Comparisons – Page 20 – Science-Education-Research

cultural organisation is like an octopus

An example of an analogy drawing upon scientific ideas:

"The appropriate image, if one must have images, or cultural organisation, is neither the spider web nor the pile of sand. It is rather more the octopus, whose tentacles are in large part separately integrated, neurally quite poorly connected with one another and with what in the octopus passes for a brain and yet who nonetheless manages both to get around and to preserve himself, for a while anyway, as a viable if somewhat ungainly entity.

…A workable theory of culture is to be achieved, if it is to be achieved, by building up form differently observable modes of thought, first to determinate families of them and then to more variable, less tightly coherent, but nonetheless ordered 'octopoid' systems of them, confluences of partial integrations, partial incongruencies and partial independencies.

Culture moves rather like an octopus too – not all at once in a smoothly coordinated synergy of parts, a massive coaction of the whole, but by disjointed movements of this part, then that, and now the other which somehow cumulate to directional change. Where, leaving cephalopods behind, in any given culture the first impulses towards progression will appear, and how and to what degree they will spread through the system, is, at this stage of out understanding, if not wholly unpredictable, very largely so."

Clifford Geertz (2000) Person, time, and conduct in Bali (first published 1966), in The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays (2nd Edition). New York. Basic Books.

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Many examples of science analogies are listed in 'Creative comparisons: Making science familiar through language. An illustrative catalogue of figurative comparisons and analogies for science concepts'. Free Download.

cultural concepts are not like chemical composition or brittleness

An example of an analogy drawing upon scientific concepts:

"And so we hear cultural integration spoken of as a harmony of meaning, cultural change as an instability of meaning, and cultural conflict as an incongruity of meaning, with the implication that the harmony, the instability, or the incongruity are properties of meaning itself, as, say, sweetness is a property of sugar or brittleness of glass.

Yet, when we try to treat these properties as we would sweetness or brittleness, they fail to behave, 'logically', in the expected way. When we look for the constituents of the harmony, the instability, or the incongruity, we are unable to find them resident in that of which they are presumably properties. One cannot run symbolic forms through some sort of cultural assay to discover their harmony content, their stability ratio, or their index of incongruity; one can only look and see if the forms in question are in fact coexisting, changing, or interfering with one another in some way or other, which is like tasting sugar to see if it is sweet or dropping a glass to see if it is brittle, not like investigating the chemical composition of sugar or the physical structure of glass."

Clifford Geertz (2000) Person, time, and conduct in Bali (first published 1966), in The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays (2nd Edition). New York. Basic Books.

Here Geertz uses both a positive and a negative analogy, comparing the investigation of some cultural concepts (cultural integration; cultural change; cultural conflict) to being like a {qualitative} phenomenological investigation of sugar and glass (tasting, dropping) rather than a {quantitative} investigation of their underlying structure using laboratory instruments.

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meanings of symbols are as discoverable as the atomic weight of hydrogen or the function of the adrenal glands

Example of a simile drawing upon scientific concepts,

"The meanings that symbols, the material vehicles of thought, embody are often elusive, vague, fluctuating, and convoluted, but they are, in principle, as capable of being discovered through systematic investigation – especially if the people who perceive them will cooperate a little – as the atomic weight of hydrogen or the function of the adrenal glands."

Clifford Geertz (2000) Person, time, and conduct in Bali (first published 1966), in The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays (2nd Edition). New York. Basic Books

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Many examples of science similes are listed in 'Creative Comparisons: Making Science Familiar through Language. An illustrative catalogue of figurative comparisons and analogies for science concepts'. Free Download.

indigenous science works like a kaleidoscope

An example of an analogy drawing upon a scientific principle:

"The uncanonical science ("which we prefer to call 'primary' rather than 'primitive'") puts a philosophy of finitude into practice. The elements of the conceptual world are given, prefabricated as it were, and thinking consist in fiddling with the elements. Savage [sic] logic works like a kaleidoscope whose chips can fall into a variety of patterns while remaining unchanged in quantity, form, or colour. The number of patterns producible in this way may be large if the chips are numerous and varied enough, but it is not infinite. The patterns consist in the disposition of the chips via-à-vis one another (that is, they are a function of the relationships among the chips rather than their individual properties considered separately). And their range of possible transformations is strictly determined by the construction of the kaleidoscope, the inner law which governs its operation. And so it too with savage [sic] thought. Both anecdotal and geometric, it builds coherent structures out of 'the odds and ends left over from psychological or historical process'."

Clifford Geertz (2000) The cerebral savage: on the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss (first published 1967), in The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays (2nd Edition). New York. Basic Books

Kaleidoscopes are often seen as toys or novelties- but clearly are based on scientific principles: The kaleidoscope is defined in Wikipedia as "an optical instrument with two or more reflecting surfaces (or mirrors) tilted to each other at an angle, so that one or more (parts of) objects on one end of these mirrors are shown as a symmetrical pattern when viewed from the other end, due to repeated reflection".

I have summarised this using the term indigenous science (cf. 'uncanonical science' and 'Savage logic'). The term 'traditional ecological knowledge' is often used which reflects the holistic nature of knowledge that certainly encompasses areas of physical and biological science, but not clearly differentiated from myth, religion and (what in 'Western' traditions are often seen as) other ways of knowing. Geertz is use of the term savage may seem especially anachronistic and inappropriate (even for 1967) but he was discussing the work of Lévi-Strauss whose wrote the classic 'La Pensée sauvage' ('Wild thought').

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genes are like Millwall supporters in Benidorm

An example of a simile for a scientific concept used in popular culture:

"You cannot control your genes. They're like Millwall supporters in Benidorm."

(With apologies to Millwall F.C. supporters.)

From a 1996 episode ('George's Car') of the satirical newsroom comedy Drop the Dead Donkey.

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energy has different manifestations like Vishnu

An example of a simile used to help explain a scientific concept:

"I…refer to energy as having different manifestations or aspects, like the god Vishnu."

Posted on the PTNC [Physics Teaching Notes & Comments] email list by Kit Gallagher

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symbol systems are to social life as the genome to the development of the organism

An example of an analogy drawing upon a scientific concept,

"Symbol systems, man-created, shared, conventional, ordered, and indeed learned, provide human beings with a meaningful framework for orienting themselves to one another, to the world around them, and to themselves. At once a product and a determinant of social interactions, they are to the process of social life as a computer's program is to its operations, the genic helix to the development of the organism, the blueprint to the contraction of the bridge, the score to performance of the symphony, or, to choose a humbler analogy, the recipe to the baking of the cake – so the symbol system is the information source that, to some measurable extent, gives shape, direction, particularity, and point to an ongoing flow of activity.

Yet these analogies, which suggest a pre-existing template stamping onto a process external to it , pass rather facilely over what has emerged as the central theoretical problem for this more sophisticated approach; namely, how to conceptualise the dialectic between the cystallisation of such directive 'patterns of meaning' and the concrete course of social life.

There is a sense in which a computer's program is an outcome of prior developments in the technology of computing, a particular helix of phylogenetic history, a blueprint of earlier experiments in bridge building, a score of the evolution of musical performance, and a recipe of a long series of successful and unsuccessful cakes. But the simple fact that the information elements in these cases are materially separable from the processual – one can , in principle anyhow, write out the program, isolate the helix, draw the blueprint, publish the score, note down the recipe – makes them less useful as models for the interaction of cultural patterns and social processes where, a few more intellectualised realms like music and cake-baking in part aside, the very question at issue is precisely how such a separation is, even in thought, actually to be effected."

Clifford Geertz (2000) After the revolution: The fate of nationalism in the new states (first published 1971), in The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays (2nd Edition). New York. Basic Books.

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political power spread out as radio waves spread from a transmitter

An example of a simile drawing upon a scientific concept:

"The early polities were thus not so much solidary territorial units as loose congeries of villages oriented toward a common urban centre, each such centre competing with others for ascendency…. So far as the the pattern was territorial at all, it consisted of a series of concentric circles of religio-military power spreading out around the various city-state capitals, as radio waves spread from a transmitter. The closer a village to a town, the greater the impact, economically and culturally, of the court on that village."

Clifford Geertz (2000) Ideology as a cultural system (first published 1964), in The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays. 2nd Edition. New York. Basic Books

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Note: I considered classing this as analogy as I could read a specific mapping between conceptual structures (urban centre :transmitter; religio-military power : radio waves), but felt the mapping was not made explicit and the sense of "as radio waves spread from a transmitter" was more of a simile. I do not pretend such classification is an exact science.

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Indonesian capital city was the nucleus of the state

An example of scientific ideas being used as metaphors:

"The most highly developed concepts of government in traditional Indonesia were those upon which the classic Hinduised states of the fourth to fifteenth centuries were built, concepts that persisted in somewhat revised and weakened form even after these states were first Islamicised and then largely replaced or overlaid by the Dutch colonial regime. And of these concepts the most important was what might be called the theory of the exemplary centre, the notion that the capital city (or more accurately the king's palace) was at once a microcosm, of the supernatural order – 'an image of…the universe on a smaller scale' – and the material embodiment of political order. The capital was not merely the nucleus, the engine, or the pivot of the state; it was the state."

Clifford Geertz (2000) Ideology as a cultural system (first published 1964), in The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays. 2nd Edition. New York. Basic Books

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Many examples of science metaphors are listed in 'Creative comparisons: Making science familiar through language. An illustrative catalogue of figurative comparisons and analogies for science concepts'. Free Download.

interest theory is like Newtonian mechanics

An example of a scientific idea used as a simile:

"…if interest theory [of the social determinants of ideology] has not now the hegemony it once had, it is not so much because it has been proved wrong as because its theoretical apparatus turned out to be too rudimentary to cope with the complexity of the interaction among social, psychological, and cultural factors it itself uncovered. Rather like Newtonian mechanics, it has not been so much displaced by subsequent developments as absorbed into them."

Clifford Geertz (2000) Ideology as a cultural system (first published 1964), in The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays. 2nd Edition. New York. Basic Books

(It is arguable if Newtonian mechanics has been absorbed into subsequent developments. Although classical mechanics works well for most purposes as an instrumental scheme, and the relativistic perspective converges on the Newtonian at limits (e.g., low velocity), the two perspectives are based on completely distinct and incongruous assumptions (e.g., Newton's world view assumed absolute space organised according to Euclidean precepts).

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ethnographic schemes are like the periodic table

An examples of a scientific concept being used as a simile.

"The job of the ethnologist is to describe the surface patterns as best he [or she] can, to reconstitute the deeper structures out of which they are built, and to classify those structures, once reconstituted, into an analytical scheme – rather like Mendeleev's periodic table of the elements."

Clifford Geertz (2000) The cerebral savage: on the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss (first published 1967), in The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays (2nd Edition). New York. Basic Books

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thirty-four circles explain the ballet of the planets

An example of a metaphor used in explaining science:

"Then Mercury runs on seven circles in all; Venus on five; the earth on three, and round it the moon on four; finally Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn on five each. Altogether, therefore, thirty-four circles suffice to explain the entire structure of the universe and the entire ballet of the planets."

Copernicus, N. (1959) The Commentariolus (first prepared in Latin in 1514, Translated by. E. Rosen), in Three Copernican Treatises (Ed. E. Rosen) Dover Publications.

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The reference to circles links to the historical conceptions tat heavenly bodies only moved in perfect circles. This alternative conception was a major obstruction to the development of modern astronomy.

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