The metaphor as a mechanism of intelligence, creation and communication in hard sciences and engineering and its recovery in university teaching

Abstract

We present here a synthesis of our research on the epistemic validity of the use of metaphor in higher education as a mechanism of intelligence, creation and communication in “hard sciences” and engineering. It was forged in a master's thesis in university teaching in which we trace the presence of the metaphorical mechanism in the inaugural and basal productions of modern science (Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Fourier, Ohm). The method used was qualitative and exploratory, descriptive and genetic in scope, inferring from empirical indicators the potential of intelligence, creation and communication of the mechanism. The design was dialectical, proposing data matrices that gave coherence and epistemic entity to them. We detect in the advance of scientific knowledge in this fundamental stage the sine qua non use of creative metaphors, which, by stepping into the “foreign fields” of daily life and from foreign disciplines, allowed creatively understand intriguing and challenging phenomena. We found that the latter, producing a kind of "hermeneutical vacuum" in the spirit, challenged the researcher and drove an initially metaphorical creative “filling” (trying to know the unknown from the known). This initial metaphor —cognitively vivid and implicating— was later made parched under a mathematical dress that turned it into a model. We conclude that if the metaphor creatively helped to understand and mathematize phenomena in the production of scientific knowledge, its recovery by teaching is timely in order to promote the construction of scientific knowledge in an interesting and meaningful way.