representationalism is a disease infecting physicists

An example of metaphor in science scholarship:

"By nature we are born realists. There is a world outside of outside, and it is more or less as we experience it. This kind of common-sense realism is included as part of our innate cognitive understanding of the world. But it is the same instinct that drives many physicists to interpret their theories realistically. The disease which infects those physicists is not realism as such but representationalism, the view that 'knowing' something means being able to 'picture' what something looks like when nobody is looking at it, a canvas of reality painted by a ghost spectator."

Faye, Jan (2017) Complementarity and pragmatic epistemology: a comparison of Bohr and C. I. Lewis, in, Neils Bohr and the Philosophy of Physics. Twenty-first-century perspectives (Jan Faye & Henry J. Folse, eds.) Bloomsbury Academic: London, pp.115-131.