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Whitehead uses the fallacy to distinguish two philosophical attitudes: the “critical
school” and the “speculative school:”
The critical school confines itself to verbal analysis within the limits of the dictionary.
The speculative school appeals to direct insight, and endeavors to indicate its meanings by
further appeal to situations which promote such specific insights. It then enlarges the
dictionary. (Whitehead
1938
, 173)
Cultures advance, languages continually change, as does thought. In the midst of all
of this change, the speculative school of philosophy finds in metaphor an engine of
change, the source of linguistic and conceptual growth. In addition to those
mentioned earlier, Bailer-Jones (
2000
,
2002
), Ricouer (
1981
) and Miller (1996)
are among philosophers who subscribe to the creative potential of metaphor in the
science.
Metaphor, as Aristotle indicated, helps to make the unfamiliar familiar, but the
current of meaning can flow both ways: the familiar can also be rendered unfamiliar
enough to appear novel, strange and interesting. The dialectic of novelty and
confirmation, so important to the Shannon definition of information, is also at
play in the way that metaphor functions. How much a metaphor would lean towards
confirmation or novelty, its signal-to-noise ratio in a given context, depends on a
variety of complex factors. In this paper, we limit the contexts to those of education
and research. Considered abstractly, education and research are polar opposites:
research seeks novelty in the form of invention and discovery, while education
strives to confirm the next generation of researchers by assuring their mastery of
basic vocabularies, concepts and skills. But we must avoid mistaking these abstrac-
tions for concrete actualities.
5
While education generally leans more toward
confirmation-oriented uses of metaphor, opportunities for student research may
sometimes lead to breakthroughs. And whereas research is often geared toward
the creation of novel metaphors in the process of model building, there are
perhaps too many cases of research that merely confirm and solidify the hold of a
given approach. The creative potential of science is enhanced whenever metacog-
nition is engaged in education or research, that is, when the function of metaphor in
scientific thinking is acknowledged and,
to whatever extent, understood and
applied.
6
Like Niels Bohr
s horseshoe,
7
metaphor works whether or not one recognizes it
as
metaphor. And once it gains sufficient currency it is no longer considered
metaphorical: it has made the transition from non-literal to literal. Commitment
to a metaphor
'
s literal “truth” has to last only as long as its ability to move inquiry
'
5
The National Science Foundation and other science agencies have sought to dispel institutional
tendencies to polarize the two modes of practice by issuing funding solicitations that call for
integrative undergraduate science curricula. For example the NSF
s Undergraduate Research
'
Centers.
6
See Graves
(
2005
) treatment of this theme in Sect.
9.4
, and Bhushan and Rosenfeld
s (1995)
'
'
treatment in Sect.
9.5
, below.
7
As the story goes, a visiting physicist commented on a horseshoe hanging above the doorway of
Bohr
s country home, “Bohr, I didn
t know you believed in such superstitions!” to which Bohr
'
'
responded: “I don
t, but I
ve heard that it works whether or not one believes in it.”
'
'
