Theodore Brown's Making Truth: Metaphor In Science

Theodore Brown has seen the light. There is no other way to describe his conversion to the kind of metaphorical thinking he describes in Making Truth: Metaphor in Science. Joining his new sect, however, requires philosophical commitments that many readers may be unwilling to make.

Few scientists will be surprised by Brown's thesis that metaphors are rampant in science. Astrophysicists have described the distribution of mass in the universe as foamlike; chemists still ascribe orbitals to atoms as if electrons were planets spinning around a nuclear sun; biologists have their genetic code; environmentalists sometimes describe the Earth as if it were a living organism. Brown himself illustrates in detail the uses of metaphors to describe the classical atom, the quantum atom, molecular models, protein folding, concepts of cells and global warming. He leaves us in no doubt that we all use metaphors. The question that will divide readers is how important such metaphors are to actually doing and thinking about science.

The difficulties begin with Brown's definition of metaphor. Most people use the term to denote a
At various places in the book the phrase encompasses the terms similarity, metaphor, analogy, abstraction, model, illustration, figure, hypothesis, theory and even mathematics, as well as literary terms such as simile, irony, trope, metonymy, and synecdoche. Brown asserts, for example, that observational data "can be related to models only through metaphors for interpreting the data." He also says that "Molecular models are metaphors because they represent a mapping from the domain of pictorial or three-dimensional model representation onto the domain of data from X ray diffraction and other experimental