An example of simile and metaphor in scholarship about science
"…between 1913 and 1925, Bohr was looking for new ways of articulating classical physics with quantum postulates, rather than trying to eliminate classical features altogether. The 'correspondence principle' between classical and quantum physics acted as a pivotal element of this strategy. It went far beyond the usual retrospective requirement that the old physical theory be a limiting case of the the new theory, and rather irrupted in the very fabric of the new theory. It was taken as prospective guide toward new theoretical structures, by way of 'generalisation' and extrapolation. And it was also used as a sort of spare wheel for assessing the value of certain variables that were absent from the hybrid model, such as the line amplitudes. The correspondence principle here worked as a meta-theoretical structure than enabled one theoretical structure (the classical one) to serve as analogic scaffolding for the elaboration and completion of another theoretical structure (the quantum one)…"
Bitbol, Michael (2017) On Bohr's transcendental research program, in, Neils Bohr and the Philosophy of Physics. Twenty-first-century perspectives (Jan Faye & Henry J. Folse, eds.) Bloomsbury Academic: London, pp.47-66.
[Note that Bitbol also refers to the role of analogy between successive theories – that is analogy used as a tool in science itself, not its communication/]
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