Szymanski Erika
Department of English, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, USA.
mSystems. 2021 Aug 31;6(4):101128msystems0076921. doi: 10.1128/mSystems.00769-21.
Language constitutes an essential set of scientific construction tools, not only for communicating knowledge, but for conceptualizing the world. Metaphors in particular, as conventions that guide and reproduce analogical reasoning, merit attention that they largely do not receive. My research addresses this deficit by examining how metaphors for handling microbes shape possibilities for working with yeast and bacteria in synthetic biology, microbiome research, and other fields that reconfigure what microbes can be. Though poised to reexamine assumptions, these fields routinely rest on metaphors and other language tools that quietly embed ways of thinking that may work against wider aims-for example, imagining bacteria as imperfect machines that should therefore be rendered increasingly passive and controllable. Researchers, therefore, need to examine how language tools structure their observations and expectations so that the tools they choose are appropriate for the work they want to do.
语言构成了一套至关重要的科学构建工具，不仅用于交流知识，还用于构建对世界的概念。尤其是隐喻，作为指导和再现类比推理的惯例，值得我们给予更多关注，但目前它们大多未得到应有的重视。我的研究旨在弥补这一不足，通过考察处理微生物的隐喻如何塑造合成生物学、微生物组研究以及其他重新定义微生物概念的领域中与酵母和细菌打交道的可能性。尽管这些领域准备重新审视一些假设，但它们通常依赖于隐喻和其他语言工具，这些工具悄然地嵌入了可能与更广泛目标相悖的思维方式——例如，将细菌想象成不完善的机器，因此应该使其变得越来越被动和可控。因此，研究人员需要审视语言工具如何构建他们的观察和期望，以便他们选择的工具适合他们想要开展的工作。
