How Metaphors Guide, Teach and Popularize Science
Metaphors are essential to scientists themselves and strongly influence science communication. Through careful analyses of metaphors actually used in science texts, recordings, and videos, this book explores the essential functions of conceptual metaphor in the conduct of science, teaching of science, and how scientific ideas are promoted and popularized. With an accessible introduction to theory and method this book prepares scientists, science teachers, and science writers to take advantage of recent shifts in metaphor theories and methods. Metaphor specialists will find theoretical issues explored in studies of bacteriology, cell reproduction, marine biology, physics, brain function and social psychology. We see the degree of conscious or intentional use of metaphor in shaping our conceptual systems and constraining inferences. Metaphor sources include social structure, embodied experience, abstract or mathematical formulations. The results are sometimes innovative hypotheses and robust conclusions; other times pedagogically useful, if inaccurate, stepping stones or, at worst, misleading fictions.
As of January 2023, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.
Published online on 30 March 2020
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].
Table of Contents
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Chapter 1. IntroductionAnke Beger and Thomas H. Smith | pp. 1–37
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Part I. Metaphor in natural science and science education – an overview
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Chapter 2. Social metaphors in cellular and molecular biologyTheodore L. Brown | pp. 41–71
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Chapter 3. Coordinating metaphors in science, learning and instruction: The case of energyTamer G. Amin | pp. 73–110
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Part II. Metaphor in science popularization – concepts of biology and biochemistry
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Chapter 4. Metaphor and the popularization of contested technologiesBettina Bock von Wülfingen | pp. 113–139
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Chapter 5. To be or not to be: Reconsidering the metaphors of apoptosis in press popularisation articlesJulia T. Williams Camus | pp. 141–173
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Chapter 6. Non-verbal and multimodal metaphors bring biology into the pictureJosé Manuel Ureña Gómez-Moreno | pp. 175–208
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Part III. Metaphors in specific fields of social sciences and the humanities
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Chapter 7. Three metaphors in social science: Use patterns and usefulness, separately and togetherThomas H. Smith | pp. 211–262
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Chapter 8. The brain is a computer and the mind is its program: Following a metaphor’s path from its birth to teaching philosophy decades laterAnke Beger | pp. 263–295
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Conclusion: When metaphors serve scientific endsThomas H. Smith and Anke Beger | pp. 297–318
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Index
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