Metaphors and social science

Understanding science: when metaphors become terms

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Social science. Computational social science.

Some Useful Social Metaphors in Logic

The purpose of this paper is to register a couple of novelties related to social conceptions and social metaphors in logic. As an overarching methodology, gametheoretic notions will be used. The purpose is not to try to explore how logical methods can be made to apply to actual human behaviour in everyday scientific reasoning and social contexts in science, but rather to (i) see how gametheoret...

Why Machine-Information Metaphors are Bad for Science and Science Education

Genes are often described by biologists using metaphors derived from computational science: they are thought of as carriers of information, as being the equivalent of ‘‘blueprints’’ for the construction of organisms. Likewise, cells are often characterized as ‘‘factories’’ and organisms themselves become analogous tomachines. Accordingly,when the human genome project was initially announced, th...

Niche Modeling: Ecological Metaphors for Sustainable Software in Science

Introduction An ecological metaphor is often used in discussing the interrelated and interdependent organization of software development environments. We believe that this is a rich and potentially useful way of describing complex systems of people and technologies that are involved in developing, using, sustaining and archiving software. Further, an appropriate metaphor can be a useful analyti...