If pushing is the most immediate image of physical agency, pulling introduces a different way of imagining how one thing may influence another.
Like pushing, pulling belongs to ordinary experience.
We pull open a drawer.
We pull a wagon.
We pull a rope taut.
The activity is entirely familiar.
Yet the imagination it encourages is subtly different.
A push begins by pressing against something.
A pull begins by drawing something towards oneself.
The direction of agency changes.
What matters is no longer only the act of pressing.
It is the possibility of bringing something nearer.
At first, this may seem a small distinction.
Yet it quietly alters the way physical influence is imagined.
The movement no longer appears simply as something driven from behind.
It may also be understood as something drawn from ahead.
The conceptual picture has changed.
The metaphor also broadens the imagination of connection.
When we push, contact is immediate and obvious.
When we pull, the connection may be mediated.
A rope.
A chain.
A handle.
The agency remains intelligible even though it is transmitted through something else.
The imagination begins to accommodate influence that is not exhausted by direct bodily contact.
This seemingly modest change proves remarkably fertile.
Once the mind becomes comfortable imagining agency as drawing rather than simply pressing, it becomes easier to ask a new kind of question.
Must the connection always be visible?
Or might bodies influence one another even when no obvious link can be seen?
The metaphor quietly prepares the imagination for possibilities that extend beyond everyday experience.
Another consequence of the pull metaphor is a reorganisation of explanation.
To explain motion is no longer only to identify what pushed.
It may instead be to identify what attracted.
The source of change is imagined as something towards which motion is directed.
Agency acquires an orienting character.
At the same time, the metaphor imports assumptions that often become difficult to notice.
One of these is the assumption that agency may act across separation.
Even where some connecting medium is imagined, the emphasis no longer falls upon simple contact between bodies.
Attention shifts toward the relation established between them.
Another assumption concerns directedness.
A pull is naturally oriented.
It has a source and a destination.
The imagination therefore begins to organise agency around relations of approach rather than merely around acts of impact.
A further implication is that absence of contact need not imply absence of influence.
The metaphor encourages the possibility that bodies may participate in physical change without the kind of immediate encounter that the push metaphor seemed to require.
The imagination has become more spacious.
Taken together, these features make the pull metaphor an important extension of physical thought.
It preserves the intuition that agency produces change.
Yet it loosens the conceptual dependence upon direct contact.
Influence is no longer confined to pressing.
It may also consist in drawing.
As with every successful metaphor, familiarity gradually conceals the imaginative work it performs.
Pulling begins to seem simply another way in which force operates.
Its conceptual novelty quietly disappears.
The metaphor becomes transparent through use.
At that point, something subtle has occurred.
Agency is no longer understood solely through encounters between touching bodies.
It has begun to inhabit the relation between them.
The imagination of force has taken a significant step away from contact and towards connection.
The question, then, is not whether pulls occur.
Nor is it whether the metaphor has proved scientifically valuable.
The more interesting question is what becomes possible once physical influence is imagined through relations that are not exhausted by contact alone.
What kinds of explanation does this image encourage?
And what possibilities become easier to conceive while it quietly reorganises physical thought?
We will not attempt to answer those questions here.
Instead, we simply note that the imagination of force would continue to evolve.
Agency would gradually cease to belong exclusively to one body acting upon another.
Increasingly, it would be understood as something arising between them.
Force would come to be imagined as interaction.
And with that shift, the very location of agency would begin to change.
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