This paper builds on recent work by Elisabeth Camp and Arnon Levy, who connect metaphors to scientific understanding via imagination. Nevertheless, metaphors have played and continue to play a crucial role in scientific development-given their aforementioned features, it is worthwhile to ask how they perform this trick. Arnon Levy ( 2020) traces this puzzlement to metaphors’ literal falsity, historical propensity to mislead, and the fact that they seem to exist in a fundamentally unconstrained and lawless place. Some may find it puzzling that metaphors can be used to increase understanding. These metaphors all have their detractors, but few would deny that they were helpful at some point for understanding a target system. The market is governed by an invisible hand, genes propagate because they’re selfish agents, the brain encodes and decodes information, etc. Scientists, as well as science consumers, frequently come to understand complex phenomena by way of metaphorical appeals to elements of the world with which we are more familiar. One way to capture several of the above contributions is in terms of understanding. It is perhaps due to these affordances that metaphors are omnipresent in both science education (Aubusson et al., 2006) and science communication (Beger & Jäkel, 2015 Kendall-Taylor et al., 2013). They can be used to justify the pursuit of one theory over another (Herrington & Jablonka, 2020 Nyrup, 2018) they can help scientists see things in new ways and thereby come to make new discoveries (Jacob, 2001 Nersessian, 1984 Spranzi, 2004) they can justify theoretical claims and provide explanations (Hills, 2016 Levy, 2020) facilitate conceptual change and commensurability (Nersessian, 2015) and mediate the interpretation of hard-to-grasp theoretical structures (Stuart, 2016, 2018). Metaphors play important roles in all stages of scientific practice. This view hints towards new positions concerning testimonial understanding, factivity, abilities, discovery via metaphor, and the relation between metaphors and models. Specifically, metaphors increase understanding either by improving our sets of representations (by making them more minimal or more accurate), or by making it easier for us to encode and process data about complex subjects by changing how we are disposed to conceptualize those subjects. Many famous scientific metaphors are epistemically good, not primarily because of what they say about the world, but because of how they cause us to think. We attempt to shift the focus away from the epistemic value of the content of metaphors, to the epistemic value of the metaphor’s consequences. In this paper, we leverage recent advances on the nature of metaphor and the nature of understanding to explore how they accomplish this feat. They serve different functions, but perhaps most striking is the way they enable understanding, of a theory, phenomenon, or idea. Metaphors are found all throughout science: in published papers, working hypotheses, policy documents, lecture slides, grant proposals, and press releases.
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