Metaphors Affect the Material World

Metaphors are language tools

If metaphors are understood as merely poetic, then they might primarily affect how non-specialists feel about scientific topics. But if metaphors are understood as essential to everyday language and in scientific inquiry (as the authors of this resource understand them), then metaphors enable people to make sense of what they perceive, and to describe their observations and interpretations to others.

Like other tools, language tools shape the work that people do with them. In a molecular biology lab, the available physical equipment has a lot to do with the kinds of questions you can ask and with what your results look like. The same is true of the discursive equipment you have available. If you’re working with microbial communities through an information network metaphor, for example, you might ask questions about information fidelity and analyze your results in terms of signal versus noise—even if you’re not explicitly aware of how metaphors are shaping your thinking.

Cognitive linguists have demonstrated that metaphors influence how non-specialist readers make choices about dealing with a fictional crime problem; they’re more likely to choose punishment and enforcement responses after reading that crime is a “beast,” and more likely to choose reform responses after reading that crime is a “virus.” While these results come from highly controlled, highly artificial studies of general readers presented with imaginary situations, we see the same pattern in how molecular biologists have built countless tools for making sense of DNA in terms of reading, writing, and editing the “genetic code.”

Together, describing DNA (or crime) through metaphors and then acting in ways structured by those metaphors shapes what DNA becomes. Physical practices and discursive practices, material stuff and words, are inseparable and work together. Nevertheless, not every metaphor does the same amount or kind of work.

Evelyn Fox Keller, a prominent rhetorician and philosopher of science, described a metaphor’s “efficacy” in terms of the environmental “resources” it mobilizes. Metaphors may, in other words, cohere with or make sense of more or less of the other practices that pertain to their targets. When Romeo says that “Juliet is the sun,” he’s describing how he feels about Juliet, but that metaphor doesn’t cohere with many other Juliet-related practices; treating Juliet as though she’s the star at the center of our solar system isn’t useful for working with her. In contrast, scientific metaphors that stick around generally do so because they mobilize lots of physical resources.

Analogizing membrane-bound living things to rooms by calling them cells, analogizing DNA and RNA to a language by calling them codes and representing them with strings of letters, and analogizing microorganisms to a car framework that can be customized with additional parts—all of these align with physical practices in ways that gradually remake these things in the image of scientists’ expectations about them. That’s particularly important because every metaphor emphasizes some similarities and downplays others. DNA is like human language in some but not all ways. Describing DNA in terms of language makes those similarities relatively easier to think about.

Material-semiotics

Science and technology studies (STS) theory describes this cooperativity between physical and language practices in terms of material-semiotics. Material-semiotics isn’t a model of communication in that it doesn’t explain how communication works; in contrast, it is a way of understanding what communication does in terms of how humans use it to relate to the world.

According to material-semiotics, all things are assemblages of practices, which is to say: we make things what they are by doing stuff with them. In a famous example, the medical anthropologist Annemarie Mol shows how atherosclerosis isn’t just defined an authoritative definition; in practice, many different “atherosclerosis” arise as a patient shows up with leg pain, or a radiologist examines an x-ray, or a diagnosis is processed on a medical record. Those practices are then all assembled into a picture of the disease as a single coherent thing.

Biologists have many different ways of enacting or practicing what a gene is, from DNA sequencing to mutation studies in model organisms to population-level studies of how organismal traits shift over time. These practices have been assembled into an idea of a coherent thing—a gene—in ways that involve both the physical things scientists do to produce evidence of genes and the language practices scientists and other people employ to understand all of that evidence as evidence of a single kind of thing called “a gene.” The things we do, our practices with and in the world, contribute to what things become, and language is intrinsic to doing things. Genes aren’t just “natural” or found objects that exist out in the world; they had to be constructed as a way of making sense of observations.

The incredible power of metaphor

Metaphors are incredibly powerful because they provide patterns for assembling things. To the extent that a metaphor helps make sense of and organize other (physical/material and discursive/language) practices, it provides an image or template of the kind of thing those practices deal with—of how to fit together the puzzle.

If we think about DNA as a code, we’ll try to decode it, and maybe then to recode it. If we think about DNA as an alphabetic text, we’ll try to read and write and copy and edit it. If we think about DNA as a polymer, we might try to study its tensile strength and other physical properties. If we analogize brains to computers, we might try to reprogram them, or we might talk about system malfunctions and cognitive hardware and software and subroutines that suggest categories of brain structure and function inspired by computers.

This last example also demonstrates how metaphors are bidirectional—they shape how we think about both the metaphor’s source and target. Analogizing brains to computers has also inspired building computer systems—neural networks—that function more like brains.

In summary, according to material-semiotics, language users participate in shaping the world through how they use language to interact with it. Who exactly participates in this process—just humans, just living creatures, or a much broader set of “entities”—is something on which all material-semioticians do not agree. Theorists also disagree about exactly how the material and semiotic dimensions of things interact and whether one can be described as more fundamental than the other. But all material-semioticians agree that the way we communicate about the world matters to the physical things we do and to how we reshape our lived environments. Words have consequences for what things become.

Further reading

• For a technical discussion of several ways to understand how the physical world and socially constructed practices work together, see John Law’s and Annemarie Mol’s “Notes on materiality and sociality.”
• For a discussion of racism in neuroscience—of how race as a socially constructed way to make sense of scientific observations has shaped the field—and recommendations for anti-racist neuroimaging reforms, check out Cardenas-Iniguez’s and Robledo Gonzalez’s Nature Neuroscience perspective.
• For an example of how language choices can emphasize particular similarities and de-emphasize particular differences, in the context of who “we” when climate and environment reporters say that “we’re the worst species,” check out Max Liboiron’s essay “There’s no such thing as ‘we.’”