The notion of speech
designates "not someone who was speaking about a mute thing, but an
impediment, a difficulty, a gamut of possible positions, a profound
uncertainty." Neither humans nor nonhumans "speak on their own,"
as traditional epistemology suggests, but only through various mediators.
The importance of metaphor’s role in poetry,
science and religion cannot be overestimated. Metaphor transforms seeing into
“seeing as” and, as Thomas Kuhn and others have demonstrated, this is precisely
how students learn to be scientists: perceptual associations are adjusted and
cultivated to form new habits of observation and thought.
