Under the spell of metaphors: Investigating the effects of conduit and container metaphors on museum experience

In 1979, Michael Reddy investigated the effects that “conduit” metaphors have on human communication. His research illustrates that people tend to conceptualize feelings, thoughts, or ideas as substances “transmitted” from one agent to another through a “conduit,” or as loosely “contained” in ambient spaces. Following a cognitive‐linguistic approach, this article investigates the effects that “conduit” and “container” metaphors have on visitors’ experiences in museums; it presupposes that our conceptual system is metaphorical in nature and that language expresses the metaphors we use to think and act in everyday life. This article acknowledges that conduit and container metaphors shape museum communication practices and sets out to identify their effects on museum objects and museum architecture—two essential material conditions that shape visitors’ experiences. To do so, this article traces expressions of transmission metaphors in professional museum discourses—particularly those of international museum organizations—and identifies their effects on museum practice. It draws attention to the conflicts that these metaphors trigger in museum debates. Furthermore, it highlights the possibility of enhancing their positive effects, and of weakening their negative ones, by building new metaphorical frames for museum theory and practice

Natural Knowledge, Inc.: The Royal Society as a Metropolitan Corporation

This article attempts to think through the logic and distinctiveness of the early Royal Society's position as a metropolitan knowledge community and chartered corporation, and the links between these aspects of its being. Among the knowledge communities of Restoration London it is one of the best known and most studied, but also one of the least typical and in many respects one of the least coherent. It was also quite unlike the chartered corporations of the City of London, exercising almost none of their ordinary functions and being granted very limited power and few responsibilities. I explore the society's imaginative and material engagements with longer-established corporate bodies, institutions and knowledge communities, and show how those encounters repeatedly reshaped the early society's internal organization, outward conduct and self-understanding. Building on fundamental work by Michael Hunter, Adrian Johns, Lisa Jardine and Jim Bennett, and new archival evidence, I examine the importance of the city to the society's foundational rhetoric and the shifting orientation of its search for patronage, the development of its charter, and how it learned to interpret the limits and possibilities of its privileges through its encounters with other chartered bodies, emphasizing the contingent nature of its early development

Manual to the LMEMT corpus

Peer reviewe

Towards new knowledge : The corpus of Late Modern English Medical Texts

Peer reviewe

Sociohistorical and cultural context of Late Modern English Medical Texts

Peer reviewe

Scientific Periodicals : The Philosophical Transactions and the Edinburgh Medical Journal

Peer reviewe

Changing portrayals of medicine and patients in eighteenth-century medical writing : Lexical bundles in Public Health, Methods, and case studies

Peer reviewe

Atheism Considered as a Christian Sect

AbstractAtheists in general need share no particular political or metaphysical views, but atheists of the most modern, Western, militant sort, escaping from a merely nihilistic mind-set, are usually humanists of an especially triumphalist kind. In this paper I offer a critical analysis and partial history of their claims, suggesting that they are members of a distinctively Christian heretical sect, formed in reaction to equally heretical forms of monotheistic idolatry.</jats:p

Public health

Peer reviewe

The re-discovery of contemplation through science : with Tom McLeish, “The Re-Discovery of Contemplation through Science: Boyle Lecture 2021”; Rowan Williams, “The Re-Discovery of Contemplation through Science: A Response to Tom McLeish”; Fraser Watts, “Discussion of the Boyle Lecture 2021”; and Tom McLeish, “Response to Boyle Lecture 2021 Panel and Participant Discussion.”

Some of the early-modern changes in the social framing of science, while often believed to be essential, are shown to be contingent. They contribute to the flawed public narrative around science today, and especially to the misconceptions around science and religion. Four are examined in detail, each of which contributes to the demise of the contemplative stance that science both requires and offers. They are: (1) a turn from an immersed subject to the pretense of a pure objectivity, (2) a turn from imagination as a legitimate pathway to knowledge, (3) a turn from shared and participative science to a restricted professionalism, and (4) an overprosaic reading of the metaphor of the “Book of Nature.” All four, but especially the imperative to consider reading nature as poetry, and a deeper examination of the entanglements between poetry and theoretical science, draw unavoidably on theological ideas, and contribute to a developing “theology of science.”