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The switch may occur between different phases of the research process, and/or
between doing research and teaching. This finding confirms the liminality of
metaphor discussed in Sect.
9.1
, above.
Gupta found that besides reifying concepts as material substance, researchers
also engaged in metaphorical identification with and projection of agency. These
tendencies were exemplified in Graves
s researchers.
These tendencies are consistent with the definition of metaphor as a rhetorical form
that introduces something unfamiliar in terms of something familiar. There are
other compelling reasons for favoring Jeppsson
'
s presentation of the continuity
between expert and novice. The history of science is full of stories about how the
expert
'
observation of MacDonald
'
s mentality mingles with that of the novice in the initial framing of an
incorrect model. Thompson
'
s solar system
model of the atom were later refined by others in the course of trying to apply
them in theory building and experimental design.
Ernst Cassirer
s plum pudding model and Rutherford
'
'
s neo-Kantian epistemology grounds his
Philosophy of Sym-
bolic Forms
20
on the continuity between different modes of symbolic thinking,
with mythic and scientific thinking occupying the extremes. Rather than sum-
marize its argument here, I note that some of his key conclusions are supportive
of the continuity thesis developed by Gupta et al., and incorporated in the
claims of Jeppsson et al. The following excerpt from Cassirer
'
s chapter on
“The Power of Metaphor” suffices to show the consistency of his analysis
with what Jeppsson et al. note as the crucial feature of expert knowledge:
flexibility with respect to choices among conceptual metaphors, and a
metacognitive grasp of such decision-making and implementation. Cassirer talks
about the final stages in the development of thought, wherein self-consciousness
is characterized by self-possession. At its final stages of development, thought
is no longer compelled by concrete aspects of imagination that shape the two
instruments that co-evolved, and thus co-determine one another, namely, language
and myth.
Word and mythic image, which once confronted the human mind as hard realistic powers,
have now cast off all reality and effectuality; they have become a light, bright ether in
which the spirit can move without let or hindrance. This liberation is achieved not because
the mind throws aside the sensuous forms of word and image, but in that it uses them both
as
organs
of its own, and thereby recognizes them for what they really are: forms of its own
self-revelation. (Cassirer
1953
, 99)
The idea of the scientific mind using word and image as “organs of its
own
'
self-revelation” is especially important: in scientific problem solving experts
consciously
choose to use materialistic (and other concrete) metaphors drawn from
daily life. That is, for as long as it is useful, the expert knowingly acts
as if
the
metaphor is literal, then switches to a more abstract metaphor for which there is no
experiential basis, or even runs contrary to the expectations of na¨ve experience.
...
20
In three volumes (1925-1929) Yale University Press. Cassirer draws on a broad multidis-
ciplinary pool of evidence from human, social and physical science of the mid-twentieth century.
