[FRIAM] The metaphor in the room

[Steve Smith]

EricS -

Great review of the "problem" with Metaphor-Forward communication.

    Scientific language is a *lossy compression layer over a
    high-dimensional formal plenum*, not a generative metaphor system.

I agree with the part of glen's (and others) criticism of Metaphors 
(Spatulas) everywhere when their use as.compressed indexicality rather 
than analogical exploration and facilitation. Your rant here also really 
helps to illuminate that hip/cool usage is also faux/projected 
"insider-signaling".

I understand the draw to using metaphors to try to communicate complex, 
subtle, esoteric phenomena to folks without the background to follow all 
but the most superficial features of the phenomena.  Unfortunately this 
is (IMO) a degenerate use of the potential power of 
metaphorical/analogical/modeling language.

Many of us, when we embrace or dismiss metaphorical language, are 
conflating this indexical-shorthand use with the generative and 
exploratory use.

/What might we know anecdotally of the contexts where generative 
metaphors are used in recognizing new models for observed phenomena? /

- SteveS

On 3/18/26 7:39 pm, Santafe wrote:
>> My worry is that scientists, when they use such rich metaphors as 
>> entanglement fail to take responsibility for the consequences of such 
>> use. Let's assume that the person who first used the metaphor, 
>> entanglement, meant something by it.   We can formalize the analysis 
>> of metaphors just as we can mathematicize any proposition.
>
> Wrong order, and not what happened.  Fuller explanation below.  I hope 
> I can report on what people are actually doing, as opposed to what the 
> psychologist who hasn’t asked them, or even in any serious way studied 
> them without asking them, supposes them to be doing.
>
>> And in that formalization, we can sort out the direction, and 
>> misdirection in the metaphor.  What did they intend when they used 
>> the metaphor entanglement? What did they NOT intend?  And when the 
>> disclaimers have been completed, is there anything left of the 
>> metaphor. If not, then, perhaps,*/scientists should stop using the 
>> metaphor/*.  In the same way that we have stopped calling porpoises 
>> "fish".
>
> The intent of the paragraph is okay (indeed, of course fine).  But the 
> term that is missing is “moniker”.  Metaphor here is missing the 
> point.  The term is just a label.  DaveW noted this as one of the 
> lifecycle stages in his list.
>
> To the extent — referring back to Frank’s post — that it is 
> metaphorically anything, directing anybody’s thoughts anywhere, it 
> would be in Glen’s didactic subsense.
>
>>
>> I don't know enough to even speculate what role "entanglement" as a 
>> metaphor has played in the development of quantum physics.
>
> None (afaik).
>
>> But I claim to know enough about human behavior to assert that it has 
>> played some role, and that physicists run some risks if they 
>> altogether disclaim it.
>
> So: the antisymmetric character of many-electron states was worked out 
> from around 1926–1929, as I find it online.  (I think that is likely 
> all right.)  They just described the properties of the states.  Good, 
> concrete, operational language.  Slater determinants, and whatnot, if 
> one wants search terms.
>
> Now, I learn from whatever AI serves answers to web searches (Gemini?) 
> that, like many things, apparently Schroedinger introduced 
> “entanglement” as an actual term in 1936, so say the kinds of things 
> Schroedinger would say (complaints about incompleteness that I still 
> don’t think have substance).  The math was already in place and being 
> used.  From anything I learned, Schroedinger’s having put a label on 
> it had no effect at all on anybody’s actually doing any quantum 
> mechanics.  It also doesn’t seem to have been adopted, and I never 
> heard it used by anybody before the mid-1990s.
>
> The fashion in the 1990s came from the quantum computing engineers. 
>  They write lots of multi-electron wave functions down, with lots of 
> combinations, and they want a shorthand to refer to them.  They also 
> _really_ like slang.  Almost as much as the Japanese, for whom 
> “building” becomes just “biru” and “convenience store” becomes 
> “combini”.  So, for the engineers, a unitary transformation becomes “A 
> unitary” (so cool to turn an adjective into a noun), and to refer 
> endlessly to entanglement.  I don’t mean to scoff.  They really are 
> very good at what they do, and they are all smarter than I am, and 
> understand their subject better than I do.  I just can’t take the 
> coolness.
>
> Anyway, that’s what the term is doing now.  It’s a shorthand, and (not 
> entirely incidental, I think) communicating hipness.
>
> Is it, didactically, directing people’s minds?  Probably.  Or maybe 
> only maybe.  But the story that somebody started with a metaphor and 
> then formalized it sounds as backward as it is possible to get from 
> those ingredients.  They started with a fog of confusion, stirred up a 
> mass of math that perplexed the hell out of people for several years, 
> learned to use it, gradually got better at it, and came up with a few 
> experiments to cash out that the math had unambiguous consequences 
> (Stern-Gerlach experiment), and over time built up a quite rigid 
> operational meaning.
>
> Then some people came along in whose hands it became a commodity, and 
> having a short name to gesture at the structure (seen in whole, only 
> at the end, within the math) served a certain function.  A 
> didactic-metaphoric name is of course nice for that, and Shroedinger 
> is often a good source of such things.
>
>
> In different news, out of a sense that I needed to do due diligence 
> before getting myself into bluffing trouble, I actually went back and 
> read Kuhn’s Structure… a few weeks ago.  Okay.
>
> But there did seem to be something concrete worth commenting in reply.
>
> TK suggests that in revolutionary times, people generate new ideas, 
> and then in the periods of “normal science” people spend their time on 
> “puzzle solving”, not really _inventing_ much of anything new.
>
> There I think I often disagree (or at least with some cases).  Usually 
> somebody gets some small fragment of something right-adjacent, often 
> in some formal form (say, Bohr’s atom: big mess, but a few little 
> things that nobody else can do, and that are specific), and a language 
> gradually gets drafted out, in which there are _lots_ of what I like 
> to call “placeholder terms”.  While the revolution is running, many of 
> them can’t really be said to have anything as operational and concrete 
> as “meaning”, and they are often significantly aspirational in the 
> service they give.
>
> What TK characterized as “puzzle solving” is often a period of 
> checking lots of cases and variations, to see what an edifice of 
> concrete work can be extended outward to cover, while retaining some 
> kind fo consistency.  I would argue that that work is what actually 
> _builds_ the operational semantics of “meaning something”.  Toward the 
> end, that semantics has finally raised the original term to better 
> than a placeholder — to a real moniker for the operational semantics 
> that it is used to refer to.
>
> In the case of entanglement, the placeholders were really quite thin: 
> Pauli’s “two classically undescribable values” (the half-integer spin 
> values), “exclusion principle”, and similar.  Then the semantics got 
> built up, and finally some didactic metaphors got attached to them, 
> somewhat ad hoc and not really standardized.
>
> Anyway, all this is probably off the point that Nick and Glen are 
> addressing (contesting?).  But if one is to adduce Fermionic QM as a 
> use case, probably good to stay sort of faithful to what the people 
> doing work are doing.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20260319/bd5b1ef2/attachment.html>