We usually think of metaphors as figures of speech.
The world is not literally a machine.
Time is not literally a river.
The mind is not literally a computer.
Life is not literally a tree.
We understand what the speaker means because we know that the comparison is not meant literally.
Metaphor, on this view, is a decorative feature of language.
It makes expression vivid.
It gives abstract ideas a concrete image.
It helps us communicate what would otherwise be difficult to say.
But sometimes something much more consequential happens.
A metaphor stops merely describing an idea.
It begins to organise one.
It becomes a way of thinking.
Consider the metaphor of the machine.
Once nature is imagined as a machine, an entire family of questions becomes available.
What are its parts?
How do the parts interact?
What causes it to operate?
What happens when a component fails?
Can its operation be predicted?
Can it be taken apart and reconstructed?
The metaphor has not merely provided an image of nature.
It has suggested what kinds of explanations should count as successful.
The same thing happens when the mind is imagined as a computer.
The metaphor immediately makes certain questions seem natural.
What is the input?
What is the representation?
How is information processed?
Where is it stored?
What algorithm is being executed?
What is the output?
Some of these questions may prove extraordinarily fruitful.
Others may eventually become constraints.
The important point is that the metaphor has become an instrument of intelligibility.
It tells us where to look.
It suggests what distinctions to make.
It makes some relationships visible while leaving others in shadow.
This is why metaphors can participate in conceptual change.
A productive metaphor does not simply transfer a familiar word from one domain to another.
It transfers a mode of organisation.
The unfamiliar becomes intelligible through relationships already understood elsewhere.
We know what a machine does.
So the machine metaphor gives us one way of thinking about an unfamiliar phenomenon.
We know what a journey is.
So the journey metaphor allows us to think about time, life, learning or argument in terms of movement, direction, obstacles and destinations.
We know what a container is.
So container metaphors allow us to conceptualise minds, categories, texts, institutions and spaces as having interiors and boundaries.
The metaphor creates a bridge between domains.
But bridges change both sides.
Once a metaphor becomes established, the source domain itself may be reconceived through the new relationship.
The metaphor becomes part of a conceptual ecology.
This is especially visible in science.
A metaphor may begin as an imaginative suggestion.
It becomes a heuristic.
Then a research programme develops around it.
Eventually the metaphor can become so deeply embedded that we stop noticing it is a metaphor at all.
We begin speaking as though the conceptual structure it introduced were simply the natural structure of reality.
This is where metaphors become powerful enough to become dangerous.
The metaphor of the blueprint provides a striking example.
To describe genetic inheritance as a blueprint encourages us to imagine an organism as something specified in advance by a stored design.
But organisms are not buildings assembled from finished plans.
Development involves interaction among genes, cells, environments, developmental histories and constraints.
The blueprint metaphor can therefore make some relationships easier to see while making others harder to see.
Dawkins' alternative metaphor of the recipe points toward a different mode of intelligibility.
A recipe does not contain a miniature finished organism.
It describes a process.
Its outcome depends upon ingredients, sequence, conditions, execution and interaction.
The metaphor shifts attention from specification to becoming.
The point is not that one metaphor is simply "true" and another "false."
The deeper question is:
What does each metaphor allow us to see?
That question changes everything.
It means that conceptual criticism cannot stop at asking whether a metaphor is literally correct.
Metaphors are not usually intended to be literal descriptions.
Their significance lies in the patterns of attention they establish.
A metaphor selects.
It foregrounds.
It backgrounds.
It creates expectations.
It makes certain questions seem obvious.
It makes other questions seem unnecessary.
In this respect, metaphor is deeply connected with language itself.
From an SFL perspective, language is not simply a system for attaching labels to a pre-existing world.
It is a resource for making meaning in context.
Choices in wording enact different ways of construing experience.
A process can be represented as an event or as a thing.
A relationship can be foregrounded or left implicit.
Agency can be made prominent or obscured.
Experience can be organised in one way rather than another.
Metaphor intensifies this power of construal.
It allows one semantic domain to help organise another.
A metaphorical construal therefore does not merely rename experience.
It can reorganise the experiential meaning through which experience becomes intelligible.
This is why different communities can inhabit different conceptual worlds while encountering the same events.
The differences are not necessarily differences in raw perception.
They may be differences in the resources available for construing what is perceived.
A physicist may speak of fields.
A biologist may speak of ecosystems.
A computer scientist may speak of algorithms.
A theologian may speak of creation.
A poet may speak of becoming.
Each construal foregrounds different relationships.
None automatically exhausts the phenomenon.
And this gives us another clue about the evolution of intelligibility.
New modes of seeing may emerge when an existing metaphor begins to fail.
The machine metaphor may reveal mechanism brilliantly until phenomena appear whose organisation cannot be adequately described in mechanical terms.
The computer metaphor may illuminate certain aspects of cognition while obscuring others.
The blueprint metaphor may clarify inheritance while obscuring development.
At such moments, the problem may not be a shortage of facts.
It may be that the conceptual metaphor has become too narrow.
A new metaphor can therefore become an evolutionary event.
It opens another space of possible questions.
It provides new distinctions.
It makes previously invisible relationships available.
And sometimes several metaphors compete.
This is not necessarily a defect.
Different metaphors may disclose different aspects of a complex phenomenon.
The mistake is not using metaphor.
The mistake is forgetting that we are using it.
For once a metaphor becomes invisible, its assumptions become invisible too.
We begin to confuse a way of seeing with what is seen.
The map becomes the landscape.
The model becomes the phenomenon.
The metaphor becomes ontology.
Perhaps the most intellectually mature response is therefore neither to reject metaphors nor to trust them completely.
It is to learn to see what they are doing.
What does this metaphor foreground?
What does it background?
What relationships does it make visible?
Which possibilities does it suppress?
What questions does it encourage?
What questions does it make difficult to ask?
And what happens when another metaphor enters the conversation?
These questions transform metaphor from a literary ornament into an instrument for studying the evolution of intelligibility itself.
A metaphor begins as a comparison.
It becomes a way of organising attention.
It becomes a conceptual tool.
It becomes embedded in language, practice and institutions.
It shapes what a community notices.
Eventually, it may become so familiar that nobody remembers that it was once a choice.
At that point, the metaphor is no longer merely something we use to think.
It has become something that thinks through us.
And perhaps that is one of the most important things to understand about the evolution of intelligibility.
We do not simply invent concepts and then apply them to the world.
Our inherited concepts participate in determining what the world can mean for us.
But inherited metaphors are not destiny.
They can be exposed.
Compared.
Revised.
Replaced.
Extended.
And when they change, our possibilities for seeing change with them.
Perhaps a conceptual revolution begins at precisely this moment:
when someone notices that the metaphor everyone has been using is not the world itself...
but only one way the world has learned to become intelligible.
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