ABSTRACT
Before the readers delve into the text that follows, a word of explanation as to the nature of this chapter would be in place. In the view of the wide diversity in the foci and approaches of the five preceding chapters, I found it practically impossible to write a well-organized commentary that neatly synthesizes the many ideas presented by the other authors. The following text should therefore be read as a provider of footnotes which, although structured and fairly extensive, do not aspire to bring an exhaustive coverage of all the issues raised in this part of the book. The most I could hope for while writing this chapter was that the implicit footnotes will bring into fuller relief those points that seem to me crucially important for understanding the centrality of metaphor in our thinking in general, and in mathematical thinking in particular. Besides, as Lee Shulman observed in his invited AERA address in 1996, “footnotes of the substantive, elaborative kind transform … exposition into textual conversation and commentary.”
