Ian Murray wrote:
>
> ----
> Mmmmmmmm, you mean they were trying to turn metaphors into algebras and
> geometries................?
>
We don't see the sentence "The tiger is an animal" as metaphorical, nor did a good deal of western (and I think eastern) thought see "The earth is an animal" as a metaphor. I'm getting rusty on this history now, but I used to spend quite a few hours a semester in a couple of my classes tracing out the endless ramifications of the "metaphor" of the four elements (which hasn't appeared yet in Homer) in medicine, geology, chemistry, politics, relition etc etc etc. In a grad course in Chaucer I took 50 years ago at George Washington (I was in the USAF at the time) we never read any Chaucer: we spent the whole semester running down this "metaphor" from Plato on.
I would say that the shift from alchemy to chemistry was a paradigm shift, but the metaphor of "paradigm shift" begins to lose its bite even in explaining the overthrow of phlogiston theory. I used to know more about that than I do now.
I think perhaps Thomas Laqueur, _Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud_ (and Gould's magnificent review of it in the NYRB) provides a better preliminary grasp on "scientific revolutions" than Kuhn does. Gould labels what I'm talking about here "neoplatonism," which at least is a good metaphor for it all.
And Levins & Lewontin also offer a useful perspective on it in the dedication of _The Dialectical Biologist_,
To Frederick Engels
who got it wrong a lot of the time
but who got it right where it counted Carrol
P.S. Note that I corrected the spelling, Hawes to Hawkes, in the subject line. Even if he doesn't understand Gould he ought to have his name spelled correctly in the LBO archives.