Technological Metaphor and Social Control

N 1969, during the big student demonstrations in Washington, the BBC showed a television news sequence (I think it originated in CBS). The sequence consisted mainly of edited clips of vox pop interviews with middle-aged bystanders, who talked about the demonstrations as a healthy letting off of steam by the young, a valve to relieve society's pressures, and so on. But the final clip was of one of the student leaders, addressing the crowd: You've heard them all say we're the safety valve-but I say they're dead wrong. We're the explosion! In recent years, there has been a notable increase in interest among philosophers of science in the cognitive functions of metaphor.' The process whereby we construe an uncertain, obscure, or puzzling area of experience in terms of one both familiar and apparently (in at least some respects) similar, the displaced pattern acting as a metaphorical redescription of the unfamiliar, has been shown to be central to many key scientific innovations.2 Technological devices are significant com-