Chemical Education Today
Book & Media Reviews
edited by
Jeffrey Kovac University of Tennessee Knoxville, TN 37996-1600
Making Truth: Metaphor in Science by Theodore L. Brown Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. 215 pp. ISBN 0-252-02810-4. $32.50 reviewed by Jeffrey Kovac
Theodore L. Brown, a well-known inorganic chemist and general chemistry textbook author, has written an interesting and important book, which will certainly be controversial. Brown applies to science the theory of conceptual metaphor, best known from the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1). Brown’s central thesis is that scientists understand nature largely through metaphorical constructs. This is a bold claim, but Brown argues for it persuasively using examples drawn largely from chemistry and biology. According to Lakoff and Johnson “the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (1, p 5). Brown points out that in science we use the embodied experience of the ordinary world to develop the models we use to interpret the results of experiments. Further, the metaphors provide us with ways to think about natural systems. For example, a cell is often called a factory. Biochemists use the concept of a chaperone protein to describe a protein that prevents unwanted interactions. Ideas and experience from one domain are used to understand phenomena in another. The match is never perfect, which is why we often need more than one metaphor to understand something. Perhaps the best example is quantum mechanics where things have both particle and wave properties, so we need both metaphors. Other than Mr. Tompkins, none of us has direct everyday experience with quantum particles, so we use what we know about billiard balls and vibrating strings to try to understand the properties of electrons (2). Brown is not the first person to discuss metaphor in science. For example, in 1995 Natalie Bhushan and Stuart Rosenfeld published “Metaphorical Models in Chemistry” in this Journal (3), but Brown’s book provides an extensive and accessible exposition of this important idea. His experience as a textbook author serves him well. In Brown’s view, the central problem of science is making a connection between a metaphor, which might also be called a model or a theory, and the results of experiments. Humans construct these metaphors to help them understand nature. Since the metaphors are based on our experience with the everyday world, they also have cultural roots. The metaphor of a cell as a factory would not arise in a society where there were no factories. However, Brown does not subscribe to a radical social constructivist view of science, such as that proposed in the so-called “strong programme”
880
in the sociology of science; he is a realist. Instead, he shows how humans construct meaning based on their experiences and the mental tools that derive from them. Even mathematical models for nature have a metaphorical basis because the equations are based on some mental picture of the system being described. This should make a lot of sense to chemists who are primarily interested in molecules. Over the centuries chemists have accumulated an enormous quantity of data about the molecular world, which has been organized by a series of increasingly sophisticated metaphors. At one level, we think of molecules in terms of their Lewis structures. When necessary we move to three-dimensional ball-and-stick models, or a space-filling model that imagines the molecule to be an essentially rigid object. We have several models for bonding: the intuitively appealing valence bond model and the more sophisticated molecular orbital approach. Like the six blind men and the elephant, none of these is a complete description of a molecule, yet each reveals something valuable and useful. Making Truth is an important book for all science educators to read. Not only does it provide deep insight into the process of science, it shows how scientific understanding is developed, or constructed, if you please. If metaphor is central, then what educators need to do is help students learn how to construct metaphors and connect them to experimental data. Brown’s examples provide a paradigm for this process. This book will be controversial. The central role of metaphor in scientific understanding is not universally accepted either by philosophers of science or by scientists. For example, reductionists will certainly disagree with Brown’s view that metaphors provide an acceptable explanation for scientific phenomena. Among cognitive scientists there is disagreement about the importance of conceptual metaphor in human thought. There are those who will be troubled that Brown does not make a clear distinction between model and metaphor. Brown has not written a tightly-argued work of philosophy. Instead he has written a book filled with insight about the way scientists think and work, a book that will generate an important dialogue about science and science education. Literature Cited 1. Lakoff, G.; Johnson, M. Metaphors We Live By; University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL, 1980. 2. Gamov, G. Mr. Tompkins in Paperback; Cambridge University Press: New York, NY, 1993. 3. Bhushan, N.; Rosenfeld, S. Metaphorical Models in Chemistry. J. Chem. Educ. 1995, 72, 578–582.
Jeffrey Kovac is in the Department of Chemistry, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996-1600;
[email protected] Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 80 No. 8 August 2003 • JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu
