Full Description
Examination of the work of scientific icons-Newton, Descartes, and others-reveals the metaphors and analogies that directed their research and explain their discoveries. Today, scientists tend to balk at the idea of their writing as rhetorical, much less metaphorical. How did this schism over metaphor occur in the scientific community? To establish that scientists should use metaphors to explain science to the public and need to be conscious of how metaphor can be useful to their research, this book examines the controversy over cloning and the lack of a metaphor to explain it to a public fearful of science's power.The disjunction between metaphor and science is traced to the dispensation of the Solar System Analogy in favor of a mathematical model. Arguing that mathematics is metaphorical, the author supports the idea of all language as metaphorical-unlike many rhetoricians and philosophers of science who have proclaimed all language as metaphorical but have allowed a distinction between a metaphorical use of language and a literal use.For technical communication pedagogy, the implications of this study suggest foregrounding metaphor in textbooks and in the classroom. Though many technical communication textbooks recommend metaphor as a rhetorical strategy, some advise avoiding it, and those that recommend it usually do so in a paragraph or two, with little direction for students on how to recognize metaphors or to how use them. This book provides the impetus for a change in the pedagogical approach to metaphor as a rhetorical tool with epistemological significance.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Problem of Metaphor in Scientific and Technical Communication
Differentiating between Scientific and Technical Communication
Metaphor and Analogy
Summary of Chapters
Chapter One: Reintroducing Metaphor in the Technical Communication Classroom
Problem
Methodology
Some General Considerations of Metaphor
Technical Communication Textbooks
Science Writing Texts
Chapter Two: Metaphor in the Technical Communication Literature
Metaphor and the Computer
Technical Communication Theory
Technical Communication Pedagogy
Conclusion
Chapter Three: A Review of the Theories of Metaphor
Substitution Theory of Metaphor
Aristotle on Metaphor
Twentieth-Century Substitutionists
Nietzsche and Post-Modern Metaphor
The Tensionists: An Introduction to Interaction
The Interactionists
Metaphor as Epistemology
Conclusion
Chapter Four: The Metaphor of Mathematics: A Case Study of the Solar System Analogy
Scottish Natural Philosophy
Lodge and the BAAS
The Solar System Analogy
The Solar System Analogy in Secondary-School Texts
A Narrative History of the Solar System Analogy
Lord Kelvin
James Clerk Maxwell
J. J. Thomson
Oliver Lodge
Ernest Rutherford
Niels Bohr
Conclusion
Chapter Five: The Question of Metaphor in Natural Language: A Case Study
The Question of Cloning
Recognition of the Dominant/Emergent Metaphors
The Effect Upon the Scientific Community
Conclusion
Chapter Six: Implications
An Approach Based on this Study
Other Avenues for Research
References
Index
