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This issue is devoted to reflections on the power of metaphor in the social sciences. Authors were invited to consider the ways in which metaphors exert control within the social sciences and how a clear concept, for example, one with a precise meaning within a particular science, migrates into the social sciences where its meaning may be diluted without diminishing its power. In the field of cognitive psychology, the field of my own research, the power of metaphor looms large. Consider, for example, the past reliance on the idea of homeostasis to explain behavior, Freud's reliance on the notion of a hydraulic system to explain the mind, Köhler's description of the functioning of the brain in terms of field theory, and our current images of the mind as a computer, either parallel or serial. In fact, J. Z. Young in his book, Doubt and Certainty in the Sciences, argued that the most advanced technology in any point in history has served as our model of the mind. The papers in this issue make it clear that the power of metaphor is by no means limited to psychology and that every social science lives by its metaphors, which determine the questions that get asked and the answers that are given. Arien Mack
Bernard Barber is Professor Emeritus, Columbia Universitv. He is the author of Constructing the Social System (1993) and Social Studies of Science (1990).
Yaron Ezrahi is professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute. He recently published "Haldane Between Daedalus and Icarus," In Haldane's Daedalus Revisited (K.R. Dronamraju, ed.) (1995).
Anne Harrington is professor in the Department for the History of Science at Harvard University. She is currently working on Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (forthcoming 1996).
George Lakoff is professor of linguistics at the Universitv of California at Berkeley. He is currently working on The Moral Agenda: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don't about Morality, the Family, and Politics (forthcoming).
David E. Leary is the Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Richmond. He is the co-editor (with Sigmund Koch) of A Century Of Psychology as Science (1992)
Donald N. Levine is Peter B. Ritzma Professor at the University of Chicago. He recently published Visions of the Sociological Tradition (1995).
Donald N. McCloskey is professor of economics and of history at the University of Iowa. He recently wrote Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics (1994).
Ilana Friedrich Silber is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She recently published Virtuosity, Charisma and Social Order: A Comparative Sociological Study of Monasticism in Theravada Buddhism and Medieval Catholicism (1995).
