Aristotle ’ s A Priori Metaphor

The paradigm of Aristotelian science continues to cause tension between scientific and literary language. Aristotle’s scientific legacy, the dominance of a strictly logical method, disbars and degrades any methodology which it deems not as rigorous. Accordingly, the scientific tradition enthrones the use of unambiguous language because it assumes that Aristotle’s systematic methodology rejects literary explanations of reality; scientists consider any such poetic descriptions to be derivative. While tropes such as analogy, metaphor, and simile are regarded as valuable for colorful writing, they are dismissed as inappropriate for scientific discourse. Mary Hesse expresses her grief at this dismissal: