have elements of this or that theory, and some scholars do identify gene as a metaphor. If gene is not a metaphor, then what kind of linguistic phenomenon is it? Furthermore, in the history of science, terms similar to the gene have had different fates. Some survived, as the gene; and other had been abandoned, as phlogiston, the overthrow of which is a famous scientific revolution. I accepted that phlogiston was rejected because of its vague meaning. Yet as long as the term gene is used, vague meaning threatens the soundness of its reason. What is the reason? This group of scientific terms as a special linguistic phenomenon with interesting histories constitutes test cases in the relation of linguistic imprecision and knowledge. In order 3 to understand the relation, what these terms are linguistically should be clearly identified, and then they should be traced through the history of science--on one hand, to examine knowledge production regarding these terms; on the other hand, to work out, if possible, a new history, especially about how knowledge emerges and changes in science. Structurally, my dissertation has three parts: the first part (Chapters One and Two) is the theoretical frame, in which I study metaphor theories in Chapter One and the anti-metaphor tradition in prose writing in Chapter Two. These two chapters are not only to establish the essential role of metaphors in knowledge production, but more importantly, to delineate that metaphors in science are a special group of metaphors that I call quasi-metaphors functioning to explore the unknown through the known. The second part (Chapter Three and Four) is case studies of the histories of the terms phlogiston and gene, respectively. The methodological reason for contrasting these two cases is that both have vague meaning, but phlogiston, though it had many supporters and still has at least one, is rejected, and the gene, though not without detractors, lives a productive life. The third part (Chapters Five and Six) are discussions on historiographical and philosophical implications of quasi-metaphor. Chapter Five takes a new look at the historiographical notion scientific revolution through metaphorical analysis. Chapter Six concludes that it takes both vagueness and precision in scientific language to build the intelligibility and complexity of the world. In short, part one theorizes quasi-metaphor; part two demonstrates quasi-metaphors in the history of science; and part three answers the question, why quasi-metaphor? Chapter One surveys metaphor theories from Isocrates, who proposed the term metaphora, to George Lakoff. The classical studies on metaphor are in the realms of rhetoric and stylistics. Plato does not use the term metaphor, but his rational discourse contains many metaphors. He also is deeply concerned with the literal meaning of metaphor. Aristotle 4 establishes a theory of metaphor based on recognition of resemblance and dissemblance between epistemic categories. Cicero and Quintilian develop Aristotelian theory further in stylistic studies. In particular, they endow metaphors with aesthetic values different from those of Aristotle. I. A. Richards makes the modern turn of metaphor studies by proposing a set of useful terms, and also a theory of how they function in the comprehension of metaphor. Max Black develops Richards’ theory into the interactive view. Lakoff’s theory treats the conventional (or dead) metaphors, “Love is a Journey” and the like, as the projections of the culture by which we live. I examine these theories through a rather unusual perspective--the treatment of resemblance and dissemblance between categories, which, as far as I am concerned, is the coherence and key of metaphor studies. In this perspective, metaphor studies can be traced back to Plato, whose discussion on the metaphor “golden men” extends to current scholarly work. The case of “golden men” demonstrates the significance of categorical establishment in regard to the interpretation of metaphor. In Aristotle’s hands, metaphor is defined by the categorization of the world. The recognition of the inter- and intra-relations of categories becomes the center of attention in modern cognitive theory of metaphor. Cicero and Quintilian, on the other hand, point out that some metaphors do not have literal paraphrases; that is to say, metaphors are more than linguistic ornaments. Contrary to the claim of some scholars, the classical studies on metaphor do go beyond poetic, rhetoric and stylistics. In modern times, metaphor studies develop along three lines. First of all, the initiation is the acknowledgment that thinking is generally metaphorical. Accordingly, the focus of metaphor theories turns from rhetoric and stylistics to cognition. Second, metaphors as the indication of poetic genius become a part of daily language. Third, metaphor studies shift from what 5 metaphor is to how metaphor means; in other words, from the descriptive to the methodological. The distinguished characteristic of modern theories is that resemblance and dissemblance are interchangeable; this is articulated in Max Black’s interaction
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