Metaphor and physics

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/quantum-poetics

“Scientific Description vs. Poetic Image

The rift between scientific language — consisting of clearly defined descriptive terms — and non-scientific language — which is more ambiguous, haphazard, and often metaphorical — goes back to the very beginning of the modern scientific project. One class of Francis Bacon’s famous “idols” of the mind— the false images of reality that he believed philosophers were fixated on to the detriment of good science — is the “idols of the marketplace.” These idols are words from everyday chatter, both popular and scholarly, that sit comfortably in our vocabularies but lack unambiguous counterparts among the things in the real world, making clear reasoning impossible.

There are two kinds of word idols, Bacon explains. First, there are “names of things which do not exist … or they are names of things which exist, but yet confused and ill-defined, and hastily and irregularly derived from realities.” Among them are: “Fortune, the Prime Mover, Planetary Orbits, Element of Fire, and like fictions which owe their origin to false and idle theories.” Second, there are words that have multiple meanings. A word of this kind — his example is “humid” — is “nothing else than a mark loosely and confusedly applied to denote a variety of actions which will not bear to be reduced to any constant meaning.”

In Bacon’s new science, words of both kinds are to be shunned, and so part of science is the need continuously to cleanse language of its imprecise and misleading words or meanings, and to find more fitting ones, because purification of language, and thus of thinking, is necessary for apprehending the world truly. But this way of putting it makes clear the value judgment against non-scientific, popular, or more poetic ways of speaking. They can soil scientific discourse, and as the gap between scientific and non-scientific language — and the according need for translation — grows, so grows the importance for translators to stay clear of imprecise words or to offer precise definitions when needed.

Underlying Bacon’s call for a scientifically strict language, and his judgment against words of the “marketplace,” seems to be a larger point about how language changes over time as our scientific knowledge increases. In his 1609 work Wisdom of the Ancients — a retelling of classic fables with fresh interpretations — Bacon explains that parables and metaphors are useful for teaching people difficult concepts, which is why, in the ancient days of greater ignorance, so many fables were written. As popular (“vulgar”) knowledge grows, metaphors give way to scientific arguments. Even so, the poets and storytellers remain useful for introducing arcane scientific insights, which then over time can again be rendered in the language of science. exceedingly useful, and sometimes necessary in the sciences, as it opens an easy and familiar passage to the human understanding, in all new discoveries that are abstruse and out of the road of vulgar opinions. Hence, in the first ages, when such inventions and conclusions of the human reason as are now trite and common were new and little known, all things abounded with fables, parables, similes, comparisons, and allusions, which were not intended to conceal, but to inform and teach…. For as hieroglyphics were in use before writing, so were parables in use before arguments. And even to this day, if any man would let new light in upon the human understanding,… he must still go in the same path, and have recourse to the like method of allegory, metaphor, and allusion.”