ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with summaries of the views of some philosophers and scientists—pro and con—about the status and use of metaphors in scientific theories. It provides an examination of some specific scientific metaphors, their character and foibles, which leads to an attempt at a description of the place of a metaphor in a theory. The chapter discusses the example metaphors from many sciences, especially psychology, but it also relies on some well-worn examples from physics. Some in philosophy of science and in the philosophy of psychology feel that metaphor is no good when used in a theory. In a broader psychological context of science, general problem-solving, many treatments of problem-solving strategies describe the use of metaphor in the creation of solutions. Metaphor may be inevitable and necessary to science, and cognitively prior to scientific description, because of psychological factors in learning, inference-making, symbol-formation, and explanation.
