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Hesse’s semantical theory is set forth in
her Models and
Analogies (1953) and also in her article
“Models and Analogies in Science” in The
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967).
There she compares two earlier conflicting
protagonists in the issues of models and the
semantical interpretation of theories.
One is Duhem, and the other is Campbell whose
views on the semantics of theories is more like
Hesse’s than Braithwaite’s.
In his
Aim and Structure of Physical Theory Duhem had
argued a view similar to Hanson's that the semantics
of a physical theory is determined only by the
equations and measurement concepts, and that even if
models based on analogy with more familiar phenomena
have served some heuristic value for developing the
new theory, nonetheless these models are not part of
the theory itself and may be discarded after the
theory is constructed.
On the other hand in his Physics,
The Elements (1920) the Cambrian philosopher
Norman R. Campbell argued that analogically based
models are not merely dispensable aids, but rather
are indispensable to a theory, because they assist
in the continuous extension of the theory.
He argued that the Positivists’ hypothetico-deductive
form of explanation alone is insufficient to account
for the role of theory in science.
He maintained that in addition to the three
elements, (1) the formal deductive system of
hypothesized axioms and theorems, (2) the dictionary
for translating some of the descriptive terms in the
formal system into experimental terms, and (3) the
experimental laws such as the gas laws, which are
confirmed by empirical tests and also can be deduced
from the system of hypothesis plus dictionary, there
is a fourth element in theories, namely (4) the
analogy, such as may be exemplified in gas theory by
the model of point particles moving at random in the
vessel containing the gas.
The motivating intent behind this view is
that scientific theories are not static museum
items, but rather are always growing as an integral
part of the growth of science; and this latter view,
which might be called the Cambrian thesis, is the
one that is accepted by both Braithwaite and Hesse.
But her
views are not quite the same as Braithwaite's. Most notably unlike Braithwaite, Hesse does not distinguish
the semantics of theoretical terms from the
semantics of models.
In fact for Hesse it is the models that
supply the indirect meaning had by the theoretical
terms. And
since extrapolation on the basis of the models
explains how the theories grow, Hesse's interest in
the semantics of theoretical terms leads her into
the topic of scientific discovery.
Hesse also differs with Braithwaite about the
interpretation of quantum theory.
She believes that the concepts of wave and
particle supply modern quantum theory with two
contrary models.
In her examination of analogical models Hesse
distinguishes three parts to an analogy, which she
calls the positive analogy, the negative analogy,
and the neutral analogy.
The positive analogy consists of those
aspects of some familiar phenomena which are known
to apply to the phenomenon explained by the theory. These include the similarities that have occasioned
recognition of the analogy in the first place.
The negative analogy consists of those
aspects of the familiar phenomena that are known not
to apply or are known to be irrelevant to the
phenomenon explained by the theory, and the theorist
ignores them. Hesse
views the neutral analogy as strategic for
scientific discovery.
The neutral analogy consists of those aspects
of the familiar phenomena whose relevance to the
problematic phenomena in the domain of the theory is
presently unknown, and therefore whose explanatory
potential for further development of the theory is
not yet known.
She calls the semantics supplied by the
neutral analogy, i.e. the concepts and conceptual
relations not present in the empirical data alone,
what she also calls the “surplus” meaning.
She also uses the phrase open texture
property of meaning without referencing any previous
usage of the phrase in the literature.
The further theoretical exploration of the
problematic phenomena will be guided by the neutral
analogy. Exploitation
of the model for scientific discovery consists in
investigating this neutral analogy, because it
suggests modifications and developments of the
theory that can be subsequently tested empirically.
Such in Hesse’s view is how neutral
analogies enable theories to grow.
In
"Models and Matter" Hesse says that in
quantum theory the wave and particle models are such
that what is positive analogy in the one model is
negative analogy in the other.
She also says without elaboration that in the
two models there are still features that physicists
cannot classify as either positive or negative, and
that it is due to these features that the particle
and wave models are yet essential.
Like Bohm, Hesse says that if physicists were
forbidden to talk in terms of models at all, then
they would have no expectations, and would be
imprisoned forever inside the range of existing
experiments. In her discussion of subquantum
theories in the chapter “Modern Physics” in her Forces and Fields: The Concept of Action at a Distance in the History of
Physics (1962) she expresses agreement with
Bohm’s thesis that a new quantum theory
postulating a subquantum order of magnitude is
possible. Specifically
she rejects the Copenhagen thesis that current
formulations of quantum theory and current models of
physical reality are unalterable.
She says that if two models each turn out to
be unsatisfactory in isolation, but usable when
regarded as complementary to each other, it is
curiously conservative to assert that no other
models can be conceived and to elevate the principle
of complementarity to a quasimetaphysical status,
when it should instead be regarded as a consequence
of the poverty of our imagination.
She adds that it may be very difficult to
conceive new models, especially when it is
remembered that they cannot be entirely abstract
formalisms because they must be tied to the
observable at some level, but difficulty does not
entail logical impossibility.
Hesse
on Metaphor
The thesis that analogically created models
supply nonliteral interpretation for theoretical
explanations leads Hesse to consider also the
semantics of metaphorical language.
In her "Explanatory Function of
Metaphor" in Logic,
Methodology and Philosophy of Science (ed. Bar-Hillel,
1965) she states that her views are significantly
influenced by the interactionist concept of metaphor
proposed by her Cambrian colleague Max Black in his
Models and Metaphors (1962).
Black opposes his interactionist view to the
comparison view.
On his rendering of the comparison view the
metaphorical statement is nonliteral for two
reasons: Firstly if it is taken literally, it is a
false statement.
Secondly it can be restated as an exhaustive
list of similes, which are literal statements
expressing the similarities implied in the metaphor.
In other words in rejecting the comparison
view Black rejects the thesis that metaphors are
elliptical similes.
In her paper on the function of metaphor in
theoretical explanation Hesse distinguishes a
primary system and a secondary system, where both
systems may be taken as real or physical systems
that are described literally.
The metaphoric use of language to describe
the primary system consists of transferring to the
description a word or words that normally are used
in connection with the literal description of the
secondary system.
In a scientific theory the primary system is
the domain of the explanandum,
the statements that describe the explained
phenomenon in an observation language, while the
secondary system is the domain of the explanans,
the statements constituting the explanation and
containing either observation language or a familiar
theory from which the explanatory model is taken.
The explanation of the explanandum for the primary system consists of statements that
metaphorically use vocabulary describing the
secondary system and that are applied to the primary
system on the basis of some similarity or analogy.
In his statement of his interactionist thesis
Black lays down a criterion for the literal
equivalence of a metaphor: the metaphor can be
re-expressed as an exhaustive list of statements
expressing all the similarities in the metaphor as
literal similes.
Then he rejects the possibility of reducing
the metaphor to such a list of similes, because such
a list can never be exhaustive.
This inexhaustibility is especially important
to Hesse, because the possibility of indefinitely
extending and explaining the metaphor constitutes
the fruitfulness of the explanatory model containing
the metaphorical language.
But the thesis that metaphor cannot be
reduced to literal language is not all there is to
Black's interactive view of metaphor.
The interactive thesis is called interactive,
because the metaphorical use of language is seen as
changing the literal meanings of the words that are
used metaphorically; there is an interaction of the
meanings of the words in their descriptions of both
the primary and secondary systems.
For example the metaphorical statement
"Man is a wolf" makes wolves seem more
human and men seem more vulpine.
This is contrasted with the comparison
thesis, which purportedly assumes that the literal
description of both primary and secondary systems is
unaffected by the metaphor, such that the meanings
of the terms remain semantically invariant.
In Hesse's view the semantical variance
postulated by the interaction view of metaphor is
relevant to scientific explanation, because metaphor
changes the semantics of the observation language.
This thesis distances Hesse from the
Positivists, for whom the observation language must
remain completely uncontaminated by theoretical
language. Hesse
sees this meaning variance in the observation
language as contrary to the assumptions of the
hypothetico-deductive account of explanation, in
which it is assumed that descriptive laws pertaining
to the domain of the explanandum remain empirically
independent and semantically invariant through all
changes of explanatory theory.
She therefore advances the view that the
deductive model of explanation should be modified
and supplemented by a view of theoretical
explanation as metaphoric redescription of the
domain of the explanation.
The interactive view of metaphor advanced by
Black and used by Hesse, is not the prevailing view.
Conventionally metaphor is construed as an
elliptical simile containing implicitly the idea of
an underlying similarity that can be explicitly and
literally expressed by a simile with the words
"like" or "as".
For example in his
Philosophy of Language (1964) William P. Alston
sets forth what may be taken as the comparison
thesis of metaphor.
Like Black and Hesse, Alston maintains that
metaphor has an indeterminacy in it that is
inexhaustible.
But he also maintains that it is a mistake to
believe that metaphorical and literal language are
different kinds of meaning.
On Alston's view the difference between
metaphorical and literal language is one of degree,
where literal language may be identified with
established usage and metaphor is a new usage that
is derived from established usage.
All meanings are literal meanings, and the
derived and unconventional usage in a metaphor may
be expressed literally with greater or lesser extent
of explanation.
When the new usage is forgotten, the metaphor
becomes a dead metaphor in the sense that it is dead
and buried. But
when it has become part of the established usage,
then the metaphor has become a dead metaphor in the
sense that it has become part of the conventional
literal language, and explanation of its derivation
from the original established usage becomes an
exercise in etymology.
Furthermore unlike Black or Hesse, Alston
does not say that metaphor must be capable of being
reduced to an exhaustive list of similes, in order
to be reduced to literal use, because there is
indeterminacy in literal language as well as in
metaphor. Alston
references Friedrich Waismann's
"Verifiability" in Logic
and Language (1952) stating that literal words
denoting physical objects have an inexhaustible
vagueness which remains even after all attempts at
clarification.
This vagueness remains because in addition to
actual cases of indeterminacy of application, one
can think of an indefinite number of possible cases
in which one would not know what to say.
Waismann calls this inexhaustible vagueness
the “open texture” of descriptive language.
Alston denies that metaphor is simply
vagueness, but he says that in both metaphorical and
established language there is an inexhaustible
indeterminacy due to the fact that it is impossible
to decide in advance on every possible usage of a
word.
The conclusion to be drawn from this is that
Black's criticism for the reduction of metaphor to
literal language by means of an exhaustive list of
similes is not a feasible criterion, because it
would demand more determinateness of nonliteral
language than of literal language.
A weaker criterion therefore is in order.
It would seem sufficient to require only that
a metaphor be re-expressible with at least one
simile that makes explicit an implicit underlying
similarity, presumably but not necessarily the
similarity that is intended by the speaker or writer
initiating the metaphor.
Furthermore semantical variability or meaning
variance must therefore be a property of both
metaphorical and literal language, or it must be a
property of neither, since the former is merely the
elliptical expression of the latter.
These considerations are relevant to Hesse's
thesis about metaphor in theoretical explanation in
science. Her
tacitly assumed premise is that meaning variance
does not occur in literal language, i.e. in the
absence of metaphor.
On this premise the nonreducibility of
metaphor to literal language is strategic to her
rejection of the adequacy of the hypothetico-deductive
thesis of theoretical explanation, and it is
strategic to her reliance on metaphor to account for
semantical change or meaning variance in the
language for description of observed phenomena.
On the other hand if as Alston says metaphor
is reducible to literal language, then semantical
variability must be a property of both metaphorical
and literal language, or it must be a property of
neither. And
it is clearly a property of metaphor; otherwise
there would be no dead metaphors indicating that the
new metaphorical use has either been forgotten or
has become a new alternative literal use.
Thus the reducibility of metaphor to
conventional literal language implies that metaphor
cannot satisfactorily be used as a general
explanation of semantical change in science, even if
it can serve to indicate that semantical change has
occurred relative to currently established meaning.
The theory-laden character of observation
discourse resulting from theory revision is a much
more general aspect of the semantics of language
than just its metaphorical usage.
The explanation of semantical change or
meaning variance demands a general theory of
semantical description for all literal language.
At the same time metaphor seems clearly to
have a role in occasioning semantical change, and it
may have a strategic utility for the development of
new theories in science.
Two decades after these 1960’s-vintage
papers on analogy, metaphor, and models Hesse
finally reconciled herself to the artifactual thesis
of the semantics of language and the phenomenon of
pervasive meaning variance in the semantics of
descriptive terms.
But her pathway was a circuitous one.
In her Construction
of Reality (1986), co-authored with Michael A.
Arbib, she says that her starting point is Max
Black’s interaction theory of metaphor as modified
in the light of Wittgenstein’s family-resemblance
theory of meaning.
At the end of her philosophical trek she is
not consistent with Black’s irreducible separation
of literal and metaphorical meanings, although she
continues to advocate it. Firstly she rejects literal meaning understood as invariant
meaning, and announces (placing her own words in
quotes) that all language is metaphorical, a
phraseology that she says some will find shocking.
It might better have been described as
mocking the meaning of literal.
Her thesis is that the use of general terms
is always metaphorical in the sense of relying on
perceived similarities and differences between
various individuals, similarities that are family
resemblances for which a term has been acceptably
used in the past.
She dichotomously opposes Wittgenstein’s
family-resemblance thesis to the Aristotelian
natural-kinds thesis.
She says that either the world is really
Aristotelian, such that objects really fall into
sharply discriminated species; or in practice we
allow that language works by capturing approximate
meanings, such that degrees
of similarity and difference are sufficiently
accessible to perception to avoid confusion in
ordinary usage.
Hesse believes that the second option is more
realistic. She
adds that it implies we lose potential information
every time we use a general descriptive term -
either information that is present to perception but
neglected for purposes of the description (e.g. no
one discriminates every
potential shade of red), or information present
in reality but below the level of conscious
perception. In
the latter case the information may later be made
accessible by instrumental aids such as microscopes,
etc. Understood
in terms of the family-resemblance analysis,
metaphorical shifts of meaning depending on
similarities and differences between objects are
pervasive in language - not deviant - and some of
the mechanisms of metaphor are essential to the
meaning of any descriptive language whatever.
She explains that this is what she means by
her thesis that all language is metaphorical.
This peculiar outcome is due to her
identification of the naturalistic thesis of the
meaning of terms, which she calls semantical
naturalism, with the concept of literal meaning, and
is also due to her earlier conclusion that metaphor
enables a nonliteral redescription of observed
phenomena in scientific explanation.
Yet she does not abandon altogether the
intuitively recognized distinction between literal
and metaphorical usages in language.
Having firstly rejected the meaning-invariant
idea of literalness she then secondly redefines the
meaning of “literal” by making the distinction
between literal and metaphoric pragmatic instead of
semantic. And
it is here that Black’s interactionist thesis
would seem to serve her no longer, because what now
distinguishes metaphor from the literal is not
Black’s semantical irreducibility but rather
conventionality.
In fact rejecting Black’s irreducibility
thesis would seem implied by a pragmatic
distinction, because she says that her new
definition of “literal” merely enshrines the use
that is most frequent in familiar context - the use
that least disturbs the network of meanings.
It is the one generally put first in
dictionary entries, where it is followed by
comparatively dead metaphors.
And metaphor denotes particular forms of
literary expressions that depend on explicit
recognition of similarities and analogies.
For example “Richard is a lion” is a
metaphor, because it based on elaborate analogy
between particular human and animal dispositions, in
which the obvious differences between human beings
and lions are consciously discarded.
A metaphor in this sense is usually
recognized only when it is newly minted.
When metaphors become entrenched in a
language, they become a new literal usage.
Such is the fate of dead metaphors.
Hesse says scientific language conforms
closely to her metaphorical model of meaning.
Not only is theoretical explanation a
metaphoric redescription of the domain of the
phenomena, as she said in the 1960’s, but now she
also says that scientific revolutions are metaphoric
revolutions. In
her earlier years as a Positivist, Hesse had been
critical of Kuhn often referring to his views
pejoratively as historicist.
Now using the Kuhnian terminology and
referencing Kuhn she says that in the development of
science a tension always exists between normal and
revolutionary science: normal science seeks to
reduce instability of meaning and consistency and to
evolve logically connected theories.
Revolutionary science makes metaphoric leaps
that are creative of new meanings and applications
and that may constitute genuine theoretical
progress. Ironically
in his later writings Kuhn rejected Hesse’s thesis
that all meaning is metaphorical, and he embraced
Black’s interactionist view.
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