On The Metaphor In Scientific Philosophy: Peircean Comments

C. S. Peirce wanted philosophy to develop into a public discipline based on objective principles that can be made subject to falsification by a scientific community; a community which takes advantage of coenoscopic experience and the method of reasoning. Peirce often emphasized that the process of philosophical inquiry is creative. For example, it requires imagination to put forth hypotheses that might explain phenomena which have surprised the philosopher and caused him to wonder. And it requires imagination to create the neologisms and changes in meaning for already-known words and sentences that can expand the limits of the linguistic resources and the formation of concepts that the philosopher has inherited from his peers and predecessors. Peirce sometimes suggested that metaphor is among one of the most important ways of exercising imagination, and that there is a pervasiveness of metaphors also in philosophical language. So, according to Peirce, metaphor has a cognitive content, it can play a role in the generation of sense and new knowledge but is metaphor therefore suited to serious, scientific, philosophical thought and discourse? In the following we will try to see if the metaphor in a Peircean perspective is likely to play a role regarding this matter. What is man`s proper function if it be not to embody general ideas in art creations, in utilities, and above all in theoretical cognition? Charles S. Peirce: “The Neglected Argument for the Reality of God”, (1908). Science consists in actually drawing the bow upon truth with intentness in the eye, with energy in the arm. Charles S. Peirce: “Minute Logic”, 1902).