Praise for
this book is well-earned. It deserves to be read, and read carefully, by general
readers interested in science, the history of science or of ideas, and by
students and post-grads in all the sciences and in philosophy. The author is
formerly director of a premier interdisciplinary institute within the
University of Illinois, and professor of chemistry; the Beckman Institute spans
the sciences, engineering, and philosophy.

 Attention professors and teachers: this is a great introduction to
the conceptual and creative side of science. It gives primacy to conceptual metaphor as a ruling distinction
in nearly all scientific activity, and it tells us much about the real meaning
of truth in science. The stories from the history of science are archetypal and
essential to anyone’s education.

 A good deal
of the viewpoint Brown adopts appears to derive from earlier work by two
researchers, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, especially in Metaphors We Live By and Philosophy
in the Flesh: the embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. Brown
refers to their work, their insights at key junctures throughout his treatment.
But the presentation is always balanced with other viewpoints and with a
clarity and mastery of his subject. And the subject is scientific understanding
itself.

 The book
begins with a cogent discussion of what science is about and how scientists do
their work, with special emphasis on something, allied to intuition, called
"implicit knowledge." This sets the stage for a full analysis of what
metaphor is, how it functions not only verbally but conceptually, that is, how metaphor helps people think about
abstract things by using words about concrete things. Brown shows how the
"source domain" for any metaphor–the tangible and familiar things,
like a journey for instance–can be used to "map" a target domain of
abstract things we want to describe scientifically. A full discussion of
metaphor leads to Chapter Three’s "Theory of Conceptual Metaphor" in
which Lakoff and Johnson’s ideas of conceptual structures being embedded in
hands-on experience–what they and Brown call "embodied experience."
It is our humanly embodied and implicit knowledge of concrete and familiar
things of all kinds–processes, tools, social systems, methods, and so on–that
allows scientists to map these as models onto target phenomena and target
systems that are outside our human experience, things like the structure of the
atom, or protein folding, or the complex of chemical reactions in a cell, or
something huge like global warming. Metaphor allows us to describe things in as
many ways as we have differing metaphors; this range of descriptors permits
many variations in problem-solving and provides many benefits.

 The Theory
of Conceptual Metaphor expands our insight into what has long been known as
figurative language. Metaphor’s not just for poets anymore, as one might say.
Brown’s analysis shows that, strictly speaking, there isn’t that much that
really is literal about scientific description and explanation when we come
right down to the targets of our theorizing. So metaphor in science is about
more than merely language: it’s about the very essence of how intelligence can
approach, describe, and ultimately know phenomena in each branch of the
sciences, both physical and social.

 All this is
intended to counter the older, so-called "realist" account about how
scientists do their work. Realism, put too simply but usefully for précis, says
there is an objective world and we can know its truths through hypothesis,
testing, confirmation and faithful replication of test results. Some things are
literally true, and humans can find out what they are, name them, and know them
objectively. Brown isn’t against this view so much as he is concerned to craft
a middle ground between realism and the fashionable
"deconstructionist" views seemingly at loggerheads with realism. The
middle ground is the Theory of Conceptual Metaphor.

 The
remainder of the book–most of its text–is a wonderfully illuminating series
of historical and conceptual inquiries into the major phenomenal breakthroughs
associated with science of the twentieth century. Brown starts with the
atom–from the ancients of Greece to the nineteenth century’s chemical atom and
discovery of electrons to the mind-bending insights of the nuclear atom and the
quantum atom. These chapters reveal the atom in relation to the use of
conceptual metaphors that unlocked the atom’s secrets and, finally, gave humans
the power to harness nuclear energies. A similar analysis of metaphor in
relation to molecules in chemistry and biochemistry follows; then follows an
even more complex analysis of metaphor in the macro-scale with an inquiry into
the phenomena of global warming. Each of these stories of the history of
science applies and illuminates the role of metaphor in the problem-solving,
discovery and invention, and emerging explanatory value of scientific
knowledge.

 The
presentation of this sweeping account is readable throughout. There is no
inclusion of formulae only for mystification, in fact, the opposite: the few
uses of math symbols are apt and always helpful, even to non-scientists. The
style of the book is crisp, conversational to the degree the subject will
allow.

 There are
some few things that could be improved as this valuable work is re-printed and
revised for the continuing use it merits. One is the typeface which is smaller
than the over-forty population needs and not nearly as readable as it could be.
Another problem is skimping on the Index: there is lots more in the text than
the Index helps us return to. This reviewer was left with no alternative but to
pen his own references to pages inside the book’s covers.

 But these
flaws are, in the bigger picture, minor details.

Making
Truth is a terrific book that should make a significant impression.

© 2005 David Wolf

David M. Wolf is the author of Philosophy That Works,
a book about the practice of philosophy. His book page for orders (hardback
& paperback) is www.xlibris.com/philosophythatworks
; readers can also see the first chapter there.

Categories: Philosophical