Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
from evolutionary biology to produce metaphors that are no longer con-
sistent with a merely scientific description of the world, they enter into the
basic linguistic modality of myth. Evolutionism professes to speak in a scien-
tific idiom but in fact speaks in a mythological one. This shift, as explained
through Max Black's and Paul Ricoeur's expansions of I. A. Richards'
well-known interactionist theory of metaphor, may be regarded as a cross-
categorizing event by which the transference of meaning that occurs when
one thing is called by the name of another creates some mutual significa-
tion, a new “combining” of meanings.
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This means that when one subject
of concern (some “tenor,” in Richards' vocabulary) figuratively appropriates
a name (or “vehicle”) usually assigned to something else, that subject or
tenor achieves a new meaning that is the result of its interaction with the
preexisting meanings of this vehicle. Thus when economists say that “con-
fidence in the dollar is eroding,” they bring together whatever meaning we
have already assigned to the tenor of “confidence” with meanings already
assigned to “erosion.” Our preexisting notions of gradual geological change
become part of our thinking about those mental states tied up with the idea
of declining confidence. Two typically unrelated concepts are taken together
interactively in what Ricoeur calls a “planned category mistake” in which
“ 'the similar' is perceived
despite
difference,
in spite of
contradiction.”
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Such devices of metaphor are so ubiquitous, in fact, that we scarcely
notice them until they are forced upon our attention. At some
level
of con-
sciousness, we recognize that tenor and vehicle are distinct categories of
thought artificially brought into interaction, but we do not have to be mind-
ful of these interactions in order for metaphors to work. This is shown by
my use of the word “level” in the previous sentence to represent a category
of thought. As a metaphorical vehicle, “level” imagines thought as some-
thing stratified, like the floors of a building or like layers of sediment laid
down on some extinct ocean bed. But such further explanation is unlikely
to be needed. Such comparisons work spontaneously. Consequently, I was
not at first aware of the fact that I was using metaphor when I composed
that sentence, nor was the reader likely to notice that “level” was metaphori-
cal before I drew attention to this fact.
It is the payoff of meaning that results from thinking across categories
in this way that makes such technical contradictions pervasive. But their
spontaneity also causes us to lose sight of the essentially fictitious bases of
metaphors. In an influential treatment of this problem, the philosopher Earl
MacCormac has argued that it is the greater difficulty of recognizing this
pattern of identification in certain metaphors that turns them into myths.
