5. Cognitive Metaphors of Restricted Scope. The
term “root metaphor” seems to have entered the lan-
guage of philosophy in other ways than that of the
source of the categories of world hypotheses. It has
come often to refer to any central idea about which
any complex problem can be organized. It becomes
then the point of reference for a restricted or special
hypothesis. When so used it overlaps the function lately
assigned by extending it over what has come to be
known as the “paradigm case.”
The term “paradigm case” acquired importance in
philosophy mainly through an analysis by Ludwig
Wittgenstein of the meaning in ordinary language of
such terms as “chair,” “leaf,” “game.” He found that
such terms are used to refer to a group of objects which
as a group are not characterized by a set of common
characteristics. But as a group they have “family re-
semblances.” During childhood men learn the range
of application of these family resemblance concepts,
which become perfectly well understood by all who
speak that ordinary language. Such a concept can be
identified or pivoted on any one of its typical objects
from which the family resemblances can be traced out
to the other members of the group. Such a conveniently
selected member would be the “paradigm case” for
the group. The paradigm case furnishes the analogy
from which the family resemblances of the other
members can be traced. It could be called the root
metaphor of a family resemblance concept. Some
writers appear to be using the term “root metaphor”
in much this way. It is one important way of using
metaphor in philosophy. It is clearly an explanatory,
not an aesthetic, use of metaphor, and falls well within
the topic of this article.
It can even be argued that the root metaphors of
world hypotheses should better be described as
paradigm cases of groups of world hypotheses making
up the various schools of philosophy. Thus the world
hypotheses of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and many
others are easily recognized as having family resem-
blances pivoting on the relation of form and matter.
When one type of formism is presented as repre-
sentative of the group, this might be offered as a
paradigm case for the group.
The chief difference between this interpretation and
the root metaphor theory is that in this view a philo
sophical school exhibits a development of a root meta-
phor towards a more nearly adequate structure for a
comprehensive view of the world. The Wittgensteinian
family resemblance concept does not suggest any such
developmental process, or allow that the paradigm case
which might be selected possesses any special explana-
tory superiority in respect to the precision and scope
of the application of the concept to what may be called
its field of application. Indeed the case is quite the
reverse. All members of a family resemblance group
are on a par, and there is no presumption of the group
yielding any special explanatory insight beyond the fact
of the family resemblances which the concept records
in the usage of ordinary language.
However, some recent writers have spread the use
of “paradigm” so as to include the progressive degrees
of adequacy exhibited by the paradigm to its field of
application. Thomas S. Kuhn in particular has devel-
oped this conception in his The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (1962). According to his exposition there
is practically no difference between the function of
the paradigm as a guiding conceptual pattern in scien-
tific procedure and that of the root metaphor as a
guiding conceptual pattern in world hypotheses except
the restricted scope of the former.
A paradigm for Kuhn is a model or pattern accepted
in science like a “judicial decision in the common law
... an object for further articulation and specification
under new or more stringent conditions.” At the time
of its first appearance it is “very limited in both scope
and precision.” The survival and endurance of a para-
digm depends upon its success in solving problems
which the practitioners in the field regard as acute.
“The success of a paradigm... is at the start largely
a promise of success discoverable in selected and still
incomplete examples. Normal science consists in the
actualization of that promise, an actualization achieved
by extending the knowledge of those facts that the
paradigm displays as particularly revealing, by in-
creasing the extent of the match between those facts
and the paradigm's predictions and by further articu-
lation of the paradigm itself” (pp. 23-24).
According to Kuhn's description, the history of sci-
ence can be almost equated with the history of the
metaphors of limited scope in their pursuit of adequacy
through their predictions and articulations in revealing
the facts of their special fields. To what extent Kuhn's
philosophy of science pivoting on the paradigm will
be found acceptable, remains to be seen. It has the
virtue of putting emphasis on the practicing scientists'
use of “models,” which no treatment of scientific
method in the philosophy of science can safely ignore.
For if on Kuhn's view a scientific model is not quite
equated with a paradigm, it must be regarded as at
least a material or conceptual embodiment of one.
If some form of the root metaphor theory for unre-
stricted hypotheses is combined with a form of para-
digm theory like Kuhn's for restricted hypotheses, it
would suggest that the basis of all productive empirical
theory is in principle metaphorical. This would be no
disparagement of it. It comes down simply to being
realistic about what theories are as products of human
creativity.
There is, of course, also the formal logical and math-
ematical aspect of theory which is perhaps properly
regarded as the ideal terminal formulation of any em-
pirical theory whether in science or philosophy. But
however contrasted the formal approach may be to
the metaphorical, there seems to be no necessary in-
compatibility between the two in their joint pursuit
of some control and understanding of our world. If
there is an issue, it lies beyond the scope of this article.
