CONSTRUCTING ANALOGIES FOR THE COMMUNICATION OF GEOLOGICAL CONCEPTS

The subject matter of geology spans a range of temporal and spatial scales which overwhelms the scale of the human experience. As long as it has been anyone’s goal to understand or communicate concepts relating to the processes that shape the Earth, the common lack of experiential bases for or natural relatability to these concepts has been an obstacle. This obstacle is only ever overcome by employing metaphorical reasoning, which is the understanding of one concept (the target) in terms of other concepts (the source). The power of metaphorical reasoning is that by way of a source, constructed out of concepts a person understands, a person can understand a target for which they have no experiential basis. Analogies, these comparisons between source and target concepts, may be said to be accurate when they faithfully describe their target. They may be said to be effective when they impart understanding. They are good when they are both accurate and effective. The construction of good analogies is the teacher’s art, and often involves careful compromise between accuracy and effectiveness. Metaphorical reasoning and the analogy are indispensable tools in the communication of geological concepts.

Beyond its role as a poetic flourish, some cognitive scientists promote the idea that the metaphor and metaphorical reasoning serve as the core of our cognition, and that the defining of concepts in terms of others, far from being a rhetorical exercise, in fact resonates with the way we naturally develop our understandings of our world. In this view, when a communicator invokes metaphor, they are not using extraordinary but very natural language.

In the construction of analogies, communicators of science may be inclined to sacrifice effectiveness for accuracy – valuing an analogy’s representativeness of its target concept over the audience’s familiarity with the source concepts – as we do when we relate the age of the Earth to 4.5 times the incomprehensible concept of “one billion years.”

While sacrifices of accuracy may be impermissible in the conduct of science, careful concessions to effectiveness can improve the analogies we use to communicate of geological concepts to students and nonexperts.