Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 9
Metaphor in Chemistry: An Examination
of Chemical Metaphor
Farzad Mahootian
The history of definitions of metaphor is a history of hopeful efforts, none of
which fully succeed in providing a satisfying answer to the question of what it is.
Aristotle
s original attempts to grapple with metaphor continue to inform (or infect)
contemporary definitions of the term. “Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name
that belongs to something else” [Aristotle
Poetics
1457b5] on the basis of some
kind of similarity. Everyone uses metaphor to communicate, but when aptly made,
a metaphor is “strange” yet “sweet,” and thus “most brings about the learning”
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but shaping good metaphors requires a special kind of genius that “cannot be
learned from anyone else” [Aristotle
Rhetoric
1410b]. Metaphor is a strange mix
of the familiar and the unfamiliar, it is common and a mark of genius. For Aristotle
a metaphor may connect two familiar things in unfamiliar ways such that the
strangeness of it may be instructive. More commonly, metaphor is defined as that
which associates an unfamiliar term with a familiar one in order to illuminate the
former in light of its similarity with the latter. Aristotle
s first definition seems
banally simple: metaphor makes one thing stand for another.
The vagueness and generality of these definitions suggests an ineradicable
circularity from the start: definitions of metaphor inevitably rely on metaphors.
For example, the very notion of “standing” for something is itself a metaphor, one
that has great significance in jurisprudence. The notions of familiarity, similarity,
and their cognates, which lie at the heart of so many definitions of metaphor, are
themselves metaphorical concepts. Metaphor is an oddly self-referential bit of
language whose description can only ever be a performance of its meaning.
The following seven sections begin with a discussion of metaphor in science
generally, then proceed to an examination of its role in chemical thinking in three
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