Metaphors, Models, and Theories

I've written about metaphors in the past and how they are useful because they allow us to transfer information across unrelated domains. Currently I am reading Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness, and the topic is brought up and expanded upon very nicely here:

We are trying to understand consciousness, but what are we really trying to do when we try to understand anything? Like children trying to describe nonsense objects, so in trying to understand a thing we are trying to find a metaphor for that thing. Not just any metaphor, but one with something more familiar and easy to our attention. Understanding a thing is to arrive at a metaphor for that thing by substituting something more familiar to us. And the feeling of familiarity is the feeling of understanding.

Generations ago we would understand thunderstorms perhaps as the roaring and rumbling about in battle of superhuman gods. We would have reduced the racket that follows the streak of lightning to familiar battle sounds, for example. Similarly today, we reduce the storm to various supposed experiences with friction, sparks, vacuums, and the imagination of bulgeous banks of burly air smashing together to make the noise. None of these really exist as we picture them. Our images of these events of physics are as far from the actuality as fighting gods. Yet they act as the metaphor and they feel familiar and so we say we understand the thunderstorm.

But metaphors are not necessarily theories. Nor are they empirical explanations of how stuff works. If we were to ask "what is a sunrise?" we might say "Well, a sunrise is the dawn of new day!" And while that may be a useful metaphor, it isn't a proof or explanation of what, exactly, a sunrise is.

A sunrise is when the Sun comes back into the reference frame on our part of Earth—a fact created by the reality that we are hurling through space and gravitating around the Sun every 24 hours. But let us ask another question: why are sunrises and sunsets often red? Or "why is the sky blue?" Of course, the answer is not as simple as merely "being the dawn of a new day."

As I wrote on my other blog about obvious and non-obvious things, and how explanations can be load-bearing or layered:

It seems like there are countless examples where a concept is assumed to be obvious. But when you sit down and really think about it for more than five seconds, you notice that one of the defining characteristics of the concept is that it isn't actually obvious at all.

"Why is the sky blue?"   Well, before you can answer that question, you have to understand light, colors, and their wavelengths (from longest to shortest): red, orange, yellow, green, and blue.

Blue light has the shortest wavelength. Additionally, it’s important to understand the behavior of light. Light can be reflected, bent, or scattered. It can also interact with the atmosphere.

The light we see on Earth is partly an optical phenomenon and partly a molecular one. Gases and particles in the atmosphere cause the light hitting Earth to scatter, which is why we see blue light most of the time.

“But what about sunsets?”  Sunsets are the result of the sun passing at a low angle, causing even more blue light to be scattered while debris and dust particles in the sky reflect more direct sunlight, making the sky appear more red than blue.

And that is the theory of why sunsets and sunrises are red -- and why the sky is blue. And I've written this out to point at how a theory is distinctly different than a metaphor. But also different than a model.

Julian Jaynes goes on to illustrate this, distinguishing and drawing relations between the concepts of metaphors, models, and theories:

So, in other areas of science, we say we understand an aspect of nature when we can say it is similar to some familiar theoretical model. The terms theory and model, incidentally, are sometimes used interchangeably. But really they should not be. A theory is a relationship of the model to the things the model is supposed to represent. The Bohr model of the atom is that of a proton surrounded by orbiting electrons. It is something like the pattern of the solar system, and that is indeed one of its metaphoric sources. Bohr’s theory was that all atoms were similar to his model. The theory, with the more recent discovery of new particles and complicated interatomic relationships, has turned out not to be true. But the model remains. A model is neither true nor false; only the theory of its similarity to what it represents.

A theory is thus a metaphor between a model and data. And understanding in science is the feeling of similarity between complicated data and a familiar model.