Abstract
To the friends and colleagues who helped put this volume together:
Thanks, in the first instance, must go to Willard McCarty for the honour he has accorded me in proposing a volume of essays on my work, and for providing support for the execution of this plan. Secondly I am indebted to Marga Vicedo and Denis Walsh for taking on the hard work of putting this volume together – i.e. of inviting the contributors and editing their contributions. When I was asked to submit a paper to help anchor these contributions, I suggested, for an organizing theme, a paper on the cognitive functions of scientific metaphor. Little did I realize what a hornet's nest I was opening.
My intention was to try to contain this often unwieldy topic by focusing on the concerns of the philosopher Mary Hesse about how metaphors served to guide the development of scientific theories. More specifically, I concentrated on the role of polysemy (and other linguistic tropes) in shaping the questions posed and the answers that have been found satisfying in twentieth century genetics and developmental biology. The papers collected here, however, expose the futility of such an attempt at containment. The subject is just too big. In this volume, the authors have brought their own preoccupations to the subject of scientific metaphor, and wonderfully so. Above all, I am grateful to them for their contribution. They clearly demonstrate both the richness, the breadth, and the uncontainability of the subject – sometimes by extending our concerns to include such overarching metaphors as the ‘book of nature’ (McLeish) or, as Helmreich urges us, to expand our focus to permit recognition of the political ‘stakes’ of scientific metaphor or, as for many of the authors, by zeroing in on gaps in biological theory that many of the most prominent metaphors have served to obscure and, in this way, bringing our attention back to the core problems of the life sciences.
Jessica Riskin's essay, ‘Biology's Mistress, A Brief History’, opens the volume with, appropriately enough, J. B. Lamarck's coining of the term ‘Biology’ and his efforts to deal with what has ever since proven to be the central problem of biological explanation, namely that of providing a naturalist account of agency and purpose. This is the challenge for a number of the other authors as well – e.g. for Fermin Fulda, Ana Soto and Carlos Sonnenschein, and Emily Herrington and Eva Jablonka – and is closely related to the difficulties incurred by talk of programs and executive control’ (see Denis Walsh's essay).
Several contributions are particularly critical of the use of the metaphor of programme in discussions of biological agency, purpose, and control. For Giuseppe Longo and Matteo Mossio, e.g. that metaphor has proven more counter-productive than productive in the pursuit of a theoretical framework; indeed they suggest that it has largely worked to foreclose such a pursuit precisely by obscuring its own failure to provide explanatory function.
Common to virtually all these authors is a preoccupation with the roles of metaphor in in our effort to understand the distinctive features of living organisms – agency to be sure, but also complexity, interactivity, instability and dynamics. All of these features demand departures from conventional scientific approaches, and an obvious question to ask is: how do the metaphors we use help us identify new approaches. Gregory Radick seems to think they don't, and he targets the locution ‘genes for’ for the historic neglect of the complexity of the relation between genotype and phenotype. Here he calls for a revision of our educational programmes in which the intricacy and complexity of that relation is highlighted rather than ignored.
In a similar spirit, Helen Longino argues that we ought to place interaction at the absolute centre of our attention. In writing about interaction, I take her to include not only interaction among the parts that make up an organism, but also among the different organisms that make up an ecology and, finally, among the different ecologies that make up a scientific research programme. In effect, Longino is arguing for a systemic shift in ontology from individual to community.
Finally, Rich Doyle reminds us of the critical role of dynamics, both in discourse and in living systems. The vitality of a metaphor, just as the vitality of an organism, is manifested in its instabilities by what he graciously dubs the ‘Keller Effect.’ Like so many of the contributors to this volume, Doyle uses his analysis of metaphor to push our thinking (about science as elsewhere) in new directions.
Once again, I am grateful, especially since the new directions they reach towards are so congenial to the arguments I have been making over the course of my career.
I thank you all.