Models or metaphors?: Remarks on ‚tranference’ in philosophy and science

pages: 121-138

Apstrakt

Dealing with the presumed universality of metaphor and its role in the discourse of philosophy and science, the article discusses, in the first part, the theses on metaphor as “all pervading means” of language and thought, raised by romantic and post-romantic philosophers of language, and its impact on the meta-discourse on philosophy and science in recent contemporary contributions by epistemologists of science and language philosophers. The aim of the article is to show, on one side, that this universalisation of metaphor has been operative in the recent philosophy rather as a tacit confusion of metaphors with models and analogies than as elaboration of the presumed constitutive role of the so-called genuin metaphor in the rational discourse. On this ground, the article tries to provide, in the second and the third part, additonal and different arguments than those raised by ‘friends of metaphor’ for locating the presumed ‘irrationality’ of metaphor so as to reexamine the relevance of the difference between the literality of the underlying linguistic functions and the emphatic assertion by metaphorical expressions. As a result, in the fourth part, a different model has been suggested for estimating metaphors as universal, legitimate, and epistemically innovative in the rational discourse of philosophy and science. Such a view allows for conceiving of the presumed ‘all-pervading’ character of transference in language and thought as based on the universality of linguistic functions and yet enables to consider metaphors as what they actually are - a particular, but peculiar, intralinguistic phenomenon without which no insight into the differential and material character of language and speech seems to be possible at all. Keywords: universalisality of metaphor, epistemology and linguistic of transference, metaphors vs models, locating ‘irrationality’, metaphoric literality