2 Self-reflexive Metaphors in Maxwell’s Demon and Shannon’s Choice: Finding the Passages

IN a sense, all language is metaphoric. When a carpenter says that a room is 7 yards long, he is comparing the length of the room with the length of an Anglo-Saxon girdle. When a scientist says that a molecule has a diameter of 2.5 angstroms, the standard has changed but the principle is the same; the object is still understood in terms of its relation to something else.1 A completely unique object, if such a thing were imaginable, could not be described. Lacking metaphoric connections, it would remain inexpressible.2 The question is thus not whether metaphors are used in science as well as literature, but rather how metaphors are constituted in the two disciplines, how they change through time, and how they are affected by the interpretive traditions in which they are embedded.