In speaking a language, it’s pretty much impossible to speak literally. So we are always using metaphors, and we’re not always using them carefully. I think one of the biggest dangers of metaphor is that we forget that it’s a metaphor. A metaphor at its heart is, as Aristotle puts it, carrying the properties of one thing over to another.

There is something quite satisfying about saying, I’m going to recharge over this weekend. I am going to shut down and recharge. But some metaphors are not apt for describing our experiences. And so maybe the mechanistic metaphor and all that has to do with computers is not appropriate for the human experience. The problem, and this is what’s happening now, is that we forget that we are using metaphors, we start to think that we really do recharge, that we really do “update” our friends, that our wires really are crossed. We begin to impose on human beings something that should only be for machines.

Can using metaphors influence our worldview?