Using Language

This weekend's edition of The Scientist has an interesting on the war against war metaphors in science. Author Melinda Wenner runs us through a quick history of the war metaphor in science, and then looks at criticism from language and cognitive linguist professors, like George Lakoff, who notes that "this is not language, this is the way people think."

Perhaps not surprising, it seems that the words we use to describe a situation influence how we approach it. To use war metaphors creates an adversarial, binary us/them mentality that may very well close off avenues of research and solutions that focus more on the social and physical environment. Anyone who's read Susan Sontag's "Illness as Metaphor" will find this a familiar concept.

I think more interesting, though, is how the use, or dis-use, of war language in research can create a method of ostrasization for a researcher who doesn't embrace the battle mentality, if you don't see the disease as an invader to be vanquished. If, instead, you look for ways to work with or around the problem, you quite literally run the risk of collusion!

Why is this of interest? Well, I think that many of us in the medical humanities approach the field from interdisciplinary perspectives that, by their very nature, are more inclined to veer away from war metaphors and towards considering multiple factors behind disease and illness. So it becomes another way we unintentionally advertise ourselves as "not real." Of course, this is a potential weakness that can also become a strength. The very thing that is marking us as other allows us to stand as a reminder that the very words we use colour of perceptions and perceived solutions to the problems we face. The way we use language is important for more than just immediate transmission of information; it shapes our attitude as well as our knowledge.

Comments

[Daniel Goldberg]

I think Sontag's observations on the military metaphor are on point, though her general suggestion that we eschew metaphor in assessing illness experience seems both overwrought and ill-advised, insofar as we are metaphorical creatures, so it seems unlikely that we can excise metaphor, and, more importantly, because metaphors help make meaning for many. As Nietzsche observed, even "harmful" metaphors are often perceived as superior to nihilism.

But I completely agree with you on the serious downsides to use of the military metaphor; I don't think this is irrelevant to a disability perspective, either.

And I also like how you tie that in to the insider-outsider problem, which remains a difficult tension for many bioethicists and medical humanists. I know I struggle with it.

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

I agree with Daniel on Sontag.

BTW: I've put together a basic bibliography on analogy and metaphor I will send along to anyone interested. In a paper on 'critical thinking' pedagogy I argued that we should pay far more attention to analogical and metaphorical reasoning and less time on formal, deductive logical models in the critical thinking curriculum. Please see: http://radicalpedagogy.icaap.org/content/issue8_1/odonnell.html

[Kelly Hills]

Oh, I agree WRT Sontag - but there haven't been many who've done accessible writing about war metaphors and disease, so it seems like we're stuck referencing her, even if we don't agree with her.

I don't think metaphors themselves are a problem - I have a hard time imagining how medicine could actually function, at least between the lay person and specialist, without a host of creative language use that allows us to communicate pain, feeling, experience, and expectation. It's just the specific use of war metaphor and the (perhaps unthought, if unintended) side effects of the language that interests me.

Another question, too, is how we actually could or would change the language to remove war metaphor from medicine. After all, you do want someone who has cancer to keep up a positive mental outlook, and notions of fighting cancer, battling cancer, etc, seem to be very positive visualizations. What would we use in their place, something that is dynamic and not passive?

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Kelly,

I did not intend my comment to detract from my appreciation of your raising this topic in the first place: I should have mentioned that in my remarks. Thanks,
Patrick

[Kelly Hills]

Oh, not taken as such, Patrick! I've just got a pile of paperwork on bioterrorism on one side of me, a few books on black market organ transplantation on the other, and silence from my home office this morning - I'm taking any excuse to procrastinate (and chitchat) that I can get! :-)

[Daniel Goldberg]

After all, you do want someone who has cancer to keep up a positive mental outlook, and notions of fighting cancer, battling cancer, etc, seem to be very positive visualizations. What would we use in their place, something that is dynamic and not passive?

That's the rub, or at least "a" rub, I tend to think. In addition, the metaphor of fighting or struggling against a powerful foe obviously goes way beyond a purely martial metaphor. One central theme of The Plague, for example, is the importance of resistance even in the face of an implacable foe. And Sisyphus reclaims himself by choosing to continue to push the boulder up the hill regardless of his knowledge that it will inexorably come tumbling down again.

Fight and struggle is an important meaning-making tool for many illness sufferers, I tend to think. The notion that the fighting metaphor may need disentanglement from the martial metaphor in the context of illness itself says something interesting about Western society. No?