1st Edition

Large Type Edition Large Type Edition

By Timothy Giles, Charles Sides Copyright 2007
    184 Pages
    by Routledge

    182 Pages
    by Routledge

    Examination of the work of scientific icons-Newton, Descartes, and others-reveals the metaphors and analogies that directed their research and explain their discoveries. Today, scientists tend to balk at the idea of their writing as rhetorical, much less metaphorical. How did this schism over metaphor occur in the scientific community? To establish that scientists should use metaphors to explain science to the public and need to be conscious of how metaphor can be useful to their research, this book examines the controversy over cloning and the lack of a metaphor to explain it to a public fearful of science's power.The disjunction between metaphor and science is traced to the dispensation of the Solar System Analogy in favor of a mathematical model. Arguing that mathematics is metaphorical, the author supports the idea of all language as metaphorical-unlike many rhetoricians and philosophers of science who have proclaimed all language as metaphorical but have allowed a distinction between a metaphorical use of language and a literal use.For technical communication pedagogy, the implications of this study suggest foregrounding metaphor in textbooks and in the classroom. Though many technical communication textbooks recommend metaphor as a rhetorical strategy, some advise avoiding it, and those that recommend it usually do so in a paragraph or two, with little direction for students on how to recognize metaphors or to how use them. This book provides the impetus for a change in the pedagogical approach to metaphor as a rhetorical tool with epistemological significance.

    Acknowledgments

    Introduction: The Problem of Metaphor in Scientific and Technical Communication
     Differentiating between Scientific and Technical Communication
     Metaphor and Analogy
     Summary of Chapters

    Chapter One: Reintroducing Metaphor in the Technical Communication Classroom
     Problem
     Methodology
     Some General Considerations of Metaphor
     Technical Communication Textbooks
     Science Writing Texts

    Chapter Two: Metaphor in the Technical Communication Literature
     Metaphor and the Computer
     Technical Communication Theory
     Technical Communication Pedagogy
     Conclusion

    Chapter Three: A Review of the Theories of Metaphor
     Substitution Theory of Metaphor
     Aristotle on Metaphor
     Twentieth-Century Substitutionists
     Nietzsche and Post-Modern Metaphor
     The Tensionists: An Introduction to Interaction
     The Interactionists
     Metaphor as Epistemology
     Conclusion

    Chapter Four: The Metaphor of Mathematics: A Case Study of the Solar System Analogy
     Scottish Natural Philosophy
     Lodge and the BAAS
     The Solar System Analogy
     The Solar System Analogy in Secondary-School Texts
     A Narrative History of the Solar System Analogy
     Lord Kelvin
     James Clerk Maxwell
     J. J. Thomson
     Oliver Lodge
     Ernest Rutherford
     Niels Bohr
     Conclusion

    Chapter Five: The Question of Metaphor in Natural Language: A Case Study
     The Question of Cloning
     Recognition of the Dominant/Emergent Metaphors
     The Effect Upon the Scientific Community
     Conclusion

    Chapter Six: Implications
     An Approach Based on this Study
     Other Avenues for Research

    References

    Index

    Biography

    Timothy Giles, Charles Sides