Seek Wisdom
Seek Wisdom
A Good Life, Part 2. Does Science Need Metaphor? An Interview with Dr. Fred Putnam on how scientists depend on metaphors
Is our reality best described by precise, scientific language, or is it better described by what we might call a more "poetic" view of the world. While we might think these two are mutually exclusive, even a quick glimpse into the expressions of the scientific community will often show the difficulty of separating the two. Scientists often struggle to describe their current understanding of their subjects without some reliance on more poetic tools such as metaphor.
My guest Dr. Fred Putnam is professor of Bible and Liberal Studies at Templeton Honors College at Eastern University. He believes that precision and poetics both have an important role to play in how we understand our world and our experience in it. As Dr. Putnam and I continue our discussion surrounding my illustrated children’s book, A Good Life, we’ll see again how difficult it is to explain our own experience without the use of metaphor, no matter our vocation.
In my continued conversation with Doctor Fred Putnam, we discuss how even scientists rely on metaphors to communicate their findings. We also discussed the importance of conversation between scientific and more poetic forms of knowledge on this episode of seek wisdom. Is our reality best described by precise scientific language, or is it better described by what we might call a more poetic view of the world? While we might think these two are mutually exclusive, even a quick glimpse into the expressions of the scientific community will often show the difficulty of separating the two. Scientists often s truggle to describe their current understanding of their subjects without some reliance on more poetic tools such as metaphor. My guest, Dr Fred Putnam, is professor of Bible and Liberal Studies at Templeton Honors College at Eastern University. He believes that precision and poetics both have an important role to play in how we understand our world and our experience in it. As D r Putnam and I continue our discussion surrounding my illustrated children's book"A Good Life," we'll see again how difficult it is to explain our own experience without the use of metaphor, no matter our vocation. We're back. We've been talking with Dr Fred Putnam about the pervasive nature of metaphors in our lives, how they affect the way we think about our daily lives, how we think about education. They're everywhere. And one of the surprising places that we maybe wouldn't expect to find them and yet we do is in modern science, and the struggle that certain scientists are having, expressing what they are learning to others without the use of metaphor. So there was an article that I sent you, I think you said your daughter had sent it to you as well. It's been, I don't know, maybe a year or two ago, but it was written by Robert Epstein Aeon magazine. It was called"The Empty Brain." Among other things, the article discusses the almost unconscious metaphors we use to describe our brains and how they function. And in particular it mentions Robert Zaradakis's book"In Our Image" where he identifies the predominant metaphors we've used to describe how our brains work over the last few centuries. And his conclusion seems to be that we have a tendency to describe the brain and how it works using the newest or most revolutionary technology of our day. So, for example, hydraulics, invented around 300 BC, he says, led to the moving liquids or humors model of the body and brain that influenced philosophy, medicine, and later even psychology and personality theory, and persisted for about 1600 or so years. In the 1500s, automata powered by springs and gears led René Descartes to suggest that humans were complex machines. In the 1600s, Thomas Hobbes suggested that our thoughts were the results of mechanical motions in the brain. In the 1700s, electricity and chemistry and breakthroughs there brought new metaphorical assertions about our brains. 1800s, the German physicist, Herman von Helmholtz compared the brain to a telegraph, the technology of that day. And surprise, surprise, a few years after the dawn of computer technology in the 1940s, the brain was said to operate like a computer, with the role of physical hardware played by the brain itself and our thoughts serving as the software. The brain as"information processor" has been the r eigning metaphor since that time.
Fred Putnam:He uses abbreviation IP. Or as my students will often say,"Well, I'm hardwired that way," or"I'm not hardwired that way." Or they'll even say,"I'm not programmed to do that sort of thing."
Jeremiah Pent:It is pervasive in the way we think about ourselves. And, this article was disputing that strongly saying, no, this is just another example of our tendency to grab the latest technology, the most advanced thing that we can conceive of, really, and use that to describe ourselves. So we talked before we started the segment, this definitely on the periphery our abilities and expertise. But I like this topic, and I'm excited about talking about it because it brings together two things that we would think don't go together very well. And that would be, maybe, a poetic way of looking at the world versus a Baconian, scientific, precise description of the world. And it seems like, based on the conclusions of this article and another one that we'll look at, we're going to need some kind of combination of those two. So what insights did you get from this article? What stood out to you in this? What do you make of it?
Fred Putnam:Well, the first thing that struck me is that he's right. We use a metaphor to explain the way our minds work. And there was a bit of confusion between mind and brain. So there is an assumption there that the brain is all there is, and therefore because it's a physical thing, we can relate it to a physical thing that is a computer and circuits and everything that goes into that. But the fundamental point of the article, his thesis is, that this metaphor has become so dominant in our thinking that he talks about even talking to brain scientists and asking them to come up with some other metaphor and they were simply unable to do it. They could not think outside the box.
Jeremiah Pent:Yes, So surprising that that group would be stumped. And I notice he doesn't mention[the name of the group], he just said a prestigious research group.
Fred Putnam:Yes. Yes. He didn't want to embarrass anyone; that was my reading. And I think this illustrates how metaphor really, really works and why we need it. We can't think without metaphor because there are lots of things we actually can't understand. So I'm just going to revert to our earlier talk for just a minute. We can't understand life. That is, what is my life when I look at pictures of myself as a baby or as a teenager or as a newly married man or whatever it is. Okay. They're all me. But if I lined them all up, what am I looking at? Okay, the progress through life. But what is life through which I progressed? So it's easier to think of, oh, I can understand what a journey is. I get a map, or today I Google it, and get directions and then I get in the car and I drive down the road and I'm going toward a destination. So I understand the journey. I can't really understand life. And in the same way we know that something is going on inside our heads or inside us. Maybe I should say that we don't understand, there's nothing concrete like the table we have our microphones on, for example. I can touch that, I can measure it, define it, I could weigh it. I could talk about the wood it's made from. I don't need to use a metaphor for the table because it's here, it's physical. But I don't know how the brain works and nobody really knows how it works. And so we, we come up with a metaphor. And as you say, as he says in his article, the metaphor keeps changing for how the brain works because we don't know.
Jeremiah Pent:In a sense we're doing what people were doing, well in 300 BC, which was trying to understand how we work using hydraulics then and computers now.
Fred Putnam:And the thing is each of those metaphors seems to work when we use it. It makes sense. He calls it"sticky." He says, this is a sticky metaphor, you know, which is why those people were having such trouble. They couldn't just figure out a way to do it, to not use it.
Jeremiah Pent:And if we take historical precedent as an example of what will happen in the future, I think there's a good chance that we'll continue to do this. That whatever the next breakthrough will be in our understanding, or what we're going to consider a breakthrough anyway, will be some other metaphor that we latch onto and began to explain the brain in that way. Anything else on that article before I move to the other one that you sent me? So you sent me another one called" Quantum Poetics: Why physics can't get rid of metaphor, by Samuel Matlack from"The New Atlantis." What really amazed me about that article, he does an excellent job of delving into some of the deep waters of current physics theory, from the theory of relativity to quantum mechanics, and shows us that the things physicists are discovering and theorizing about are almost impossible for them to communicate without the use of metaphorical language. What do you make of that? Even in physics?
Fred Putnam:Yes. But there again, that simply fits with our need for metaphor. We're made to think metaphorically because there are things that are beyond our ability to conceptual to describe, to grasp, let's say, to use a metaphor. And so I remember when when I was young, I got these books on science that my parents bought me, and the molecule was described as a miniature solar system. That's what it looked like. And then when we went to a lab class in high school chemistry, we used these wooden balls with springs that connect them, and each spring represented a molecular bond. And then by the time I was in college or shortly after college, we're onto the cloud theory of atoms. And now we're into quark theory and chaos theory. And each one of those seems so right at the time. I mean, every one of those is a metaphor. It's not a solar system. It's not a cloud. It's not this, they're all just attempts to describe something that is beyond[us]. Well, first of all, we can't see it. And so we can't measure it. We can't define it. All we can do is try to talk conceptually about it. And so as soon as we do that, we're into the land of metaphor, to use a metaphor, r ight? We've moved o nto that and we can't help it. We have no choice, especially when we're trying to communicate with people who are not specialists or maybe just below the specialist level. So, let's say we have high level researchers at some research institute and there are college professors who need to teach this stuff but are not actually doing the work themselves, and they need to teach it to students who have no idea what's going on. And so the level of metaphor kind of spreads out as it were and becomes more generic, let's say, more culturally recognizable. That's where the need for metaphor comes in. And as soon as we say,"It's like...", now we're into a metaphor. So in metaphor theory, one of the ideas is that of blended spaces. So a blended space in the theory is that we have a target that we're trying to explain and we have a source from which we're drawing our explanatory metaphor. Now that's actually a target in a source"domain" because the source is bigger than the target. So we're talking about a whole area, a realm of experience that we're going to use to explain this target, or to describe it, let's say, but not everything over here in the source fits the target and vice versa. So instead we borrow from both of those and put them together in a space that doesn't really exist. There is a famous example you'll find in some books by Kövesces and others on metaphor theory. Suppose a man says to a woman, I actually have trouble envisioning this conversation, but nonetheless, suppose the man says to a woman,"If I were you, I would get pregnant." Well, okay, immediately the mind begins bending, right? Because he just created an imaginary world that we know is an impossible world. But what he's saying is,"You're the target, I'm trying to explain it, so I'm going to draw from this other realm and put them together and say this is how we can understand the situation." And so this blended space becomes the a world that's created by the metaphor, which is not the thing we're trying to explain, and it's not the source we're drawing from, but it's instead pieces of each of those being put together. And what's really fascinating is that when we hear a metaphor, well let me use a different one. So, I've heard this, a student will walk into the classroom before class and somebody says,"How are you doing?" And they'll say,"Oh, I'm dead." Well, we know they're not dead, but we understand what they mean, right? And so we automatically discount all the stuff from the source domain of being dead that doesn't apply. Like, no heartbeat, no pulse, you know, no brain waves, right? But we also draw all the things from being dead. That is, a dead person is often horizontal. They look like they're asleep, they don't move, they don't respond. They are incapable of response. There's no energy. So we can apply that to we understand instantly. We don't have to go,"Oh, here's the list of things that it means to be dead." We just know. And that's how metaphors work almost miraculously, but were made to work that way.
Jeremiah Pent:So what you're saying is we're creating our own worlds, as it were. Where we almost agree with another person,"Okay, we're going to create this world together, and we're going to inhabit it while we talk about this thing, and then we'll leave it." And we may pick up another world and exist there together for a little bit, a different metaphor.
Fred Putnam:And that's why physicists can use metaphors, and they can talk to each other in these metaphors because they understand the pieces of each of those, the source and the target that they're actually applying to what they're trying to understand. The challenge is the rest of us who are not physicists and not working in quark theory or chaos theory, all we know is the source. And so we're trying to figure out which aspects of that source may or may not apply to the target, which we can ourselves have trouble conceptualizing.
Jeremiah Pent:Very, very complex equation. I loved the quote in the article from a Nobel prize winning physicist, Neils Bohr. He said,"We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry." And even more, I loved Matlack's comment on that idea. He says,"Homo sapiens began his quest for knowledge in the realm of poetry, and in the end it seems that, in basic respect, we are destined to remain close to this starting point." I thought that was a wonderful summary of the problem, or possibly not the problem, possibly a better take on reality.
Fred Putnam:There's a book by James Taylor called"Poetic Knowledge" in which he describes what a view of knowledge, or a way of knowing, which he calls poetic, which actually goes back to the Greeks, back to the Socratics– Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and is, well, let me illustrate. It's easier to illustrate than to explain. Perhaps one way of learning astronomy is to hand someone a textbook or to lecture or show them PowerPoint series of slides and give them equations and explain that you need to, you really do need to know calculus to do astronomy, you know. So astronomy becomes a list of facts a nd figures and equations and th at s ort of thing. An d t hat's one way to actually introducing people to a stronomy, that's actually used in a lot of schools, and it's pretty common. Another way is to take the same students out on a dark night and just look at the stars and talk about different c olors. Ask them to pick out different colors. Look, how many colors can you see? Show them the constellations. Use one of those laser pointers, you know, show the constellations, tell them the stories. This is the Native American legend of that constellation. Here's a Greek legend for that constellation. And here's a Roman legend for this one, or whatever else, and then just get them thinking about what it means even to look at the stars, even to consider the stars. And then begin to introduce, this is the other way, the scientific way as we would call it, of looking at this. But never let go of that. Keep the two going together. So the poetic knowledge informs the"scientific" knowledge and vice versa.
Jeremiah Pent:I just wonder whether if there could be a greater dialogue, or a renewed dialogue, between people of those, let's just say two mindset tendencies, that maybe we would make breakthroughs that we're not making. Maybe that isolation of those two ways of thinking and sort of the cold war between them, that's not healthy. It's not really helping anybody. It's probably crippling both sides to some degree. So yes. Anything else?
Fred Putnam:Yeah, I think we, we do run into that problem in academia. It's called siloing, right? Where I have my discipline and I have my sub-discipline and I have my sub- sub- sub-discipline. I just wrote a book on the discourse analysis of biblical Hebrew poetry that's probably about as sub- sub- sub- as you can get. And if I only studied that then I think my life would be severely truncated. Instead, there's a need, I think you're right in saying that there is a need for, not just for cooperation, but for deliberate partnership. You know the story of, what is it building 200 at MIT during World War II[it was actually"Building 20"]? There's an article, I think it's Atlantic Monthly. MIT didn't, they weren't allowed the materials to put up a new building because of war restrictions. And so they basically built a building out of plywood and 2-by-4s, a three story building, huge building. And they just put everybody in there they didn't have room for. So linguistics was in there, physics was in there, nuclear physics was in there. I mean, just a whole mess. And because the building was made out of plywood and 2-by-4s, you could make doors wherever you wanted to. One person even took out the floor, or the ceiling I guess, so he could have a two story room in order to have a small sort of reactor so you could test. But they said what happened was, because the building was so haphazard, there was no rhyme or reason to the room numbers of the office numbers. And so everybody had to ask everybody else, how do I find this place? And everybody was talking to each other all the time. And out of that building came, I don't remember how many, but more than a dozen Nobel Prizes. There was this fermentation that took place by all these disciplines mixing together. When Steve Jobs, when they designed the new headquarters for Apple, he wanted one bathroom, one break room, one mail room, and he wanted them all in the same place. Eventually he got enough pushback on the bathrooms that they put a couple more around the building. But the idea was that everybody would have a much better chance of meeting each other. And if they had to go here to get their mail, they had to go here to go to, you know, use a men's room or ladies' room. So people who might never have talked to each other in a normal corporation, where you're segmented according to job, would meld, mix together, blend together. And it seems to me the same thing ought to be true in, if we say the sciences and the liberal arts, to use two terms, right? If they were put in proximity to each other so that the person who's studying linear algebra is also talking to the person who is studying poetry.
Jeremiah Pent:That brings us back to the idea of education being a conversation. There are really two sides of it. I mean, even universities, you have the research end of it, which is, there are things we don't know, let's keep looking. And then you've got the education part of it, which is, okay, let's take the things we do know and tell the people that are coming up so that they can later be part of the research project. So the whole goal is to understand what we don't know and to explain what we do. And in both of those, conversation is possibly where we could get a lot more breakthrough than siloing or isolation. So it seems like we've come back around to that idea as a good one. And that brings to a close our second episode of Seek Wisdom. In episode 3, I'll conclude my conversation with Dr Fred Putnam as we delve into his expertise on biblical poetry and getting a closer look at the Bible's idea that God is a farmer, the world is his field, and people are plants. We'll discuss the implications of these ideas and how they can impact our work and our lives. Thank you for listening. I'm Jeremiah Pent.