13: Metaphors: Ladders of Innovation

Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight pp. 129-145
DOI:

13: Metaphors: Ladders of Innovation

Authors: D. Eric Smith and Harold Morowitz

 

Excerpt

Though often dismissed as mere rhetorical window dressing, metaphors play an important role in innovative thinking. In particular, the cognitive use of metaphor can reveal potentially fruitful connections and novel ways of seeing that lead to new insight. There are many modes of metaphorical thinking, and an analysis of its operation in science, as in other domains, requires attention to the intention of the metaphor, its essential structures, and the different types of impact it can produce.

A Necessary Ladder

A two-day workshop organized by the Santa Fe Institute and the Strategy Institute of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) last April brought together practitioners and academics from a number of fields with a common interest in the topic of metaphor. SFI participants Walter Fontana, José Lobo, and Jim Rutt gave presentations on the use of metaphor in their respective areas of chemistry, economics, and business. Paul Humphreys and Nicholas de Monchaux of the University of Virginia presented, respectively, a philosophical account of metaphor and its use in shaping visions in architecture. Tiha von Ghyczy of the University of Virginia’s business school and the BCG Strategy Institute, together with Michele Macready and David Gray, also of BCG, reported on the Strategy Institute’s effort to build an online “gallery” of multidisciplinary metaphors to inspire business thinkers and reflected on the potential of employing large sets of metaphors as aids to creative thinking. The meeting explored the use of the cognitive metaphor as an important element in innovation in all these disciplines. The road to novel theoretical work consistently winds through a forest of metaphors.

Complexity science is premised on the assumption that seemingly disparate phenomena, both natural and social, evolved and constructed, can be understood using a common conceptual framework. The signature concepts used to talk about complex systems—emergence, adaptation, networks, evolvability, phase transitions, self-organized criticality, fitness landscapes, robustness, learning, edge of chaos, even the very notion of complexity itself—remain more metaphorical and suggestive than definitional and precise. And how else could physicists, biologists, chemists, economists, anthropologists, ecologists, computer scientists, and historians engage in meaningful scientific dialogue without the ferocious exchange of metaphors?

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